<p>Having spent time at Middlebury, I would say that the little town around it is nice, but wouldn't exactly call it "vastly superior." I wasn't even there that long and the options were already starting to wear a little thin by the end. If you mean Burlington, it is a very nice small city, but good luck getting there if you don't have a car. Perhaps there are more transportation options during the year, but there was only a little shuttle bus while I was there (and the trip is a good bit longer than it is to Philadelphia by SEPTA). I go to the orchestra/ballet/opera ($5-$7 student tickets) pretty regularly in Philadelphia (twice a month, or so - I know many people who go more often, especially in the music department). I would take minor inconvenience of a train ride (take reading if 30 minutes is so bad) and lacking immediate surroundings over a cute little town.</p>
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Electing to go to Swarthmore over Middlebury on account of some presumed superior connection to the rest of the world and less isolated environment would be an error.
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<p>As someone who attended a very remote college, I disagree entirely. It's the ability to go attend a concert or a baseball game or a symphony without a major road trip that makes the difference.</p>
<p>BTW, people forget that Swarthmore has a major retail shopping area within walking distance of campus including a mall, a Target, a Best Buy, and many dining options.</p>
<p>People also may not realize that to walk from Middlebury's campus to more than a dozen bars and restaurants, coffee shops, used bookstrores, etc., takes less than 10 minutes. You won't find any big box stores in Middlebury (or most of Vermont for that matter), so if you can't live without Target, Best Buy, etc., then you're better off going somewhere else.</p>
<p>burlington live music scene kicks ass</p>
<p>that was actually a key reason i chose middlebury over swat...sure, philly has museums, clubs, pro sports, and all kinds of stuff, but i just never really took to the city when i went there for model un.</p>
<p>isolated schools also tend to compensate for their separation from such things with lots of on-campus events, such as bands, comedians, speakers, and the like. middlebury even has an extensive art museum.</p>
<p>my brother, who is at swat, says philadelphia is nice to have as an option, but not really necessary. fact is, middlebury is right by burlington and near enough to albany, boston, montreal to justify trips for the cultural offerings that aren't participated in enough to the point where you need immediate access to them anyway.</p>
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Have you been to Swarthmore? It consists of some very marginal shops and a pizza place. The pizza there is above average when compared to pizza you find elsewhere in the United States, but it still isn't much of an offering.</p>
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If you mean Burlington, it is a very nice small city, but good luck getting there if you don't have a car. Perhaps there are more transportation options during the year, but there was only a little shuttle bus while I was there (and the trip is a good bit longer than it is to Philadelphia by SEPTA). I go to the orchestra/ballet/opera ($5-$7 student tickets) pretty regularly in Philadelphia (twice a month, or so - I know many people who go more often, especially in the music department). I would take minor inconvenience of a train ride (take reading if 30 minutes is so bad) and lacking immediate surroundings over a cute little town.
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At Swarthmore, if you're a freshman or sophomore, you're not getting a parking permit (unless you have some sort of very special need, like a medical condition) and, as such, having a car will be either an impossibility or a massive inconvenience. It's not even a guarantee for juniors. Middlebury isn't nearly as restrictive about cars as Swarthmore.</p>
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Going to a baseball game is generally incompatible with the typical Swarthmore student's schedule and social life (and budget these days). It's actually kind of amusing you'd choose that as an example, because it is representative of the illusion that Swarthmore wants to project by claiming proximity to a "world class" city like Philly. In general, Swarthmore students just don't make use of that sort of offering, and the presence of the Phillies a 30+ minute train ride away means all of jack, in reality. As for concerts, I would imagine the only concerts that most students attend at Swarthmore (if they attend any) are actually on campus.</p>
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BTW, people forget that Swarthmore has a major retail shopping area within walking distance of campus including a mall, a Target, a Best Buy, and many dining options.
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If, by walking distance you mean "walking distance," then I completely agree. Let's not forget the Outback Steakhouse, too. Quite a draw.</p>
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Now that sounds just like the kind of thing someone attending a LAC might like to hear.</p>
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This is precisely the point I've been trying to make. Middlebury is not "very remote" and a student there will not really feel anymore isolated than a student at Swarthmore. This presumption of less isolation would be an extremely poor reason to choose Swarthmore over Middlebury.</p>
<p>My son is a rising senior and has had a car since sophomore year. He parked his car near campus on the roads sophomore year (not a good idea all the time, got some tickets) and this year got a parking permit from the town of Swarthmore for $50 a month. He did not sweat it while he did not have a parking permit, though. Granted, $50 is pretty expensive, still he does have a car and goes to NYC and Philly as much as he pleases (yes, NYC as well, although not a much as Philly). So I don't know about the impossibility of having a car. He pays for his parking permit with money he makes working around campus.</p>
<p>Actually, I think sophomore year, he parked his car most of the time at Strathmore which is a housing unit (apartments) some of his friends were at off campus...so that was sort-of legal. In any case, I never saw him nervous about his car or anything the whole year that he parked this way.</p>
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Going to a baseball game is generally incompatible with the typical Swarthmore student's schedule and social life (and budget these days). It's actually kind of amusing you'd choose that as an example, because it is representative of the illusion that Swarthmore wants to project by claiming proximity to a "world class" city like Philly. In general, Swarthmore students just don't make use of that sort of offering, and the presence of the Phillies a 30+ minute train ride away means all of jack, in reality. As for concerts, I would imagine the only concerts that most students attend at Swarthmore (if they attend any) are actually on campus.
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<p>Hey, I used to drive from Williamstown to Philadelphia for concerts. The Dead. Bob Dylan. It was a pain in the butt, but sunrise over NYC is nice on the way home.</p>
<p>I know of Swatties who take advantage of the concert scene in Phila, especially the big shows like U2.</p>
<p>BTW, the restaurants that are most popular "up on the Pike" are Bertucci's brick oven pizza, John Harvard's pub, Baja Fresh, Starbucks, etc. The Thai place is pretty good, too. There's really good Japanese and a good brew pub in Media -- one train stop the other direction from Philly.</p>
<p>On the car thing. The point is that you don't need a car at Swarthmore. Everything from D.C. to NYC is easily accessible by rail, right from campus -- including the airport, which is nice for people flying in from around the country or the globe. Philly's a competitive air market so it's feasible to do cheapo airfare flights, which is REALLY handy for vacations.</p>
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Hey, I used to drive from Williamstown to Philadelphia for concerts. The Dead. Bob Dylan. It was a pain in the butt, but sunrise over NYC is nice on the way home.
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Well, that's great to hear, but it's not really pertinent to this discussion.</p>
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I know of Swatties who take advantage of the concert scene in Phila, especially the big shows like U2.
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<p>I'm sure you do. I'm sure there are students at Middlebury who take advantage of the live music scene in Burlington.</p>
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BTW, the restaurants that are most popular "up on the Pike" are Bertucci's brick oven pizza, John Harvard's pub, Baja Fresh, Starbucks, etc. The Thai place is pretty good, too. There's really good Japanese and a good brew pub in Media -- one train stop the other direction from Philly.
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Thanks. So what? Bertucci's and John Harvard's are equivalent to Outback in the level of their offerings, and where isn't there a Starbucks? Furthermore, to quote a recent Swarthmore graduate, "No one in his right mind would ever take a train to Media."</p>
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On the car thing. The point is that you don't need a car at Swarthmore. Everything from D.C. to NYC is easily accessible by rail, right from campus -- including the airport, which is nice for people flying in from around the country or the globe. Philly's a competitive air market so it's feasible to do cheapo airfare flights, which is REALLY handy for vacations.
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Not everyone wants to go right where the train goes, you know. Sometimes, a car would be really nice. It can get you all over Philadelphia and its miserable suburbs and away from the Swarthmore campus far more efficiently than the second-rate public transportation that is SEPTA can. It can also get you across the Delaware border to Liquor World to buy mass quantities of booze on the cheap, or to Wawa at 3:00am to get a sub. The entire point of the very restrictive parking policy at Swarthmore is so that freshmen and sophomores can't have cars, so they are forced to spend more time on campus than they would otherwise. It's almost like institutionalized isolation. So, yes, you're right that you don't need a car, but you also don't need to be less isolated than you are at Swarthmore, just like you don't need a lot of things in life.</p>
<p>And, again, since this is a comparison of Swarthmore to Middlebury, let's not try to go the cheap airfare route. JetBlue flies out of Burlington, which means you're going to be getting just the same kind of cheap ticket capability there that you do in Philadlphia (which doesn't even have JetBlue). This whole isolation at Middlebury thing is way overblown, and a person at either school will be about equally isolated.</p>
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The entire point of the very restrictive parking policy at Swarthmore is so that freshmen and sophomores can't have cars...
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<p>I would take it a step further than that. The entire Swarthmore campus is designed to be a pedestrian campus and discourage traffic on campus.</p>
<p>If a student wants a car-oriented campus, I would recommend somewhere other than Swarthmore.</p>
<p>A.E., I agree with you to a great extent. Suburban campuses, even on the edges of major cities, can be much, much more isolated than some people think because of the fact that 99% of any college student's time is spent on campus or within 2-3 blocks of it. Middlebury is not a "suburban" campus - it's more of a "town" campus, near the middle of the town, just like Amherst, Wellesley (well, that one is a bit of a walk, but still in town), Wesleyan or Williams (the last one being perhaps too tiny to count as a town). I would say that Swarthmore doesn't have a town, except for a handful of little shops across a dimly-lit train overpass, and would therefore characterize it as "suburban".</p>
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<p>If a student wants a car-oriented campus, I would recommend somewhere other than Swarthmore.
It's not all about the campus! This kind of mentality is precisely what I'm trying to point out, and precisely why a Swarthmore student is as effecitvely isolated as a Middlebury student. The Swarthmore administration helps propagate a very campus-centric culture at Swarthmore with things such as their very restrictive parking policies. Sure, Swarthmore has a great pedestrian campus and, sure, the administration also tries to alleviate the need for a car by bringing events to campus (and funding students groups and organizations so they can do the same), but all of this definitely contributes to a culture of isolation at Swarthmore. The students (and professors) there become very engrossed in their little world in the ivory tower. So, what you should really say is that if a prospective student doesn't want to be isolated in an inconvenient suburban locale (without a car for his first two years), and doesn't want to become part of a very microcosmic, self-absorbed campus culture, then he should consider somewhere besides Swarthmore. Of course, the same can be said about many liberal arts colleges and, in the context of this thread (Swarthmore vs. Middlebury), there is effectively no difference on the isolation front, despite Swarthmore's presence in a dense suburban area adjacent to a major city (albeit, the worst major city in the country, lol).</p>
<p>Worse than Cleveland? Worse than St. Louis? C'mon.</p>
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Worse than Cleveland? Worse than St. Louis? C'mon.
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Philadelphia is the country's fifth largest city. Cleveland and St. Louis are 39th and 52nd largest, respectively. When I talk about major cities, I'm not talking about minor leaguers like that. Just the top 10 or so. Even in metropolitan populations, Philadelphia's is more than that of the other two combined. Even still, while I can't speak to Cleveland, having only been there once and only for about a day, I can say that St. Louis and Philadelphia have some similarities, and I'd be hard-pressed to say one was much worse than the other. They're both relics of a bygone era, and both rife with the same kinds of problems and inconveniences.</p>
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why a Swarthmore student is as effecitvely isolated as a Middlebury student
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<p>With all due respect, that's just absurd.</p>
<p>Try a valid argument, like pitching the advantages of Vermont over easy access to Washington, Philly, and NYC. I've lived in Vermont. I love Vermont. There are many wonderful things about Vermont. But, to suggest that Vermont is not not more isolated than an inside-the-beltway neighborhood of a metro area of 5 million is just disingenuous.</p>
<p>It is also incorrect to suggest that Swarthmore students do not take advantage of easy access to Philly, Washington, and NYC. They do. Regularly. Not at the expense of the tight residential community that defines the LAC experience, but certainly has an addition.</p>
<p>My daughter been to Philly countless times (museums, research, or just a dinner with friends) and both Washington and NYC multiple times each...all a piece of cake from Swarthmore.</p>
<p>my brother is at swarthmore, im at middlebury, and even though i could have gone to swat, i go to great lengths to belittle it as part of our good-natured sibling rivalry. </p>
<p>however, interesteddad is, as usual, correct, in this case concerning the isolation issue, which is really only an issue because of A.E.'s mis-reasoned campaign to disparage swarthmore.</p>
<p>personally, i think philadelphia is a dump and would rather take in the fresh air and scenic hills up north. the beauty and serenity of vermont and middlebury's isolated campus are unsurpassed. the peace, the seemingly endless acres of green, the laid-back, gay marriage supporting culture, the ben and jerry's...it just has a charm that can't be matched.</p>
<p>the beauty of swarthmore's arboretum of an enclave is something of a tease, what with it being so close to a major highway and a majorly polluted city. but it still is quite beautiful, and for many, perhaps even most, the perks of a major urban area like philly outweigh its few drawbacks. that said, middlebury provides easy access to burlington, which has a vibrant live music scene…it is also not all that hard to get to larger cities like montreal and boston, if necessary.</p>
<p>as well, idad's statements reak of bias towards swarthmore, and are in many ways accurate, but i also know firsthand that a good deal of it is rhetoric. the intellectual nature of the campus is overstated...the students there are normal, frisbee playing, fart joke cracking college kids...while there is surely an emphasis on academics, this is no doubt the case at a school like middlebury, of which idad's assesment, though truthful to an extent, is again a bit harsh and overstated.</p>
<p>there is a high volume of preppy, athletic new england kids, but middlebury is far from being a frat-boy jock school. all the students i spoke with were friendly, engaging, highly intelligent, and quite honestly wouldn't even qualify as jocks where i come from. there are international students and members of 'underrepresented minorities' everywhere you turn, and 0 pretense exists between groups from what i have observed.</p>
<p>on the whole, middlebury students are more attractive, preppier, and somewhat less intellectual than the students at swarthmore, which is slightly more diverse. (but middlebury also has a big population of and big focus on international students to the point where swat’s higher level of diversity hardly goes deeper than idad’s dated numbers.)</p>
<p>both schools are amazingly well regarded and provide top-notch educations...this debate is quite preposterous, and all who are lucky enough to have a choice between midd and swat will pick the one that suits them best.</p>
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<p>Try a valid argument, like pitching the advantages of Vermont over easy access to Washington, Philly, and NYC. I've lived in Vermont. I love Vermont. There are many wonderful things about Vermont. But, to suggest that Vermont is not not more isolated than an inside-the-beltway neighborhood of a metro area of 5 million is just disingenuous.</p>
<p>It is also incorrect to suggest that Swarthmore students do not take advantage of easy access to Philly, Washington, and NYC. They do. Regularly. Not at the expense of the tight residential community that defines the LAC experience, but certainly has an addition.</p>
<p>My daughter been to Philly countless times (museums, research, or just a dinner with friends) and both Washington and NYC multiple times each...all a piece of cake from Swarthmore.
With all due respect, my argument is valid, and your position smacks of rhetorical parroting. You sound like a college brochure with all of the points you've been trying to make, what with advertising the presence of a Starbucks within "walking distance." So, allow me to construct an analogy so that you can understand what I'm trying to explain, consider the situation of a man who spends everyday in his apartment in the middle of Manhattan and also the situation of a man who spends everyday in and around his community of 150 people in rural Kansas. The former is a hermit and never communicates with anyone, despite living in the center of one of the world's foremost cities and, while the latter lives "in the middle of nowhere," he still has correspondance with all of the people in his little corner of the world. I ask you, who is more isolated? Of course these are extreme examples, but they do serve to illustrate the phenomenon I am talking about when I say "effective isolation." </p>
<p>Most Swarthmore students spend the overwhelming majority of their time on campus, not interacting with the world beyond its borders, save for occasional trips into Philadelphia and into the surrounding suburban malaise that is Delaware County. Students at Middlebury spend a greater percentage of their time off campus, albeit in a smaller college town and neighboring city. The immediate environment is much friendlier to the typical student at a liberal arts college, and the neighboring city, while far smaller than the Philadelphia metropolitan area, is sufficient to meet the demands of most students. For those for whom it is not, supplemental trips to Montreal or Boston can be made.</p>
<p>You ask me to argue in a specific fashion, and yet you ignore every point I've made, dismissing them as "absurd." It's not absurd that Philadelphia is among the worst for cities its size in terms of convenience and offerings for liberal arts college students; it's a fact. It's not absurd that Swarthmore has a very restrictive parking policy, or that Swarthmore students tend to spend the vast majority of their time on campus, or that SEPTA is inconvenient compared to the public transportation in other metropolitan areas of Philadelphia's size. These are just more facts. Your own experiences and anecdotal evidence are essentially meaningless. I don't really care that you've lived in Vermont. That says nothing of the relative isolation of a Swarthmore student as compared to that of a Middlebury student. The proximity to Philadelphia gives an illusion of connectedness, and one that the administration at Swarthmore does well to push but, when it comes down to it, the Swarthmore administration does a lot to keep its students on campus as much as possible, thereby leaving them as effectively isolated as students at Middlebury.</p>
<p>So, I'll say it again: using isolation among your criteria for selection between these two schools is an error. A prospective student should look to other factors to make the decision, because relative isolation is just not relevant, and not as easily quantified as the populations of their respective nearby cities.</p>
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I'm not attempting to disparage Swarthmore; I'm just trying to inject a little truth into these discussions by letting prospective students know that, college brochures and propaganda aside, it is an error to select between the two schools by letting the notion that a student at Swarthmore is less isolated than a student at Middlebury be a deciding point. It's simply not the case, and the rationale transcends arguments based on the relative sizes of the cities within geographic proximity to campuses. Fortunately, I think most people seriously considering either college will be intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about. Swarthmore is no better than Middlebury when it comes to being connected to the world and the surrounding communities and cities and, if that is a big priority for a student, there are far better choices. If it's not a big priority, then Middlebury and Swarthmore are very similar in this regard, and one should not be considered more isolated than the other.</p>
<p>Swarthmore has a beautiful campus! Excellent school. Middlebury is great for economics and languages!</p>
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when it comes down to it, the Swarthmore administration does a lot to keep its students on campus as much as possible, thereby leaving them as effectively isolated as students at Middlebury.
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You are right. All those free parties, movies, lectures, concerts, etc. (and, of course, the academic workload)-- it's all just a part of the grand conspiracy by the Swarthmore administration to keep its students grounded at Swarthmore.</p>