According to the Women’s College Coalition, in 1960 there were 230 women’s schools in the United States, but by 2014 that number had shrunk to 47.
Staunton also has really cool Shakespeare. 
Agree completely that Lexington is very small. My father had a second retirement career at VMI and while it was a great place to visit, I was happy not to live there year round. It’s got some very nice art galleries and the area has nice hiking, caves, Frontier Village lots of Civil War stuff.
I really make nothing of Weiss’ departure from Haverford (although I know its board was already sick to death of presidential searches after the last two). Come on! The guy is 57. The job he’s in now, effectively, is going to be the last significant job of his career. Haverford is a wonderful small college, but the Met is the greatest art museum in this hemisphere, and one of the top cultural institutions in the world. It’s the biggest of big-time. Anyone who wouldn’t leave Haverford for that opportunity probably shouldn’t be president of Haverford in the first place. They are little colleges, but they want big people.
Tony Marx – who spent a great deal more time promoting himself than Weiss, and who was reportedly on the short list when Harvard chose its current president – left Amherst to head the New York Public Library, an institution that pales in comparison to the Met. No one did any handwringing about Amherst.
^ Let’s hope Weiss refrains from driving while intoxicated.
Agreed. But still surprised that no one covering higher ed thinks his departure is newsworthy.
A former Haverford President, John Coleman, wrote a book I’ve always admired - Blue Collar Journal. I think it was made into a not very good movie that starred Ralph Waite.
I am not sure how much is due to “self-promotion” but Marx had a far more eventful tenure at Amherst than Weiss did at Haverford or Lafayette. A number of Marx’ initiatives were remarkable, and especially his endless attempts to increase the diversity at Amherst. Despite this, it is almost a certainty that battling the BOT at LACs ends up being taxing as the “usure du pouvoir” creeps in. Landing a job in New York does seem to be an upwards step in a career.
@MYOS1634
I understand what you’re saying about sustainability, but what do you find inherently unfair about applying the no loan policy to all students? If the University could afford to maintain its no loan policy for everyone, why would that be a problem?
Merc: Haverford’s endowment doesn’t make it not niche. Many of the other colleges you named above, such as Middlebury, Wesleyan, Hamilton, are niche too. That doesn’t make them not great schools. Again, you seem offended by the use of the word niche. Why is that? It doesn’t cast aspersions on quality.
Pizzagirl, if Middlebury, Wesleyan and Hamilton are niche that’s a pretty darned big niche, as it would encompass most of the liberal arts colleges out there.
U Conn- not niche. Connecticut College- niche. It’s not a slam, it’s reality. If a kid is selecting on certain criteria (LAC with a strong Classics department, sailing team, with an active alternative music scene in the city or town it’s located in) the niche might be a small one. If a kid is interested in an LAC with a strong English department anywhere but in the downtown of a big city, the niche is a big one.
Again, I don’t understand why a LAC with a strong Classics department, sailing team, with an active alternative music scene in the city or town it’s located in is niche but mid-sized New England university strong in marine biology on the grounds of an old Coast Guard training Center (U Conn Avery Point) or a state university which is part of a consortium (UMass Amherst) is not.
There are literally thousands of liberal arts colleges similar to Conn College. Believe me, my kids considered a good 3 dozen of them.
Add up the total enrollment of the three dozen schools your kids considered. Then consider the number of kids enrolled in three dozen flagship state U’s (and you don’t even need to consider the biggest U’s or the most populous states.)
Which one is the niche?
Heck, you can add up the total enrollment of all of the top ten LACs from US News and that will get you a number that is less than the undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan.
Perhaps our communication issue centers on the meaning of the word “niche”. I’d use the Merriam-Webster use of the word as “the situation in which a business’s products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or group of people”. In other words, not just a small school, but one appealing only to a particular kind of customer.
An interesting story about what will happen to the professors at Sweet Briar: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-unfortunate-fate-of-sweet-briars-professors/387376/
Pizzagirl: I’m pretty sure that the word “niche” is being misused by the majority of posters. Niche refers to breadth within the area you are talking about. Raw numbers are irrelevant. In this case we are talking about academic and extracurricular breadth, opportunity and access at colleges. But I’ll first use an example with cities.
At one point not long ago, Houston, despite its high national rank in population, had, because of its dependence on oil, a type of niche economy. If anything changed in oil, good or bad, so changed the economy of the city. Many other, much smaller cities had diversified economies, and were more likely to follow national trends in their prosperity. Therefore, within the realm of economics, the smaller cities – and even smaller towns – were not niche, while the much larger Houston was.
The same is true in academia. A larger university may be specialized academically, or limited in some other significant way, and therefore dependent on narrower external elements, and therefore, “niche.” A smaller college may have a great range in academics and extracurriculars, as well as accessibility across the socioeconomic scale, and therefore would not be “niche.”
Regarding your point on niche being a value-neutral term, I agree. I simply think it has been used improperly in this thread.
The endowment figures I posted do not apply to this point.
@merc81, you’ll have a hard time finding a large university that is “specialized academically”. In fact, I challenge you to name one (all I can think of is a large university that is specialized religiously, like BYU).
Likewise, I don’t see many LACs with “a great range in academics”. Again, I challenge you to name a LAC that has as great a range in academic offerings as a typical state school.
^^ Clarification: “Niche refers to breadth within the area [one is] talking about.”
Georgia Tech: http://www.admission.gatech.edu/academics/majors
Note the very limited offerings in humanities and social studies.
However, it is hard to find academically specialized large universities.