They have a beautiful natatorium for whatever that is worth! D22 swam there often for Club meets!
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The purpose of the comment is that you have been talking about adding schools to reach out later to for recruiting if others drop off because coaches don’t demonstrate interest. That strategy is at odds with the reality of the actual recruiting timeline that coaches are following that I described for another D3 sport with a similar group of LACs. Maybe swimming’s different, but it doesn’t seem to be based on much of the information posted here on conversations with coaches.
The additional schools that I and others have mentioned to consider are not necessarily “weaker academically”. And using your earlier problematic phrase of “academically selective,” many of them could be considered as peers in selectivity to schools that are currently on the list, depending on what criteria are used.
Are you sure? Their championships times seem on par with NESCAC results.
And as a D3 school in the UC system, the Santa Cruz coaches (at least in the team sport I am familiar with) don’t have any pull with admissions at all—kids have to get in on their own. Coaches have to wait to see who gets admitted, meaning their recruit lists are much larger than other places. Some recruits don’t get in, and they lose others to other schools in the RD round.
I just had to pipe in the Whitman has a fantastic swimming program. One swimmer on the men’s team has broken 3 national Div III records the last 2 years. And they are smart too, the women’s team had the second highest GPA among all Division III programs and fifth across all NCAA and NAIA divisions. Not too shabby!
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Agreed. 9% is still really low.
But it’s all relative- OP has a list of highly selective schools.
The theoretical Stanford legacy 9% acceptance rate is numerically higher than many of the schools on the OP’s non-recruit US university list. The original admission rate of ~3-4% puts Stanford at the bottom of the OP’s list in terms of acceptance rate. I admit that with those numbers, it’s really splitting hairs. The relative difference may be important to the OP.
Brown 5%
Barnard 6%
Claremont N/A
Dartmouth 6%
Pomona N/A
Swarthmore 7%
Amherst 9%
Carnegie Mellon 11%
UVA (out of state) 12.1%
UCs N/A
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Neither have most American high school students. The difference is that most Americans don’t have two “top 50” universities as their safeties.
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Legacy has been significantly decreased in importance as an admissions factor at Stanford in REA/RD in the last 10 years.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone has suggested this. What people, including myself, have been suggesting, perhaps too diplomatically, is that you have a flawed conception of what counts as a strong school.
I don’t have any issues with the Canadian schools you mention (although the winter I spent in Montreal scurrying through tunnels like a mole person to avoid the cold made me swear I’d never go back between November and March).
But the American kids I know who opt for those schools do so because they are relatively inexpensive and admission is more predictable, not because they are better options in most fields than many state flagships or small LACs that are less well known to internationals who only look at overly simplistic ratings.
I wish your daughter luck but I’d urge you not to send her to the US or Canada with the incorrect impression that Americans care less than you about school quality.
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Does your daughter have an interest in living in the middle of the US? Grinnell is not near any big cities and will be tough to get to from wherever you live (through Minneapolis, Chicago, and then more hours of travel). Last night I was on a flight from Seattle to Denver, and then a few poor souls had to fly on to Omaha. Getting to small town American just isn’t easy.
I don’t think some of the schools on your list will work if the purpose is for her to go to a school is for the name to be recognized worldwide. People on this list know them, people in academia know them, but the average person in the world just hasn’t heard of Grinnell. Or even Iowa.
Pick the schools she wants to go to. She’ll figure out a way to swim.
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I would echo this point.
The schools will be weaker from a swimming perspective. They are not weaker academically. Please, target those schools!
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As an international student who went to school in the nethers of NY state, I think this is sound advice.
The ease of coming and going (as well as the cost of doing so) needs to factor in. Even today I am hesitant to move too far from an easy (but long) flight back.
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I officially give up on this thread. OP can have an auto admit at McGill/Toronto (top 50 global schools), and has stated the importance of rankings to them, so F&M (the fine school that it is) is not a real alternative.
This thread’s logic is circular and going nowhere. 
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there is nothing circular, as stated earlier, if D24 is recruited by more than 1 school, she would be in the lucky position of being able to choose, be it between McGill and F&M, or Pomona and Amherst, likely after having visited both to form her own view. she would make a well thought out decision without any prejudice. equally, if she isn’t recruited, she will form an opinion as to what is the best list of schools for her to apply to, with the benefit of having visited many of them.
That is our experience as well.
Understood, and I believe that is the nature of swimming. Many of swimmers and swimming families that I know of, regardless of how top level they are, focus pretty much on just swimming and are essentially year round on travel teams/clubs.
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An earlier post definitively stated that she would choose McGill over F&M if recruited by both.
The characterizations of the process and who is really driving it seems to have contradictions.
OP’s child hasn’t even applied to schools yet so there is no need to figure out which school they are going to accept over others. Please move on.
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What I am struggling is why you are defending your approach (as above) when it is clear that you are not following it in earnest.
There are schools-many of which have been mentioned specifically for your D-which have stronger environmental science programs than those on the list currently. There are schools which are higher ranked than those on the list. Also, why have any American LACs on your list if you are looking at international rankings? Also, like Barnard, Scripps could be argued as being integrated with the Claremont consortium community.
To me, it sounds as if swimming is really important to your D and that is why there are 800+ posts here. If it is totally clear to her that she would be happy at a Canadian school without swimming then no need to modify the list. However, it seems that she is continuing to add schools to be recruited at and is open to the possibility of doing so later in the year. The nearly unanimous advice from posters is to go ahead and add those several (we are not talking about overwhelming your D) now rather than wait.
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The post was about how the OP themselves described the decision between two schools that had already been made. There are some strong contradictions in various accounts of the decision-making process by the OP that call into question who is actually driving it. If they are not being straightforward with people being extremely generous with information and advice, this is not a good faith effort by all parties.
would agree with @momofboiler1 and reiterate
D24’s swim list reflects ongoing effort, thanks to much of the advice of the past several months. many of you call on her to seek more swim schools (me included), and there are a few additions which she accepts will be the last round given how late it is. only IF she’s recruited by more than one school will she visit and make a choice. we can all opine, but even as parents we have no idea what she would choose, and she herself has no clear view since as she correctly says “I am not yet recruited”
Her non recruit list is even further out in time, and one can expect many changes if she’s not recruited and actually looks at what different campuses look and feels like.