Grinnell didn’t have swim team cuts when my daughter looked at it. Great school and beautiful facility!
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I love that school. The coach is new, from a very competitive D3 program, but I believe OP had positive conversations with them. Not sure if they visited.
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Excellent point. Many schools have worked to increase their number of applicants in order to lower their rate of admission. I’m an alum interviewer for my college. The number of applicants I have been asked to interview has gone way up, but the number of applicants who seem admissible has not.
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Grinnell is a great school with all the critical elements she’s after
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Did you visit? It was one of our favorites when my daughter applied.
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I commented earlier that this isn’t a very useful metric for determining the quality of environmental science/studies instruction at various institutions, especially given the multidisciplinary nature of the field….
…In any case, judged by that metric, Grinnell’s Environmental Studies Concentration is currently chaired by an Associate Professor, not a full professor. Only 3 out of the 8 instructors listed in this concentration are full professors (note: again, I personally don’t think this is an issue).
Their curriculum for this concentration seems very similar to those of many other LACs with equivalent qualifications of the instructors, even those schools that were not considered because they didn’t meet the 20% or less acceptance rate criteria. (At around 11% for 2022, Grinnell does).
Again though, focusing on acceptance rate as a proxy for educational quality and student body academic talent is not particularly useful. For example, one of the schools I recently mentioned with a more-realistically attainable swim program—Macalester—has an acceptance rate of around 30% which doesn’t meet the cut-off and was therefore dismissed as a candidate for an ED application. It also had a USNWR-listed middle 50% SAT range of 1340 and 1515, which is almost indistinguishable from Grinnell’s at 1370 and 1530 (note: with TO policies and only a portion of applicants reporting, these stats should be taken with a grain of salt).
In both cases, the top quartile of students have significantly better SATs than your D24 (reported as low 1400s I think?). To add to that, many of the schools with apparently unacceptably high acceptance rates in the 30% to 60% range also have students in their top quartile with better test stats. They are academically-rigorous institutions with quality instructors and many serious students with top-notch stats, and to dismiss them out-of-hand because of an arbitrary acceptance rate cut-off figure strikes me as arrogant and out of touch.
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Why are you pooh-poohing their love for Grinnell? We’ve been telling them to look for a school like that (one which I doubt anyone has heard of in their country) where she will also be able to contribute to the team, and now you are pointing out “issues” with it. Leave it be!
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On the contrary! I think they should indeed look for a school like that.
I don’t think Grinnell has “issues” in that academic program at all. What I was pooh-poohing was the OP’s stated criteria for evaluating the academic strength of different environmental studies/environmental sciences programs at LACs. If they consider Grinnell’s to be strong—as they apparently do—many programs that the OP has dismissed are as well.
Grinnell may or may not want to recruit this swimmer. A quick check of times suggests there is a reasonable possibility: the potential recruit has a best time this year in her strongest event that would put her #3 in the current roster, or #4 accounting for an incoming 2023 recruit. Other times are relatively slower, so that one event might not be enough. Or it may be. Only the coach will decide that.
In any case, the potential recruit should be looking at more programs that are around that level of swim program strength as reasonable targets (i.e., well outside the top 50 D3s).
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Here’s the thing, we all have to cut our losses somewhere. While we may disagree, the school list ship has sailed. That is not to say that they won’t revisit when it’s time to apply.
Personally, in their shoes, I would not seek recruitment at most of those other schools. What I would do differently is try to find a couple of academic safeties where walking on would be possible and include them in a RD list.
It’s time to let it go. Come Fall, if OP has no offers and is interested in revisiting the list and wants help, we can do that.
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@NiVo have you seen this yet?
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I respectfully disagree.
If athletic recruitment is truly a goal, Grinnell may be their only chance. Why place all hope on one place? If Grinnell is acceptable on an oadmissions rate level and has varsity swimming there are plenty of peer schools that meet these criteria (@Yolo2 has mentioned only some of them).
Waiting to contact these program leave the OP open to the perils of getting to the game of musical chairs late…already a lot of dominos have to fall for the OP’s kid to rise to consideration.
Waiting until the RD round to talk with Grinnell lookalikes takes away any optionality they may have…Kids who are talking to everyone are gaining advantage…
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Fair enough. I agree on the point that getting in the door now would be best, but OP seems uninterested in exploring the possibilities (probably to their own detriment).
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I agree here. Contacting other programs now could lead to actual recruitment (and a push to commit via ED). But the potential recruit could also decide to try to push a commitment off to the RD round and still might get coach support there depending on their talent level vs the team needs. They could also at least have a good idea sooner rather than later of which programs would potentially have a walk-on slot available as a way to figure out the RD list.
Trying to initiate contact later in the Fall to do any of the above though would be a lot harder. The coaches will be busy trying to lock-down and confirm ED1 commitments with recruits they have been talking to for a long time, and moving down their existing lists to try to fill in the gaps in the ED2 and RD rounds.
I also agree with the assessment about the apparent lack of interest by the OP in doing this.
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Academics preceed swimming for D24, and everyone has different academic objectives and fit is different for every child. She did a school tour for a purpose, and it has generated many surprises from the loves to the dislikes. We can try to understand, and categorize, but am not even sure there is necessarily a categoric logic to it all.
She has already mentally eliminated several discussions that have/will automatically die off (including passed pre-read), there are still several conversations that are very much active and in pre-read. Of course, she’s not a top recruit, but she’s consciously seeking a spot and both willing and hoping to chance it. Some will argue that those pre-reads are meaningless because the coaches have not already voiced their support before the pre-read, and that she’s therefore at the very bottom of their bucket. The next few weeks will play that out.
Many have suggested expanding her swim list, whether it’s women’s colleges or schools which are generally less selective, and she prefers McGill with/without swimming to those options. Some will argue that’s because she hasn’t considered/visited those other schools, but indeed one cannot visit every school in the catalog.
McGill/Toronto have a higher admit rates, but their 30% admit cannot really be compared to US admit rates, because the Canadian schools clearly publicize their grade requirements which represents almost exclusively their admission criteria. Applicants have grades that are either above or at least very close to the line.
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Big difference between U.S. and Canadian schools isn’t published grade requirements - it is the massive differential in general population (331 million v 38 million - not a typo) and number of students applying to schools v the number of spots available at the schools being applied to.
Most of the applicants at highly selective U.S. schools have the grades/stats to be admitted. That’s one of the big reasons why the schools are holistic - they don’t have enough spots available for the number of qualified applicants and need other criteria to build their class the way they want.
P.S. To put this in starker perspective - the population of just California is larger than the entire population of Canada (39 mil v 38 mil).
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What I am reading - in spite of the OP stating that “anything other than varsity swimming is a failure” …. That is not actually what he means.
Reading between the lines, I get “prestige is THE most important factor” … and the OP hoped to used swimming as a hook for these incredibly selective colleges.
He is equating prestige with low acceptance rate. That may or may not be the case. He is trying to hang his hat on “academic strength” … but there are many posters who have shown they are D3 schools with strong academic strength (at least equal to his list) - similar levels of full-time vs. associate vs. part-time professors - and a weaker varsity team where she could be a recruited athlete or at least a strong walk-on candidate.
McGill is a great school - but totally different than the other list in terms of size of school, size of classes, and frankly, no chance of walking on. Maybe she could be a team manager to get that “team atmosphere” that he felt was so important?
I certainly have learned a lot from the many replies about other D3 schools and relative strength of swim programs.
The real question - to me - is how much of this is father driven vs daughter driven? Would she answer the question the same way?
I hope the daughter ends up at the school that loves her back and the fit is good. Those are the important factors.
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The beauty of knowing what you want to study is that there are often hidden gems that are power houses in one’s area of interest. Consider Dikinson or UVM for example.
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McGill and UofT are not “highly selective”. Their entry requirements are not difficult, they cull the herd over time, and have tough grading, especially in science and engineering. The SAT scores of Americans attending these schools wouldn’t crack the top 50 in the U.S.
McGill Environmental Science academic cut-off for US Applicants:
- B average in grades 10, 11 and 12
- B in each prerequisite math and science
- SAT per minimum requirements or
- ACT 26
Furthermore, Environmental Science is offered at McGill’s McDonald campus, which is a 45 minute commute from McGill’s downtown campus.
These schools’ primary missions are to provide an entryway to higher education to many qualified Ontario and Quebec students (hence 50,000 undergrads at UofT and 27,000 at McGill), so they do not meet the “highly selective” criteria, although perhaps others, including a general sense of prestige.
I wish you had visited McGill in Nov-April, because seeing the school, and lovely Montreal, in July when the students are not around sloshing though slush, ice, and snow is a non-representative experience.
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Yes, that seems to be a big question. This post states that the process was driven by the daughter:
And this too:
But it actually seems that there was no freedom to choose a school that doesn’t meet the OP’s arbitrary cutoff of a 20% or lower acceptance rate.
There was this statement in late April that indicates this is being driven by the parents/family:
Foreign families seek highly reputable academic institutions and deeply prioritize this, probably more so than US families.
And this from February:
Our assessment is that it’s only worth investing $400,000+ in a college education that’s academically selective, otherwise the cost isn’t justified because local universities at her place of residence cost $40,000 which is 10% of the cost of US college education
Given that there is a very strong overlap with highly-selective D3 schools in terms of admissions rate and really strong D3 swim programs, this resulted in hardly any realistic options for getting recruited for varsity swimming (or even having potential for a walk-on spot if admission was secured independently) because of how the potential recruit’s times compare to the very selective swim programs.
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Your analysis is incorrect because there are 2 environmental science programs at McGill, with different specs and very different admission requirements. The program in Arts and Science is at the main campus, and has substantially higher grade requirements, with a 38/42 expected IB grade. It’s fine if you prefer other US programs, but there is no need to belittle McGill/Toronto.