<p>Maybe, maybe not. Cutting faculty in departments that are underenrolled, or even eliminating whole departments where enrollment doesn’t support them, does NOT decrease academic quality. And all the arguments about how increasing size can increase quality still hold. (Quick example: in every case, Smith’s foreign language departments are academically superior to those at Amherst, as are the music and art departments. It is simply a matter of having the critical mass to support students, and to have students support each other, in their endeavors.)</p>
<p>interresteddad</p>
<p>where do you get the net prices and the other data from? Is that available in that form on a site somewhere?</p>
<p>I am wondering how many international students are actually willing to pay the full sticker price for a liberal arts education. Most of the international students I know at my own college (Bryn Mawr) fall into one of three categories:
- financial aid recipients
- receive outside funding (though the funding opportunities seem to be concentrated in a few countries)
- transfer to a more prestigious university after a year or two</p>
<p>Most full-paying international students seem to prefer universities with name recognition overseas. Why pay for a Williams education (which might be perceived at the level of a community college education in your home country) when you could go to Berkeley instead? Or if you like it small, how about Princeton or Brown or Dartmouth? Sure, they might apply to Williams for the heck of it, but what are the odds that they would actually enroll and stay to graduate?</p>
<p>Data from liberal arts colleges with little financial aid for international students seem to support that conclusion. Haverford enrolls 2% international students, with a policy to fund 3-4 international students each year. Bowdoin has 4% international students, or 2.5% without the twenty-something students on aid. </p>
<p>Interestingly enough, Bryn Mawr recently made the decision to admit more international students (mostly on full aid!) despite the economic downturn. That went hand-in-hand with an effort to open a satellite campus overseas and establish academic partnerships with foreign universities. I do not know the rational behind the aggressive internationalization, but it sure seems to be a very conscious decision.</p>
<p>
Part of academic quality, to me, is breadth of offerings–especially important for an LAC, which will never match a university in breadth. A sampling of what is unique to Swarthmore and important to me academically: depth in linguistics, interpretation theory minor, introductory Chinese course specifically for heritage students. Those reasons are equally as compelling and obscure as your D’s choice of Smith over Williams (IIRC) for Italian and a certain type of music. </p>
<p>Swat’s academic weak points, from anecdotal information, include theatre (leans heavily avant-garde) and classical music (ensembles are not competitive quality). Similarly, one major detractor of both Amherst and Smith was the 5-College linguistics certificate that depends very heavily on UMass (read: Amherst and Smith have nonexistent linguistics departments). </p>
<p>Ling is always a small major at the few LACs that even offer it and even at large public universities. Thus, it does represent ONE aspect of “higher” academic quality because those particular schools are committed to supporting this particular “underenrolled” major, and perhaps others (Arabic comes to mind).</p>
<p>mini:</p>
<p>When Amherst decided to add 80 students starting three years ago, they approved the expansion of the faculty by 18 tenure track lines. Apparently, they felt they needed to increase the faculty. I can only go by what their reports said.</p>
<p>Last summer, when they decided to expand the student body by an additional 100 students to raise cash, the cut 15 of the 18 previously approved faculty slots. So, they will be increasing enrollment by 180, increasing tenure track by 3, and decreasing visiting faculty by some number. </p>
<p>As it stands right now, Amherst has seven fewer tenure track faculty for an expected enrollment of 1800 than Swarthmore has for an enrollment of 1500.</p>
<p>speedo:</p>
<p>All of the data comes from the Common Data Set filings – 2009-10 for Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams. 2008-9 for Pomona because they don’t have their new financial aid numbers posted yet. It’s just numbers of students, total aid students, total intl aid students, total dollar amounts for aid, dollar amounts for intl aid. Simple stuff. They only adjustment I made is backing out the study abroad students from Swat’s enrollment because none of the other schools include them in total enrollment.</p>
<p>keil:</p>
<p>I actually think theater and dance is one of Swarthmore’s strengths. Definitely avante garde, but there are Swarthmore alumni theater ensembles (like [Pig</a> Iron | Theatre Company](<a href=“http://www.pigiron.org%5DPig”>http://www.pigiron.org)) winning off-broadway awards and producing signficant independent plays. So, if you really want a theater life, Swarthmore grads are doing that. And, of course, a Swarthmore alum has a lead role in Avatar and is one of the co-directors of the Actor’s Studio in New York – the method acting workshop with links to rather famous Williams Alum (Ella Kazan).</p>
<p>If breadth of academic offerings is the issue to you, especially in linguistics, you shouldn’t be in any of these schools.</p>
<p>Breadth by itself doesn’t increase academic quality. Strength of a department does.</p>
<p>Thanks but Still not getting how you compute the net price paid figure, is that listed or do you compute it. I’d be interested in seeing a list of that number for LACs. it’s actually a very telling piece of info.</p>
<p>
I hope you don’t mind me asking why the minor in interpretation theory is so important to you? Maybe I am mistaken, but isn’t the interpretation theory minor just a collection of standard classes from other departments? It seems like any liberal arts education would allow you to pursue this interest.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I have no doubt that many of the full-pay students (both US and international) at Swarthmore live frugally. Heck Sam Bronfman lived frugally at Williams, until his parent flew in for parents weekend in the family jet.</p>
<p>In many cases, we are talking about the very top students in countries that see a national interest in sending their best and brightest to the United States for college. I think there’s often money available if money is needed.</p>
<p>
An education of “national interest” is typically not a liberal arts education. And then of course there are the countries that would rather keep the best and brightest students in the country than send them overseas for college and watch them emigrate.</p>
<p>Speedo.</p>
<p>I have total intl students. Intl students on aid. Total aid dollars for internationals. And, of course, I have sticker price (tuition, room, board, and activity fee). Total aid dollars divided by number of internationals gives me the average discount. Subtract that from sticker and you get the average price paid.</p>
<p>Because I’ve also got total enrollment, total # of aided students, and total grant dollars spent on aid (all from the Common Data Sets), it’s easy to calculate the entire student body and/or for just US students.</p>
<p>thanks for that, when I get time or retire I’ll work on that net paid list.</p>
<p>ID - The anecdotal point on theatre came from my host, a freshman prospective theatre major who was no longer really a prospective theatre major because she felt that the department had no room for “traditional” acting styles. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I personally have zero interest in theatre so it’s all hearsay.</p>
<p>mini - Swarthmore is one of the top two LACs in the nation for linguistics, the other being Wellesley. (If one were to become very serious about it, and I’m not anywhere close to that point yet, one should probably also apply to Penn and MIT, which are the respective reasons WHY Swat and Wellesley are T2 for LAC + ling.) There are some fields of study where one absolutely must attend a university, but I don’t believe that linguistics is one of them if the student highly prioritizes the LAC atmosphere.</p>
<p>b@r!um - Theory is a distinct interest of mine, obviously spanning many different departments. I like that Swat sees theory as a coherent interdisciplinary study in and of itself. It’s obviously not a make-or-break factor.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>True, but there are countries like the People’s Republic of China that need some top notch people in the US to watch over their investment.</p>
<p>I checked countries for Swarthmore. China (15), South Korea (20), Hong Kong (5) , and India (8) are all strongly represented.</p>
<p>It is always possible, I suppose, that some schools don’t want to get “too Asian”. I don’t know. That’s kind of a touchy subject.</p>
<p>I think Barium hit the nail on the head with post 15. A middle class family in a third-world country with a low dollar value is almost certainly considered low-income after you convert to USD and therefore will be eligible for a lot of aid at the tippy top schools. This isn’t wrong per se, because either way, they wouldn’t be able to afford the education otherwise, because their dollar value is weak when converted to USD. </p>
<p>As an international applying for aid, I myself think Williams should have gone need-aware and still remain no-loan. I mean, diversity is one thing, but this is quite a big price to pay for US students. If it were my country, I’d feel the same way all of you do.</p>
<p>EDIT : I do agree that it’ll be extremely hard to find full-paying internationals at an LAC, even one like Williams. So the only trade up would be to lower its percentage of internationals. I do NOT agree, however, that poor-high achieving international students shouldn’t have a chance.</p>
<p>For example, I know someone, seriously low-income (like less than $5000 a year) first-gen and all that and she got waitlisted at Williams and got full financial aid from Wellesley. She’s had to face so many things in life, and I’m so glad she made it. And you have no idea the image an American education like that portrays when the rest of us hear of it, knowing that she probably wouldn’t have had a chance to get an education, at least a proper one, without her financial aid from Wellesley.</p>
<p>Keil:</p>
<p>I hear ya on theater. It all looks pretty cutting edge to me. Like that Shakespeare last spring with the actors and audience moving together through the Crum Woods. It’s all greek to me.</p>
<p>On linguistics, the professors are just so cool. I’d be a linguistics major just to hang with the likes of:</p>
<p>David Harrison (the Indiana Jones of linguistics)
[The</a> Linguists - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linguists]The”>The Linguists - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Donna Jo Napoli, famous children’s book author
[Donna</a> Jo Napoli - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Jo_Napoli]Donna”>Donna Jo Napoli - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Ted Fernald, head of the Navajo Academy
[Theodore</a> B. Fernald - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_B._Fernald]Theodore”>Theodore B. Fernald - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>And, this year’s Lang Visiting Professor is a fascinating linguist, specializing in “spanglish” bilingual communities. It is so cool that she is having her Swarthmore students write a book on bilingual communities in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>Ana Celia Zentella
[Amazon.com:</a> Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York (9781557864079): Ana Celia Zentella: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Bilingual-Puerto-Rican-Children/dp/1557864071/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265341167&sr=1-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Bilingual-Puerto-Rican-Children/dp/1557864071/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265341167&sr=1-1)</p>
<p>Donna Jo Napoli was one of three professors referenced in my Why Swat essay. Btw, I didn’t mention my particular creative writing interest because it’s kind of ridiculously niche, but Swat is extremely genre-friendly (for those few people who might care).</p>
<p>Good choice. She wrote a wonderful article a few years back when she went to Iran on a book tour for one of her books being translated into Farsi.</p>
<p>In a move that was all but inevitable, Williams College ended need-blind admissions for international today, effective with this year’s current applicants, according to the test of a letter from interim Pres. Bill Wagner reprinted at EphBlog.</p>
<p>I say it was inevitable because, last year, Williams averaged slightly less than $5000 total revenue from each of their 143 international students. When you are spending $80,000 per student, you can’t make that up on volume. They were bleeding revenue from the failure to attract more than a handful of full-pay internationals. The comparison to peer schools (Swarthmore and Pomona both have roughly the same percentange of full-pay internationals as domestic students) is so dramatic that the only conclusion is that the need-blind policy was shaping an applicant pool that was unusually needy (or perhaps more creative in hiding assets feeling that full-pay wouldn’t increase admissions odds).</p>
<p>Whatever the case, there are millions of dollars of potential revenue on the table, money that simply cannot be ignored.</p>
<p>I believe this leaves Amherst has the only remaining “need-blind for internationals” liberal arts college. They have, however, just instituted a cap on the number of internationals (to the stop their own financial aid bleeding). I don’t think it will be long before they follow suit on this one.</p>
<p>Swarthmore was considering need-blind for internationals before the recession, but it is now solidly off the table. Nobody can justify charging internationals an average of $4,996 versus and average of $34,000 for US students like Williams did last year.</p>
<p>@interesteddad im from india. we dont have IBs and APs but all our regular courses are intensive like hell. probably tougher than the APs and IBs. and in reply to your original question, a lot of really brilliant students here are from poor families. and in case you have forgotten, the GDP in india is not equal to the GDP in usa. an upper-middle class family earns between $15000 to $30000 here. now do you get why we need financial aids? dont know much about other countries but in india this is the condition. how could you expect us to pay the full tuition fees with a family income like that? im not being rude, just giving out facts that you dont seem to know. </p>
<p>p.s. if you dont mind ill be applying to your colleges next year and i definitely need a good aid.</p>