<p>Sloparent...
I certainly cannot speak as a parent of a Bowdoin student...but I have known many students....graduates....I like everyone I have ever met who went to Bowdoin....they are smart, active, articulate people.... the reasons for a student to not put Bowdoin on their list include things like size, or location or not having their subject of interest etc.... it is a beautiful campus with a great faculty and administration....top food.... I have no idea if your counselor friend has ever worked on any other campus....but, I suspect the sample pool they were dealing with was already subselected..... I know I would be proud to have a child educated at Bowdoin....</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, I have an uncle who is a dean at Bowdoin who will absolutely NOT allow his kids to apply there and yet there is a cousin (child from a different branch of the family) who just finished freshman year and absolutely loved it!</p>
<p>Motherdear:
There could be many reasons why a dean would not want his children to attend the college where he is dean. Do you have some idea why this particular dean feels the way he does?</p>
<p>Yes I do. He and my aunt (his wife) felt he had invested too much time in Bowdoin to leave. However, they both felt Bowdoin was too insular and wanted their kids to broaden their horizons so to speak. They also felt the town of Brunswick was divided between 3 distinct categories, Bowdoin academic personnel, US Navy personnel, and workers who serviced either community. </p>
<p>He loved Bowdoin as a professor but not as a father of a potential student.</p>
<p>If you scroll about halfway down the page, you'll see the courses. It looks to me like an impressive array for such a small school. D wants to take Japanese, so I've been helping her find good programs. We visited Bowdoin last summer, but she thought it was too small, alas.</p>
<p>'I am quite suspicious, personally, of stereotypes of schools as cutthroat - having never seen it myself in some very competitive schools. Doesn't mean that kids don't suffer depression/stress etc. But due to competitiveness from other kids? I question it."</p>
<p>Well, I don't. If you take a school with a very large number of entering premeds, and they know in advance that only 30% of those entering are ever going to get a recommendation from the screening committee, and that courses are designed to weed a large number of students out, and that these very same weeded out students would have become fine doctors had they gone to a midlevel state university, don't you think that might occasionally lead to a little tinge of meanness in the overall competition?</p>
<p>Motherdear:</p>
<p>Thanks! S loved what he saw of Bowdoin but the small size was a minus for him. The faculty is topnotch, the offerings are great for a small LAC. It's a wonderful school for the right type of student. S had a friend who went there and absolutely loved it.</p>
<p>Papa Chicken - your trip sounds very similar to the Maine trip I took with my parents a little over a year ago. </p>
<p>We had the same exact thoughts on Bates. I found it to be a little underwhelming. The town left a lot to be desired and I didn't find the campus to be as beautiful as their viewbooks described. </p>
<p>Bowdoin and Colby both impressed me, and I decided on adding Colby to my list in the end. I really loved the campus and the entire environment. It seemed a little more relaxed than Bowdoin, at least to me. I ended up getting into Colby, and it was a very close second choice to Wellesley.</p>
<p>My daughter and I went to visit Colby after she was accepted last spring. We took the accepted students tour, and my daughter attended a couple of classes. One of her friends is in the 2010 class, which is how she heard of the school, and his sister goes to Bates. </p>
<p>We were very impressed with the friendliness of the faculty and admissions staff (that was our reaction at Trinity also) and the students, who were very laid-back and casually dressed. We thought the campus was very attractive, much better than Middlebury, which had a proliferation of white buildings.</p>
<p>In the end she decided to attend W&L, where the students are <em>not</em> very laid-back and casually dressed. Go figure.</p>
<p>The buildings at Middlebury are not "white"--most are gray. That's the color of locally quarried limestone and granite. The majority of buildings at Middlebury have architectural styles that are consistent with early New England mill structures. Mead chapel is as close to white as you'll get, and that's because its facade is entirely dressed in marble. </p>
<p>Most of the New England campuses (Colby, Bates, Dartmouth, Amherst, Bowdoin) are characterized by rows of brick buildings. I found Middlebury's campus to be a refreshing change. The light-colored, ivy-covered buildings look beautiful when contrasted against the changing fall foliage, and they take on an ethereal appearance when sitting atop the snow covered landscape in winter.</p>
<p>I gathered some more data while researching strong programs at Bowdoin, and although the info I present below represents only a facet (& perhaps a controversial one) to the strengths & weaknesses of those programs, its interesting nevertheless IMHO.</p>
<p>Professional school placement
WSJ article circa 2003 regarding professional grad degree program placement from undergrad schools to elite institutions (law, med, business, etc.)
<a href="http://wsjclassroom.com/college/feederschools.htm%5B/url%5D">http://wsjclassroom.com/college/feederschools.htm</a></p>
<p>Bowdoin ranks #19 nationally here, implying that their pre-med, pre-law, etc professional program prep is very good. (Bates #40, Colby #46.)</p>
<p>PhD production.
Last year, interesteddad culled some fed reports on Phd graduates by discipline (1994-2003) sorted by originating undergraduate school. He then took those data, normalized by undergarduate student body size, and ranked (limited to top 50 or so) the undergraduate origins by number of PhD's produced per 1000 students.
Here's a link to interesteddad's threads (a thread per discipline):
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/search.php?searchid=3729133%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/search.php?searchid=3729133</a></p>
<p>For Bowdoin, here's what he came up with:</p>
<p>RANK....DISCIPLINE (# PhD's produced per 1000 students)
32.........Total (203)
30.........Total Math, Sciences & engineering (100)</p>
<p>...so half of the PhD's that Bowdoin undergraduates produced during that time period where in the math, sciences, & engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>RANK DISCIPLINE (# PhD's produced per 1000 students)
7............Chemistry (26)
17...........Economics (7)
18...........Anthropology (7)
24...........Biology & Health Sciences (46)
30...........Political Science & Public Admin (8)
31...........Sociology (4)
33...........History (9)
33...........Music & Art (9)
37...........Math & Comp Science (7)
39...........English Lit (13)
57...........Physics & Astronomy (7)
not rated..Language & Linguistics (<5)</p>
<p>There must be a few disciplines missing here, as the disciplines don't add up to the totals. However, looks like relative to its overall #30 rank, chemistry & biology look particularly strong for the natural sciences, and economics & anthropology appear very strong as well. Of note, Bowdoin does not appear to be strong in languages, relative to other listed disciplines.</p>
<p>ps....Bates & Colby show up on the top ~50 PhD production lists quite a bit, but not as often or generally as high a rank as Bowdoin (although there are some exceptions to that last point.)</p>
<p>Papachicken:</p>
<p>People normally do not do Ph.Ds in languages as what is required to teach is fluency rather than research; and linguistics is a tiny field (nearly got eliminated at Harvard only a few years ago!), so it's not surprising that there is no data for these two fields.</p>
<p>good point marite.....I did err however in my description (should have said "not ranked" rather than "not rated").....Bowdoin was not ranked in the pool of 62 that did rank. So, relative to those other institutions which on average produce fewer PhDs overall, Bowdoin produces fewer undergraduates that go onto a language PhD. Interestingly, Williams was ranked 12th, wheras I had always heard that their language departments were not that strong....guess that is relative to their other departments. Of course, PhD production, especially for languages, may have little to do with quality of undergraduate program.</p>
<p>sorry, doesn't look like the search link I posted above for the PhD production threads works (new forum?)</p>
<p>here they are, each thread separately listed:</p>
<p>TOTAL MATH, SCIENCES & ENGINEERING
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61288&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61288&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>ENGINEERING
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60983&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60983&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>MATH & COMP SCIENCE
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60986&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60986&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>BIOLOGY & HEALTH SCIENCE
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60990&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60990&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>SOCIOLOGY
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60997&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=60997&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>ENGLISH LIT
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61091&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61091&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>POLI SCI & PUBLIC ADMIN
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61096&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61096&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61113&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61113&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>CHEMISTRY
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61287&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61287&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>LANGUAGES & LINGUISTICS
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61320&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61320&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>ANTHROPOLOGY
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61341&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=61341&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>HISTORY
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64846&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64846&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>MUSIC & ART
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64850&highlight=phd%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=64850&highlight=phd</a></p>
<p>mini - point well taken (post #26). I have to admit that the whole pre-med thing with screening committees and (effectively) caps on # who will be recommended forward is Greek to me. Hadn't been aware of it prior to reading a bit here on cc, and haven't paid attention to it since it's not relevant to our family. </p>
<p>When it's a zero-sum game, which is what you outline, I think some form of competitiveness across students has to be inevitable. My observations relate to situations where it isn't a zero-sum game and some stereotypes say that students behave as though it is. That I have not seen.</p>
<p>This thread still shows how difficult it is to tease out differences between these three schools, so I would like to add another perspective.<br>
Daughter visited all three, and decided to apply to Colby and Bates. She felt Bowdoin still had a bit too much of the frat culture and didn't really fit her. In the end, she got in at both, among other LACs, and decided to go to Colby.</p>
<p>A supportive social environment was key to her, but she felt that both Colby and Bates have terrific communities with little direct competition.</p>
<p>But what really won her over was Colby's decided focus on international studies and their commitment to attracting top-notch foreign students. The class of 2010 has over 12% international students, far more than prior classes and far more than many of the top LACs. And about 70% of students do a semester abroad. </p>
<p>The key factor that kept her from considering Bates further was the lack of a multi-disciplinary program like International Studies. She felt she would have much greater ability to shape a highly individualized course of study at Colby.</p>
<p>For those interested, the Colby website has the college's strategic plan, which gives a great sense of its focus. That global perspective has become an overarching goal that should help it become better known nationally.</p>
<p>Bates interests me the most of these excellent schools, they appear to cater to the artsy, laid-back student. Both Portland and Freeport are within 30 miles each.</p>
<p>I am an upcoming sophomore at Bates. I love the school. The College was founded by those who were ahead of their time. Bates was the first college in New England to accept women, the only college discussed of the three to never have frats, and today's policy of optional SATs. Their really is an egalitarian feel to the school. I'm from a small town of 1,600 in southern md, and comign to the Lewiston Auburn area is like a metropolis to me. I love Lewiston, it really makes you realize how difficult some people have it. Unlike Brunswick it does not have any seasonal residents, I feel as if you get more of a "maine experience." I am a double major in poli sci/history (american politics, asian history) and I can tell you that the facultyof the Asian Studies program are top notch. If your son was to come to Bates, he would find that Chinese is the second most popular language (after spanish), and the college has 5 full time faculty members devoted just to Chinese and Japanese. Also a new dorm and dining hall are currently being built and we just finished a Campaign that will help the College's resources. As for the rankings, I do believe Bates is highly underranked (i think should be around 15ish), but was ranked number 1 by Pr for "best value college." Bates faculty are also very very committed, they currently make on average less than 10,000 than their peers at other nescac schools (with the new campaign being ended faculty salaries will be improved considerably). A lot of professors told me they have had offers to leave to go to other schools for higher pay, but they said that they could never leave Bates one professor told me not for a million dollars! Well sorry for being so long, if you have any other questions about Bates or Lewiston just ask!</p>