Our S19 applied to and was accepted to all three of the US schools you mention - Lawrence, St. Olaf and Denison - and is currently a sophomore at Denison. He’s a US citizen but grew up in Asia and was educated entirely overseas. He also did the IB diploma program. S19 is not a STEM kid, and his artistic interests are more in the theater area, so I don’t have any personal knowledge of the 3+2 engineering program or the choir. But I can tell you that my son really loves the school and we couldn’t be happier with his choice. I have lived on the East Coast and the West Coast but had little experience with the Midwest and hadn’t really envisioned him living in a small town in Ohio, but it’s turned out to be a great entree to life in the US. Granville is a lovely little village, and the state capital of Columbus is only about 30 minutes away. Denison itself is very diverse and has a strong sense of community, and the academics are very high-quality, with a lot of personal attention and interaction with the professors. My son, who’s normally cautious in a new environment, was immediately drawn into various activities - he’s working in the Admissions office, acting as a peer mentor, tutoring Japanese students and doing various other things that make him feel he’s making a contribution. Denison has also done a very good job dealing with COVID, finding the right balance between keeping the cases close to zero and allowing life to go on. My son runs track and that has gone forward this year, with a lot of restrictions but still challenging and fun. The music programs at Lawrence and St. Olaf are better known, but the arts facilities at Denison are terrific and the arts in general are a point of pride for the school. I think that @Midwestmomofboys ’ son, who graduated last year, was more involved in music at Denison, so maybe she can chime in. Regarding the other two schools, I don’t have as much knowledge, as in the end we did not visit either. With Lawrence, my son was put off by being treated too generically as an international student - he had Lawrence students from all over Asia calling him up in the middle of class during his senior year, and his feeling was that he really would have preferred to speak with someone from the U.S. With St. Olaf, we had met a couple of very enthusiastic graduates at a college fair in Tokyo, and he was interested, but after he saw Denison, which was kind of love at first sight, he decided he had seen enough colleges and we never made it to Minnesota.
Thanks very much @tkoparent that is lots of useful information. Denison sounds like a really good college (and wood be the most affordable for us). I don’t know how we will decide which one is most suitable! I have heard a bit about the frats/sororities at Denison and the party culture which I am not sure would be suitable for my daughter. We recoil a bit at the idea of having to go through a popularity contest to join a club of this nature (it seems to channel all the worst “mean girl” images from bad US TV shows we have seen!). How has your son found that side of things?
I have a Freshman daughter at Denison and can speak to your social and frat/sorority concerns. She has some similar qualities you mentioned for your D: academic, resilient, adapts well to different environments and social situations. I refer to her as “plug and play.” She’s a urban kid and would have preferred going to school in NYC or Boston but she ended up in Granville, OH not knowing a soul. But she’s thriving and enjoys it very much. And she wouldn’t be caught dead joining a sorority. But the Greek scene is a non issue for her and it sounds like for anyone else not into that scene. The Greek houses are not residences so there isn’t a that “Animal House” quality with the frats. Seems like Denison is “Greek-light.” Nor would my D call the girls social scene Mean Girls-esque. ( And D is a theater kid that looks and dresses a bit outside the norm) 
She just says everyone is really nice. Sure there’s parties and drinking. It is a college. But like the Greek presence, it’s a non issue for those that don’t. In the end, both she and her parents are happy she ended up at a damn good school with a lot of personal attention and a largely down to earth student body.
Wow, great to have someone with a daughter at Denison contributing! This question comes up from time to time, and I can only answer based on experience with my son. I was also worried about these issues when we were looking at schools two years ago. It seems that 25 or 30 years ago, Denison had a very strong Greek culture and a reputation as a preppy party school. The fraternities and sororities were moved out of their houses and into the regular dorms more than 20 years ago, I believe, and several with a reputation for hazing were suspended. The school made a deliberate effort to move towards what @herecomesmongo describes as “Greek-light” and it seems to have worked. My son is not in a fraternity, although both of his roommates are, and he is kind of a “my body is a temple” type, so not much involved in partying. It all seems to be a non-issue for him. It is my impression that, at Denison and presumably at other schools, it’s important for a student to find their niche, or niches, and everything flows from that. I don’t think there is any particularly strong pressure to pledge a fraternity or sorority, although that is an option for those who want it. In my son’s case, his niches are the track team, his roommates (one runs track, one doesn’t), the Admissions team he is working with and a couple of others. For your daughter, presumably the choir would be very important. When my son was accepted, he was invited to join a Facebook group for admitted students and then some other groups, including one for track, spun off from that. It was very helpful to him in understand who his fellow students might be. I understand they are going to send an email to all of the admitted students letting them know about these various resources. My son has been assigned 80 admitted students to follow up with - I wonder if your daughter might be in his group? One other thing I should mention is Denison’s president, Adam Weinberg, who is really terrific. He is very thoughtful about the role of liberal arts colleges and has brought a lot of energy and innovation to the school. (You can find some of his writings if you look at his Twitter account @AdamatDenison,) The students like and respect him, and it has been impressive to see how the students have adapted to the pandemic restrictions. They have all been asked to signed a Community Care Agreement, and by and large, have complied, as can be seen in the very low number of cases. The school meanwhile has done a lot of innovative things to make life easier and more fun, including an ice skating rink outside the student union, food trucks, and fire pits where students can safely gather.
Thanks very much @tkoparent and @Herecomesmongo That is very helpful to have your perspectives. I will encourage our daughter to join the admitted students page for Denison and St Olaf.
Glad if it helps. I don’t mean to oversell Denison, you’ll need to decide which school is the best fit, but I thought of one other thing that has been helpful to me as an overseas parent. The Facebook page for Denison parents and guardians has been enormously helpful. It’s a very nice group and people provide really helpful advice on everything from housing to how to have a cherry pie delivered (that came up today from another overseas parent and reminded me to mention this). There are also a number of parents who live relatively close to the school and last year, when kids needed to move off campus quickly in the spring, someone actually created a spreadsheet where local parents offered to help out in various ways. Knowing that group is there and will help if we need them provides me with peace of mind. I don’t like FB and try to avoid it, but I am very glad I joined this one group.
I thought of one more thing (it’s Saturday morning here, and my mind has been wandering while I do the chores), this time about Lawrence. As you may know, some schools will give credit for AP and IB courses taken in high school. I don’t know if that is something that would be a factor for you and your daughter, but I recall that Lawrence was unusually generous in granting credit for IB courses. They give credit for both HL and SL courses and for grades of 5, 6 and 7, up to almost a full year’s credits. Denison, on the other hand, only gives credit for HL courses and only 6s and 7s. I don’t remember what the situation is at St. Olaf, but you can probably find the page by googling St. Olaf Credit for IB. My son didn’t care about this, for good or for ill, but for a student who’s interested in finishing early or skipping past some intro courses, it might be a factor.
Denison would offer the unique environment of a LAC without the high cost but without the level of choirs (St Olaf especially, and Lawrence). It’s a good middle ground.
So, to summarize:
LAC environment+flexibility+ top choirs = St Olaf
LAC environment+flexibility+ strong music = Lawrence
LAC environment+flexibility+ lower cost = Denison
Large university environment+ Engineering + lowest cost = Queens
Echoing @tkoparent and @Herecomesmongo’s comments about Denison. My kid graduated in '20, a 4 year athlete, not in greek life, and loved every aspect of his experience at Denison. He and his classmates were devastated to leave campus last March.
My kid had been a musician as well as athlete in high school and looked at schools where he could continue both, so we visited Lawrence and met with faculty in his instrument there and had those same conversations at Denison. I cannot speak to choral music specifically at either school. Lawrence, with the Con, of course has a music-rich environment and does a good job of opening opportunities up to non-Con students by audition. Denison is really good in the fine and performing arts – the new performing arts center, the Eisner Center, is a fantastic learning and performance space, and the Vail Series and Tutti festival provide incredible music experiences on campus. The OP’s daughter might reach out to the Chair of the Music Dept, and copy the Admin Asst, to ask to be connected with choral faculty and/or students further. At least when my kid was deciding, he spoke with faculty in his areas of interest to understand the opportunities, and the culture of the department, better. Wonderful choices all around, you can’t go wrong in choosing among St. Olaf, Lawrence and Denison!
Thanks @MYOS1634. That is a great summary. Choir is the reason we wish aid/merit were swapped between St Olaf and Denison.
Can I ask you and others whether there be would be any reason to think that the academics are stronger at Denison due to its greater selectivity and higher ranking in US news? I presume not from the good comments I have heard about academics at Lawrence and St Olaf and the strength of physics at Lawrence and science and maths at St Olaf. The selectivity isn’t a measure of the quality of the education but rather the level of the other students and it sounds like she would have good motivated students around her at any of the three.
And yes, Queens is a large university. I was kind of fooling myself about that as it is smaller than UBC and McGill and has the reputation within Canada for being more like a US University experience (more residential, more school spirit and activities) but I can see that is not the same as the particular environment of LAC. Having only been to large universities myself (at home and in the UK) it’s hard to for us to really imagine what that is like. Our S15 went to Princeton which we know is a pretty exceptional place (and quite small with only 5k undergrad and no a lot of PG) so that is the only real experience we have of the US.
One other (admittedly minor) factor about Denison is it looks quite a bit closer on the map at least to her brother in NYC but I guess it is still a flight regardless so this doesn’t really make any difference. We have never been to Ohio, Wisconsin or Minnesota!
The total cost of attendance for Denison (tuition, room & board, meals, etc) is about $7,000 - $9,000 higher than the total cost of attendance for St Olaf. Both of your daughter’s merit offers are very good, but your overall total cost to attend Denison vs St Olaf is closer than at first glance looking at just the merit offer.
Also, I think location may have some impact on the acceptance rate at each school. Ohio is closer to the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, so more students from those higher population areas are likely to consider and apply to Ohio schools than to Minnesota schools.
Edited to add: I think they’re all good options, and it sounds like she would thrive at any of her choices.
Absolutely, the OP should be comparing cost of attendance after merit, and not just the merit awards themselves. When we were comparing finances, we compared the total of tuition, mandatory fees, and room and board – but not books, travel and incidentals – because schools often had wildly different estimates for those other items and we felt those were items we could budget and control for.
So looking just at tuition, mandatory fees, and room and board, before awards – and I think my math is right:
St Olaf would be $63k minus $30k merit/aid=$33k
Lawrence would be $62k minus $31k merit/aid= $31k
Denison would be $70k minus $41k merit/aid=$29k
Another consideration for finances is understanding how any need-based aid or merit awards change over 4 years. If you have a current college student in NY, what happens to predicted need-based aid once he graduates? Also, if any of that aid package is merit aid, make sure you understand the “risk” involved in potentially losing it.
In terms of the question about quality of academics – as a faculty family ourself, when we were looking at LACs for our kid, I dove deeply into faculty at assorted LACs (to rebut my spouse’s initial view that the only ones with a “good education” were the top 10. I found that the faculty at LACs, from #1 to 65 etc., generally had their Ph.Ds from excellent universities and were active researchers. So we quickly assured ourselves that the faculty were not a reason to discount some schools. So then I look at factors like, facilities, course offerings, administrative support for faculty development and engagement as well as how active and engaged the students are. Among St Olaf, Lawrence and Denison, you will find active students and terrific faculty.
If St Olaf really is her preferred school, if my numbers are correct, then it doesn’t look like a significant gap between St Olaf and Denison, and she should follow her heart!
Thanks very much for the research. The St Olaf’s merit is 28k not 30k but otherwise that looks right.
Denison have given their aid mostly as a “grant” (not that we submitted any financial information to them or specifically applied for needs based aid) but we spoke to Financial Aid at Denison yesterday and they definitely said that it was guaranteed and would continue for 4 years with increases to compensate for tuition price hikes.
The brother in NYC has graduated and is happily in his second year in workforce in a big tech company so our daughter is our only dependent at this stage.
Oops, sorry about mis-reading St Olaf. Okay, so there is a $6k difference per year between St Olaf and Denison. That could be significant, or not, depending on a family’s personal circumstances.
I’d double check on the finances to understand how the awards could change. I know that for my Denison kid, his merit award required a 3.0 after his sophomore year and we took some comfort in the fact that, even if his gpa dropped below that (which we’d told him was also the minimum gpa he needed in order to continue to play his sport), the merit award would just drop a tier, rather than disappear altogether. At all the other schools where he had merit, it disappeared completely if his 1st year cumulative gpa was not a 3.0. While that might not seem like a concern for parents of disciplined girls, as the parents of a male athlete who didn’t drink or party in high school, we had some concerns about whether he’d “enjoy” college too much his first year, so we appreciated that flexibility.
Hello all
I wanted to update that eventually after lots of discussion and deliberation she chose Queen’s in Canada.
Queen’s was one of the few options that offered her engineering (her other options for engineering/arts dual degrees were UBC and Sydney). In the end she felt she wanted to try engineering from the start rather than the 3+2 options of the LACs she was accepted to. (The reason she didn’t apply to more engineering schools btw was that at the time of application she doubted she wanted to go the engineering route but watching some of her school friends start engineering in our home country (where the university year starts in February) has tipped her back into wanting to give it a go.
She would have loved the choirs at St Olaf but she has reached out to the choir director at Queen’s and also found a Kingston city choir that sounds great (we were lucky that one of the Canadian diplomats here is a Queen’s alum
and was able to tell us about the city choir, as she had sang in it. Our D has been in contact with the director of that choir as well and he was very positive about the prospect of her singing with them.
As her mother I was very attracted by the small classes and individual attention at St Olaf but, as I said on another thread, she has become a lot more independent since finishing high school in December including working away from home for a few months and now is working as an administrator in the COVID vaccine programme. It doesn’t seem so important now that she be in an LAC environment. I feel confident she will navigate the bigger environment of a larger university well and get the help she needs when she needs it.
And finally in these challenging times with COVID still affecting a lot of borders we are attracted to the idea that in Canada she is a citizen and has all the rights of citizenship such as access to the health system and the right to work.
Queen’s is also the least expensive due to her two scholarships meaning tuition is covered, so that is a plus as we will put aside the equivalent of the scholarship money so she can use it for graduate school if she wants.
I wanted to thank everyone for their input including a few of you who DM’d me with additional comments.
So happy it’s worked out for her. I was rooting for Queen’s all along!
Hi! I just saw this thread - congrats on making the choice! All would have been great, so congratulations on having so many terrific options! I graduated from Queen’s, as did my brother, husband and a cousin as well. And I’m from the Kingston area (my family has lived in the area since the 1770s) so this is one of the few areas on CC where I can hold myself out as a genuine expert. As a New Zealander (with Canadian citizenship), she will feel incredibly at home there. I love the US (I’ve lived in NY and now live in the LA area) and really enjoy and appreciate it, but it has made me realize that there is indeed a cultural difference. By going to Queen’s she will get the best of both worlds - different enough for it to be a growth opportunity, but similar enough (due to the shared Commonwealth culture) to feel like home. Kingston is a fantastic place to go to university - a classic college town that also has St. Lawrence college and the Royal Military College. The pubs and bagpipes and the like that were omnipresent when I was there would be familiar to a Brit/Aussie/New Zealander, as is having Queen Elizabeth on the money and whatnot. We have a similar self-deprecating sense of humor. Like NZ, a country of immense natural beauty. She’ll be able to easily take the train to Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, and if she wants to visit NY or other US cities at holiday time, the flights from those cities are short. There is an intense sense of community, and much more diversity these days than when I attended. And like you said, there is great comfort in having citizenship and thus e.g. access to the health system and having all rights of a citizen. And Queen’s is very well known by US grad programs, if that ends up being a path in the future. My husband ended up at a top two US business school for his MBA, and I know plenty of other people who ended up at other top US programs (or who ended up at Oxford or Cambridge etc.). Again, congratulations, and wanted to weigh in with these thoughts as confirmation! All the best to your daughter.
Thanks so much for this encouraging message @snowbirdmom.
Our D is very lucky to have this opportunity and we are excited for her. She has never been to Canada but I loved there on and off as a child and am also excited to reconnect with that part of my childhood.