My son who is an athlete- a runner- is having trouble deciding between Haverford or Vassar for ED1. He has very good ACT scores and solid GPA. Academically he is within range of both of them and can run at both of those schools. His interests have always been surrounding sports. He does not party much and prefers hanging out with friends and watching or going to games rather than drinking. He has visited both schools and is torn between the two. He plans on studying economics and maybe applying to business or law school. Trying to figure out which one he would be happier at. Would appreciate any input! Thanks.
He canât go wrong between these two excellent colleges!
He will find friends who share his interests at both colleges, and both will have a lot of people who hang out without drinking alcohol as well as many who do drink.
The two colleges share more similarities than differences- top small colleges with super-smart students, small classes, professors who love to teach and interact closely with students, a tight community, a pretty campus/arboretum in a setting that feels (Vassar) or is (Haverford) suburban.
I am going to start with one difference in âfeel,â with the caveat that no stereotype of a college applies to all students at the college and that many different types of students happily exist at both colleges.
That said, Haverford defines itself by its Honor Code so much that it makes it a supplemental question on the application. As such, students who are rule followers and enforcers may be attracted to Haverford.
Vassar students donât cheat or do dishonorable things more than Haverford students do! But Vassar students, on average, tend to be more challengers of authority than enforcers of authority. They question, they protest, they approach the world with a dose of healthy skepticism.
For the members of my family, that key distinction makes Vassar more attractive than Haverford. Others would feel the exact opposite way!
Some other considerations:
Vassar- fewer distribution requirements/ a wonderfully open curriculum; great opportunities in theatre as both participants and audience; more spectacularly gorgeous buildings; situated in a pretty immediate area but on the edge of a small city that many find less than charming; car access to great hiking in the Shawangunk Mountains or Hudson Highlands; most entertainment and socialization will take place on campus.
Haverford- opportunity to shape the community through the plenary council and honor code; participation in a close bi-college relationship with Bryn Mawr; opportunities to take classes easily at Bryn Mawr and, with a slightly harder commute, at Swarthmore and U Penn; situated in a lovely suburb, a short easy train trip to Philadelphia.
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Based on faculty publishing, Vassarâs economics department appears to be excellent and places tenth by this factor when compared to 196 other colleges of its type: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.uslacecon.html. Note, however, that the data for this analysis is likely to be incomplete, and is not normalized for department size, and should not be the sole factor considered when comparing the strength of respective programs.
Vassar is nearly twice as large. And, while itâs true that Haverford makes up for it by the nearby presence of all-female Bryn Mawr, the unified presence of nearly 2400 students on one campus has to âfeelâ different.
As someone who loves both schools, I need to temper the comments of @TheGreyKing somewhat. The Honor Code isnât about being a rule follower and enforcer. (âEnforcerâ?? What??). Iâm sort of astonished that was the take-away about the Honor Code that was given here. Itâs about providing the freedom to relax in ways that many colleges donât seem to offer. The HC is developed year by year by students, a way of forming a community that agrees on its precepts, and then follows them.
The Honor Code allows you to leave your belongings unprotected and they wonât get stolen. Your laptop will be there when you return. Your wallet-- you no longer need to ask someone to watch it for you if you step away. Your shampoo will be in the bathroom and will not have been stolen by a bulimic student (as has happened at Vassar so many times that it was impossible to leave stuff in the bathroom.) You feel relaxed at Haverford because of the HC.
The HC allows you to take your exams as you schedule them, unproctored, and you donât cheat. You control when you take the exam and where you take the exam, and so you will never experience three papers due and two exams all piled into one day. At Vassar they are scheduled by outside forces and often proctored for the larger classes but not always.
The HC allows students to not compete by grades â little to none of the âwhat did you get on the examâ happens at Haverford. Rather you compete with yourself (not your fellow student) to do your best. That reduces the anxiety and helps to create a collaborative community where students help other students. At Vassar the student body generally doesnât seem inter-competitive by nature, but there isnât baked into the structure a way to relieve pressure such as through self-scheduling. That may be one reason they have the primal scream as a pressure relief at exam time.
There arenât RAs in the dorms making sure that youâre doing one thing and not another. You are taking care of yourself.
Vassar has much more acreage to explore than does Haverford. Vassar is just larger and has different types of paths than does Haverford, which has a nature path that goes around the perimeter of the campus. Itâs quite nice but itâs just smaller.
The physical settings are very different. Vassar has a very self-enclosed campus that is set apart from Poughkeepsie, a small city thatâs not so vibrant. Itâs a pretty long way from Vassar to anywhere else involving culture and civilization, though not so far to beautiful places to hike in the Hudson Valley. Haverford is a small campus tucked away just off the main drag in a vibrant, affluent suburb thatâs a short commuter train ride from a major city. Itâs walking distance from Bryn Mawr (which is also quite small, but also quite beautiful) and Villanova, which is not so small or so beautiful, but ensures that the area is stocked with college students and businesses catering to them.
Also, the values of Quakerism are central to Haverford. It is definitely funny to see that characterized here as ârule followers and enforcers of authority,â because in a million years they wouldnât say that about themselves. But from an outsiderâs perspective the Society of Friends does have a plethora of rules (almost all of them unspoken) and a fair amount of pressure to conform to the authority of the community (which is very different from âpeer pressureâ or external sources of authority like government, or institutional hierarchy). It also has a rock-solid culture of respect for all people and absolute commitment to respectful dialogue. Vassarâs version of liberal humanism is more standard, at least for institutions of higher learning.
Haverford - Economics program is strong and students have good post-grad results, location is better, one of the best schools for student driven autonomy/governance - really makes Haverford a unique place. Lastly, the running program and its coach are top notch. The coach gets stellar results and is great at developing talent and camaraderie.
@Dustyfeathers beautifully described what the Honor Code means at Haverford so I will just chime in and say, yes, the Honor Code opens up the community because of the shared norms and expectations, rather than creates a set of rules to follow. I am a BiCo alum, and was grateful for the flexibility and autonomy that the Honor Code afforded.
I would encourage the OP to ask pointed questions to the coach at both schools to know what the ED1 acceptance has been for students with the sonâs profile and that level of coach support â how many admitted, deferred, rejected, say over the past 5 years. Haverford has a reputation for being less predictable in terms of ED recruited athlete admissions than some of its peers, for instance, in NESCAC. Iâd suggest making sure that, in comparing schools, you have clear information about recruiting and admission.
Haverford has full cross registration with Bryn Mawr and easy to walk to the girls school. Since Haverford College is about 52% girls, there are a lot of girls in that consortium, about 3/4 of students roaming around are girls.
The math at Bryn Mawr is excellent, which could be a great advantage for an economics student, to take math over there.
Haverford has a good location for someone who wants to explore a city, on the train line, to Philadelphia.
Haverford has a sporty vibe.
My take on the Haverford Honor code, is that it is taken a bit far???, in that students need to take tests in
their rooms. I would prefer proctored testing myself. Its just a bit more orderly to go to a timed test, in my opinion,
and less rope to hang myself with.
The Honor code does seem to encourage students to rat on each other, but I was not a Haverford student,
just observing the campus.
I did not want my son to feel obligated to spent time on accusing others of cheating. He decided he would rather
attend a college where he did not have to be stressing out about taking exams alone in his dorm room.
Also I attended a university where everyone helped each other on problem sets and homework. That was not considered cheating at my university,
so I was uncomfortable with Haverford for my son both because it seemed too heavy with girl students
and the honor code felt strange to us.
⊠women.
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. . . . agreed â women at Bryn Mawr and frankly other colleges. @Coloradomama
Your son isâor you areâuncomfortable with your son around so many women students, that sadly eliminates most liberal arts colleges, as the normal ratio is about 60-40 women to men.
Also â you arenât necessarily taking tests in your dorm room. There is an entire campus available after all. Not sure how itâs possible to âhang yourselfâ with flexibility . . . ? Are you unsure whether youâd cheat? I genuinely donât understand that. As for ârattingâ each other out â that seems to be moot if people are not cheating in the first place, as seems to be the case. Tests and results are often left in public places and people simply donât look at what they arenât supposed toâboth the test before they take it and the results of the other students. They just donât.
Itâs about trust.
I have trouble wondering how itâs possible to âstress outâ taking an exam when you self-schedule and choose the location . . .
No one considers working together on problem sets and studying together in various ways âcheatingâ at Haverford or Bryn Mawr. Thatâs collaboration, something thatâs encouraged. And the HC, helps to ensure that happensâbecause students arenât in competition with each other for grades.
The honor code asks you to be comfortable trusting yourself. And taking personal responsibility. Thatâs all it does.
Haverfordâs Honor Code is about students creating a community through self-determination, that the community each year endorses and embraces the shared expectations of living together. it affects community life in ways like, if a student on the hall is studying and another group down the hall is playing loud music, the student studying is empowered to walk down the hall and say, âfolks, Iâve got a big test tomorrow, can you please turn it down.â And, the loud students, as members of the same community, are encouraged to respect the needs of other members of the community, and turn it down. Or work out another solution, such as turning it down after a certain amount of time etc. The idea is, work together to find a solution. Neither group should feel belabored or attacked. Similarly, because students are understood to respect themselves and each other, one has more flexibility in taking exams. Maybe it has changed since I was a BiCo student, but one could take exams in a designated academic building. Some classes (maybe all now, I donât know) also offered the flexibility to take the exam anywhere on campus. We were expected not to use our notes, if it was a closed book exam, because of the Honor Code. From recent grads whom we know well, I understand that the Honor Code continues to operate as a shared cultural value, and is not about a culture of turning in oneâs peers. The point of the Honor Code is that students respect and accountable to each other, not to some College Administration bureaucracy.
Also, Bryn Mawr is a womenâs college.
OK, take this from someone who knows nothing about sports recruitment at Haverford, but you should go through the Haverford forum here carefully. I remember a lengthy thread about Haverford not coming through for recruited athletes in ED.
Really, truly your sonâs response to each school really matters! they âfeelâ quite different. If he hasnât visited both / sat in on a class / spent some time with students, that should happen asap.
@brantly â Agreed that anyone going through D3 recruiting should ask specific questions about prior ED1 acceptance information for similarly situated recruits. In my response at #7, I encouraged the OP to ask specific questions at both schools to get real numbers about ED acceptances for recruits with that level of coach support. That Haverford thread started several years ago after some serious frustration â understandable â with the process.
Haverford is reputed to be much less predictable than some of its NESCAC peers. Part of that may be because, as one of the smallest top LACs and one with a distinctive Quaker influenced culture, mutual fit matters a lot for admissions, so just meeting required academic standards and being recruited is not the end of the process. On one end of the spectrum, there are schools like MIT or Caltech, where being an athletic recruit seems to be just more than a feather on the acceptance scale. On the other end, there are some NESCAC schools with tips and slots where, once the pre-read comes back positive and the coach has told you what level of support you are getting, there is not too much risk. At Haverford, a recruit should absolutely be asking detailed questions about actual admissions for recent applicants with similar academic profile in order to decide whether to commit their one shot at ED1 at Haverford. There are plenty of stories of happy, ED admitted athletes at Haverford, but it does not have the same predictability and consistency as can be found at some peer schools.
I went to a school where time mattered on tests. How fast you can solve a problem does matter in life. I donât really see how I would have timed myself in a timed test, and never once made a mistake on that, but maybe Haverford does not care about speed. I just do not get the honor code model, and it felt uncomfortable to me. It would be very easy to over stay time inside a room alone. Also lonely I believe. I really prefer the idea of âwe are in this test togetherâ. We walk out together and discuss the test. That was the classic way to relief stress, yeah number 2, was really not that easy, OK, I also did not really understand that one. Can you show me how you solved it? LOTS OF LEARNING from peers, thats the college model I know. Thats the college life I knew, and thats the college life my sons have at their schools. I guess I call people girls and boys and thats how some people do it. Its not meant as an insult and does not need to be corrected. Find something better to do that run down others way of speaking.
I think an even gender balance is better, because I went to a mostly boys college, in fact as a girl and did not like that aspect of my university. . Social life and life in general, is much better when colleges are gender balanced. Haverford -Bryn Mawr are not, but there is greater Philadelphia and other strengths there. I do not see why LACs tip towards girls, as all its doing is throwing many boys into state programs and giving girls advantages of smaller schools and smaller environments. Its really not particularly fair to boys in fact, that so many all boys schools have switched to admitting more girls than boys. Why not keep it balanced? If its important for girls to get into STEM, its equally important for boys to get into teaching and nursing careers. Otherwise, what are we really saying?
Just a side note, irrelevant to the OPâs question:
Other colleges besides Haverford have self-scheduled tests you can take anywhere. Many classes at Williams have self-scheduled take-home exams during the final exam week period. The test must be completed within 24 hours of whenever you start taking it.
@Coloradomama - Believe me, most LACs are not tipping in favor of female enrollment. Most are doing everything possible to attract male applicants without the tail wind of an engineering or business management major helping to do the job. Itâs bad enough that the term, âliberal arts and sciencesâ is often mistaken to mean, liberal politically, proper attention to bro culture also requires big sums of money spent on Division I level athletics.
Thatâs the key: people are giving information that she can share with her son, to help him decide if it would uncomfortable to him
As a different perspective, when I took college exams that way I loved it. I could schedule the exams in the order that worked best for me, I could take them at the time of day that worked for me, and I could take them in the type of room that worked for me (small classroom / large lecture theater / whatever). I could take do it on my own, or with go with a gang of my friends.
Of course, it might not suit @nervosamomâs son at all- but itâs great that there are a variety of views for them to discuss and consider.