Men who graduated from Vassar in the late 1980’s (20 years after it went Co Ed in 1969) and even current male grads still get confused looks and the “isn’t that a girls school” comment. So well known yes, accurately understood not so much.
Also rumor has it that in the 1980s the Wesleyan men’s Crew team would frequently take advantage of the “13 school exchange” and attend Vassar junior year because of the abundance of females. To ensure they were identifiable and their intentions clear they wore tshirts emblazoned with one word: WesCrew.
I agree with you. Of course, as to who does and doesn’t have a branding problem will always be open to debate. I also think some schools and some groups of schools do it very well. I have found that Wesleyan can be a little clumsy at it, but they are enjoying some momentum from the fact that the “NESCAC” has come as close as any group of schools to emulating what the Ivy League has done for itself and its member institutions by creating a strong group brand.
I think you’re spot on as it pertains to Washington University, and to a lesser extent Emory and Rice. But I see your point with all three.
I guess my view is colored to a degree by living in the West. When you venture away from the main city centers, there aren’t a lot of people who know Williams College from Governor Williams Community College. My specialist (doc) did her undergrad at Williams, and she was always asking me about my D at Wesleyan and shared her experience of even having family members ask her, “Why don’t you go to Notre Dame?” And she grew up in the mid-Atlantic! Out west, college tends to be a big school thing. You’d be surprised at how many people out here have no clue about Pomona College.
Wellesley may be the only national LAC that almost everyone has heard of, even the really clueless people who don’t give a damn.
As someone who lives on the West Coast, I agree that the Vassar name and reputation is better known. Not to say anything against Davidson. There are many excellent schools in the West that are overlooked/unknown by those in the East.
Speaking of clumsy attempts at branding, NESCAC is successful precisely because as an acronym, it never depended on knowing exactly what each letter stood for; you just needed to know that they were a group of selective Eastern LACs. I’m old enough to remember AWS, PAWS and the unfortunately malaprop, WASP, all of which suffered from the requirement that you know the names of the colleges before you could figure out what each letter stood for.
Conversely, NESCAC is elastic enough as a concept that many people would be surprised to learn that colleges as diverse as Colgate, Union, Swarthmore, and Haverford are not members.
Well it stands for New England…so I wouldn’t think those schools would be in - but then the NY schools shouldn’t be in and they are.
I know the conference is considered elite but schools like Trinity and Conn College, while excellent, would not be deemed elite. Tufts is an outlier just as it’s not a “small” college…or a LAC in this sense.
Then again, Vandy is in a conference with Ms State and LSU; Northwestern is in a conference with Iowa and Nebraska, and Stanford is in a conference with Washington State and Utah.
All great schools - but whereas the Ivies all punch similarly, the same can’t be said for the others.
Well, that’s sort of the point. I, too, am old enough to remember a few things, including the days when not all Ivy League schools were single digit admissions, and when there was (and arguably still is) a very real pecking order, with in my day Penn and Cornell taking their turns bringing up the rear. I think the pecking order is still there, but even the bottom have super tough admissions standards. And that’s the point: the branding has worked. Don’t get me wrong. Every single one an outstanding school, but they’re not the same. There are many significant differences between them. A lot of people say, for example, that Dartmouth is much more like a true LAC than the rest (and certainly as compared to research behemoths like Harvard), even though it has a business and medical school.
And so it is with NESCAC: the branding effort isn’t as old as the Ivy League, but in the relatively short period of time it’s been around it has moved the needle for the member schools. Out west, it’s a well known grouping. Who the heck knows about the CMAC or Centennial Conference, and can rattle off the schools that comprise them?
The other thing that helps NESCAC is that it has other historical analogs like the Little Three and the Triangular League. Many of the associations in the league are old (by American standards) and historical.
Like I said, it doesn’t have “Coke” like branding the way the Ivy League does, but it is by far the best group branding among small colleges and as time goes on it becomes more and more “catchy” and known by more and more people. I think the “Seven Sisters” also had that kind of powerful cache, but it’s no longer the Seven Sisters.
Quick test: without Google, what is the conference in which Pomona competes?
Haha! NO IDEA of the athletic conference. And I don’t believe I’d heard of the college until 4-5 years ago when a friends’ kid was admitted. (I’m in the South)
Minor correction: There is only one NESCAC school in New York which is Hamilton. Middlebury is in Vermont, Amherst, Williams and Tufts in Mass, Wesleyan, Conn College and Trinity in Connecticut and Bates, Bowdoin and Colby in Maine. And of course, my list is in no particular order.
LOL. I attended a NESCAC college from 1987-1991 and never heard of the acronym until I began reading College Confidential starting in 2014! (Of course, I also never attended a sporting event while in college.)
I’m astonished by the number of parents of athletes who contribute to College Confidential. And, most of their kids seem to be attending NESCAC schools!
Just want to add my two cents in case anyone comes to this thread in the future. My daughter is at Davidson (and is SO SO HAPPY) and it’s definitely very liberal overall. She is an activist type and hasn’t really met anyone conservative at ALL. On the class IG page, almost every single freshman had their pronouns on their profiles. In fact, some of the only negative reviews of Davidson on Niche are because they’ve become so liberal. The town of Davidson is also generally liberal, which for NC is refreshing (well for me at least, not trying to be political here!).
Not disputing that Vassar may be more liberal, but Davidson is definitely liberal. Washington & Lee seems to be the opposite (my very conservative nephew went there and definitely found the vast majority to be his people).
All that said, I am a fan of general diversity of thought and my daughter has told me that she looks forward to some good debates in class (she will be a political science major)!
S22 is also considering these 2 schools. He’s an artsy quirky kid so would fit in well at Vassar. However, Davidson is closer to home, has better weather, and offered a superior financial aid package with no loans. On the other hand, it seems the sports and Greek life are both huge at Davidson, unlike Vassar. I’m wondering if non-athletes, non-Greeks would be able to find their niche at Davidson or would they be left out?
