<p>But there isn’t a single campus culture. There are many subcultures; as long as those subcultures are big enough to provide comfort, then a student will thrive there.
When I was in college, I was part of the international students group. It was large, diverse, and very welcoming. The rest of the college was highly homogeneous.</p>
<p>I think you (in general terms, not just the OP) really have to visit LACs to get a sense of them and even then your impression will depend on your tour guide and your info session speaker (who may not always match but at least will give you one or two glimpses of the real if public face of a school). Online and in real life off campus you can get one person who will tell you one thing about campus culture and another who will have a quite different take on it. I suspect there are a lot of schools where the prevailing culture matches a stereotype but only up to a point and that there are lots of people at the school who don’t match the prevailing image at all and yet are perfectly happy there and indeed have friends from various groups.</p>
<p>As a junior, the OP’s daughter has the luxury of several months this school year to do some informal visiting and confirm on her devotion to both film production and rowing, not to mentioned polishing her academic credentials.</p>
<p>When it comes to small LACs, I’d recommend applying to a lot of schools if you can. Each one accepts so few students that they HAVE to turn away large numbers, many of whom must be highly qualified kids. My son got into Wesleyan but was waitlisted at Vassar and Oberlin. He almost didn’t apply to Wesleyan but we figured what the heck, what’s one more app. He totally loves it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is especially true at schools the size of Middlebury (2,350 undergrads) and Wesleyan (2,700 undergrads)—both quite large for LACs. Once you get to that size there’s not going to be a single campus culture; there will be lots of overlapping groups, and a fair bit of diversity. I know Wes’s student body is somewhat self-selecting based on a stereotype that it’s “alternative,” but not everyone goes there for that reason, as other posters have suggested. Many go because it’s the best school they get into, or the best fit for them academically, or because of some sport or other EC (e.g., theater), or because their individual FA package is a little better (though I hear Wes is not known for being particularly generous with FA). </p>
<p>My own D is attracted to both Midd and Wes, the former because of its overall academics, theater, and strength in languages, and the latter for its overall academic excellence, theater, and “alternative” and “political” reputation. Middlebury, by the way, has also had a reputation for lots of “crunchy” or “alternative” types, along with another large group of preppy-jocks. I have no doubt my D would thrive at either school, though her experience at each would be different from the other. Kids are multifaceted. So are colleges. Don’t sell either short by reducing them to rigid stereotypes.</p>
<p>Well, I personally attended Carleton, found the culture not at all to my liking, and transferred out.</p>
<p>My take is that smaller colleges, because they have small populations, do tend to be more influenced by an overriding culture than larger universities.</p>
<p>Thus with LACs it is more important to take the prevailing culture into account.</p>
<p>Fendrock:</p>
<p>I agree if the LAC is about 1,200. But as bclintonk pointed out, both Midd and Wes are on the larger side of the spectrum. Both my Ss, who are very different in their own ways, march to their own drummer and are not swayed by “prevailing culture.” But each kid is different.</p>
<p>I’m not going to describe them because I shall just be told that I am all wrong. Reading these posts would convince a foreign student that every liberal arts college in the US has a student body exactly like every other. The only difference is in the range of SATs/ACTs scores and gpa’s. If you believe that, fine. If your kid believes that, even better. He is one of those kids who will be happy wherever he goes because the differences really don’t matter to him.</p>
<p>I do not think that anyone has said that all LACs are the same. Some of us, with examples, have addressed the query as to why some students would be interested in both sets of LACS you posted. My S dismissed out of hand 2 LACs that were very similar to one of his top two, and, as I said, agonized over the two until the very last possible day. He was fully cognizant of the differences. Watching PCU did not phase him, but, as I said, he is not easily swayed by what others think. Once he was on campus, he joined a number of groups that pretty much reflected his personality and interests.</p>
<p>No, there are differences, but they are differences of degree, not kind. If you aren’t comfortable with political correctness, you won’t be happy at Wesleyan, but I suspect the majority of actual Wesleyan students think Wesleyan’s uber-PC culture is funny, not actually necessary or correct. Probably two-thirds of Wesleyan students are indistinguishable from Middlebury students, except perhaps for having chosen Wesleyan.</p>
<p>The fairly pronounced difference between the two colleges comes from the third of Wesleyan students who would have refused even to look at Middlebury (for being too conventional), the absence of that group at Middlebury, and the presence there of a much smaller group that could not have tolerated the politics at Wesleyan. But of the 5,000 students at both colleges, I would bet 4,000 would do fine at either. Some of them no doubt would have preferred the other, but didn’t get in, or got better aid, or bowed to parental pressure the other way, or didn’t understand what their preferences really were when they were high school seniors.</p>
<p>And it doesn’t surprise me at all that you know a hard-drinking frat boy at Chicago. There are plenty of them, just fewer than at Duke, and they maybe drink a little less and get a little more excited about their actual classes.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>I didn’t expect you to be surprised by the fact that I know someone who belonged to a frat at UChicago and drank way too much. That was the POINT!!!I am equally unsurprised by your descriptions of the 10 kids you know at Wes, who allegedly prove the stereotype I allegedly have of Wes incorrect. I simply said that you can find kids like this at almost every college, but it still doesn’t mean that all colleges are the same. </p>
<p>I haven’t posted my view of the campus cultures of either Wes or Middlebury. You’ve invented my views out of whole cloth. You’re way off base. There is no point in arguing with someone who attacks your position before you’ve stated your position.</p>
<p>My S visited both Wesleyan and Middlebury. He preferred Middlebury’s campus and natural surroundings but Wesleyan’s social atmosphere. He was not interested in the Midwest either (other than Minnesota), although I tried to interest him in Grinnell. Another school he liked was Macalester, which seems to have a social/political atmosphere like Wesleyan’s but in a more attractive location (if you can tolerate the frigid winters).</p>
<p>The Midwestern colleges offer some great choices at slightly lower costs than the NESCAC schools. But they are all selling pretty much the same product in slightly different packages.</p>
<p>Not sure what to make of the preferring Wes’s social life over Middlebury when they are strikingly similar in a lot of ways. I think you will find a range at all of these schools and I say never judge a whole life by a visit on a day. </p>
<p>As example: My son went to visit Amherst last year. The first night he stayed with a pretty normal guy and they went out and had a good time, not wild by any stretch, but it was fun and he met a lot of people he felt he could see as friends. The next night he stayed with another guy who on a Saturday night played video games until he skyped with his girlfriend all night. He said that was the extent of the social life. Now had he only stayed with the second kid, he would have been tempted to believe that. Just pointing out the obvious.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>They said Wes’s social atmosphere, not life. I imagine they are talking about the fact that Wes is, on a whole, probably a little more liberal/activisty, more quirky/artsy, less preppy and outdoorsy, not the extent of social opportunities or whatever. Again, as people have been saying, these are differences of degrees, but they are differences. While, as we’ve been discussing, many people would be happy at a range of schools, it’s not odd to prefer the atmosphere of one to another.</p>
<p>My S’s two favorites were Williams and Vassar. He knew exactly what he was doing.</p>
<p>Williams is much artier than it seems. Vassar more academic.</p>
<p>There may be a predominant culture but it may change frequently based on who’s admitted and how the class shapes itself.</p>
<p>At the college I teach at two sections of the same class can be radically different. One would swear she was at two different colleges.</p>
<p>To my mind LAC’s are like Baskin/Robins – 27 flavors, or whatever.</p>
<p>in my family of four we all have our own idiosyncratic list of favorites and those we all like. It’s not a predictable list.</p>
<p>Same with LAC’s. S loved Williams and Vassar. Was just okay with Wes and Amherst. Why? Who knows. Just a matter of taste.</p>
<p>jonri, since both Wesleyan and Middlebury have strong, widely known, and specific images, I assumed you shared what I consider conventional wisdom. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry, but since you were so defensive and coy about insisting that their differences were terribly important without actually saying what you thought those differences were, and since you opened this conversation by saying that where you live no one applies to both, it was hard not to think that you were referring to conventional wisdom rather than your own idiosyncratic analysis.</p>
<p>In any event, you have been attacking a straw man. I doubt anyone believes that Wesleyan and Middlebury are the same. Given that they are both New England LACs in roughly the same market tier, they are about as different as two such colleges get. My point, and others’, is that even that degree of difference is often way overvalued, and that most of the students who consider either of them will also consider, at least, the other, because the similarities are more important to them.</p>
<p>Part of the reason that Wes is “activisty” and Midd (and many other LACs) less so has to do with location. When S1 visited on admitted students day, there were busloads of Wes students getting ready to go to NYC to demonstrate against WTO.</p>
<p>Going back to the poster’s original question, which really wasn’t about defining the differences - nuanced or obvious - between the list of schools, I will suggest that there is probably a better chance of being rejected by all than getting in at all. What is mostly likely going to happen is your daughter will get into some and not at others depending on her overall application - stats, letters of rec, etc. I think these schools have a better insight into applications than anyone here does and in crafting a class they all looking at all of these things. The thing about small LAC - whether they are all in the NE or spread across the states - is that they do look at the whole. And I honestly believe they do look at the whole. While Midd no longer has a supplemental essay in addition to the common application, (and I have no idea about the others), depending on what the question is, everyone will be stronger than others. And too, SOME kids would fit at any of these schools. At the end of the day (meaning once all the acceptances came in), my son thought he really could be happy at any of the schools where he was admitted. Mostly I think this was due to good planning and guidance by his GC who really knew him.</p>
<p>Well… One of my kids was rejected by both liberal arts schools to which she applied (Wes and Skidmore-- which actually didn’t reject her, just lost her application). The other one had marvelous results across the board. (Lacs accepted: Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Hamilton, Skidmore, Vassar, Wesleyan. Deferred then rejected: Amherst Rejected: Tufts) So I would cast a wide net but we found the results somewhat consistent. </p>
<p>In hindsight, the results make sense. The daughter with the rejections had interests that didn’t match the lacs well. For example, she had spent years studying an unusual language that wasn’t even offered at either of those lacs. </p>
<p>By the way, some of those schools (Bates, Hamilton, Skidmore) are not need-blind and I was nervous that $ would play a factor but, in fact, Hamilton’s package was very competitive and Skidmore’s was more generous than Bowdoin’s. (I do think Skidmore really wanted her, though-- they offered to fly her out after she was accepted.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, that (approximately). I recognize there must be a lot of overlap in the “tribes” at both schools. Nevertheless, my kid (and I) sensed differences in the atmospheres at the two. And I agree, some of this may be attributable to the locations.</p>
<p>The dining hall at Middlebury seemed to self-organize into little sports-related interest groups (cliques?). If everyone appeared to play a sport at Middlebury, it seemed as if playing an instrument (or some other strong artistic bent) was the more common interest at Wesleyan. No? Maybe these are stereotypes and we went into each campus with our antennae tuned to detect them. Perhaps there are musicians everywhere at Midd but they tend to hunker down in warm recital rooms.</p>
<p>I don’t want to keep a moot debate going, though all sorts of responses occur to me from the above post. However, in the interest of all the parents of good will on this thread (which to my mind is everyone) perhaps we can agree on this.</p>
<p>There are differences in campus culture between Middlebury and Wesleyan that will be significant to some students and not to others.</p>
<p>There are students who straddle the divide between Middlebury and Wesleyan who will have no decided preference between them.</p>
<p>There will be students who could fit in at either but have a decided preference for one over the other.</p>
<p>And there will be students who can only see themselves at one and definitely not the other.</p>
<p>And then there will be students who can ONLY see themselves at one of these schools. I have heard both Wes and Midd stimulate this kind of enthusiasm.</p>
<p>I know each of my kids had a dream school that blew everything else out of the water for them based on strictly personal factors. I was the lucky mamma who got to watch happy chicklets. I am sure they could have been happy other places, but they were not so sure.</p>