<p>Hate to open up a can of worms here, but what is the feeling of the board about Wellesley (or other LAC's) vs. the Ivy League?</p>
<p>I think my dd will be applying to Brown and Columbia as well as Barnard and Wellesley. </p>
<p>Did any of you currents apply to an Ivy? If not, why? Inquiring mind(s) wants to know. :D</p>
<p>I applied to Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown and was rejected by the first two and waitlisted by the second two. I think that I probably did not have good enough extracurriculars to make me truly competitive at those schools; my numerical stats where all well within range. Looking back, I also think I was really not that good a fit for Princeton (my parents both went there) and that may have come out on my application. </p>
<p>But I generally liked all the schools I applied to and certainly do not/did not view Wellesley as second-rate.</p>
<p>I was rejected from Yale and Harvard when I applied for admission to the class of 2008. I think I could have had a better writing sat II (mine was abysmal) and written a better essay. I also should taken an advanced math course at a college, but I never looked into it, even though I was qualified.</p>
<p>I fell into the Astronomy Department at Wellesley, a happy accident that would have never happened at ANY of the other schools I applied to. So I had I not gone to Wellesley, I truly have no idea what I would be doing right now, or how my college years would have gone.</p>
<p>Post-admission, any college is just "your school". I go to MIT now, and I step back and realize how lucky everyone was to get in, especially the undergrads, but to me, they are all just people.</p>
<p>The only ivy I bothered applying to was Brown, and was rejected from that (SAT scores not high enough). My roomie, however, was waitlisted for Yale and then accepted but she chose to go to Wellesley. I have another friend who chose Wellesley over Brown. I think there's a mixture of people who got rejected from the ivies so they chose Wellesley, but then there are also the people who chose Wellesley over the ivies because of the quality of the education (meaning smaller classes, more attention, etc).</p>
<p>I am applying to Y, C, Corn, AND Wellesley, Barnard. I think more than anything what the schools have to offer is somewhat similar, in the sense of they are all well respected but I think it helps if you have a special focus. For me, at least, I know that leadership is one of the biggest aspects of my application, and as a young woman it seems to me that if I am accepted <em>fingers crossed</em> to say Barnard AND Columbia I'll have a hard time making the decissions because they both instill that type of mentality.</p>
<p>I think more often than not students that are applying to Wellesley are applying to more than one Ivy (my classmates and I are) but don't consider Wellesley a safety, just another school that we could succeed at.</p>
<p>My D is applying to Wellesley and several other excellent LACs (Middlebury, Bowdoin, other Seven Sisters, etc.) but wouldn't touch Ivies with a ten-foot pole. She feels that LACs will provide the kind of personal community that Ivies by their large size simply cannot offer. She figures that if she wants to go to graduate school, that's when the Ivies will be appropriate.</p>
<p>I went to a LAC in Ohio; I loved the experience. My H went to Harvard and found it very unsatisfactory as a "college" experience; he wishes he'd attended a LAC. That's not to say that Ivies can't provide a "college" experience for some people; it's just different strokes for different folks! It's good to know what kind of experience you're looking for and what kind of environment you will thrive in.</p>
<p>"I think more often than not students that are applying to Wellesley are applying to more than one Ivy (my classmates and I are) but don't consider Wellesley a safety, just another school that we could succeed at."</p>
<p>THIS, in a nutshell. =P</p>
<p>Lots of Wellesley students apply to the Ivies. From a talk that the dean of admission gave recently, here are Wellesley's "overlap" schools. Students admitted to Wellesley also apply to these schools. Another important point -- for the past couple of years, more girls have applied to Wellesley than have applied to Williams, Amherst, or Swarthmore. Wellesley's apps have been above 4000 for several years.</p>
<p>Overlaps:
1. Yale
2. Harvard
3. Brown
4. Princeton
5. Columbia
6. Dartmouth
8. Stanford
9. Cornell
10.Tufts
11. Amherst
12. Swarthmore
13. Williams
14. Northwestern
15. Smith</p>
<p>There was someone on the Brown board that said she couldn't think of any Wellesley girl who even had the grades for an Ivy except for Cornell, and I totally disagree (and it makes me a little mad, too). </p>
<p>I applied to Brown ED, but Wellesley is definitely one of my top choices. I agree wholeheartedly with what lilmisstaggart said about Wellesley being another school we could succeed at. Two of my teachers went there and they are really smart and strong, independent-minded women. </p>
<p>That being said, I also plan on applying to other LACs (Amherst, Barnard, maybe Bowdoin, maybe Williams) as well as other Ivies and Tufts, if I don't get in to Brown. </p>
<p>I don't want to sound stuck-up or anything, but top students will apply to top schools. Wellesley is definitely a great top school, even if it isn't an Ivy (and remember, "Ivy" is just a title).</p>
<p>^^Oh please. I was waitlisted by Brown and I don't think it was because being ranked in the top 2% of one's class no longer counts as good enough to gain admittance to Brown (I also think being waitlisted offers some sort of evidence that your application wasn't a total dud, but whatever). I think people who make the cut at Ivies should feel good about themselves, but I also think that they, perhaps more than anyone, should recognize that the students they got the nod over were not slouches--certainly the kids getting waitlisted and many, many of the kids getting rejected at these schools that accept in the teens and single digits of their applications are highly intelligent and often highly accomplished individuals. That should be obvious to anyone who spends an admissions cycle at CC, and clearly, those kids go to school somewhere. At any rate, as I said in my first post, I am fairly sure that it was my extracurriculars, and not my academics, that were unable to compare to the outstandingly high standard that a school that only accepts 8% of its applicants maintains, and I accepted that and happily moved on.</p>
<p>Is your "oh please" in response to my post or the quote in it?</p>
<p>I'm pretty sure it's the quote.</p>
<p>It's the quote, sorry! I'm so bad about accidentally offending people in print...</p>
<p>Wellesley's acceptance rate is much higher than the ivy's and even Barnard,Middlebury.Many that met at accepted students day stated they were rejected from Barnard.</p>
<p>I would hesitate to equate the acceptance rate for an institution with how "good" it is - certainly, it's one criteria one can use to talk about how selective a school is, but I don't think it's necessarily the best barometer of which school is "better."</p>
<p>Taking your example of Middlebury, if you look at their common data set found here: <a href="http://www.middlebury.edu/NR/rdonlyres/38CD6DF6-9AE0-4D6E-829B-BB56151DA0F0/0/CDS2008_2009.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.middlebury.edu/NR/rdonlyres/38CD6DF6-9AE0-4D6E-829B-BB56151DA0F0/0/CDS2008_2009.pdf</a> you'll note that about 4500 women applied to Middlebury, 660 were accepted, and 290 eventually chose to come. The numbers are comparable for male applicants, though there were about 1000 fewer applications. In other words, Middlebury's incoming freshman class was about 570, with an almost even split of 50/50 female to male ratio.</p>
<p>Then look at Wellesley. If you look at their latest available common data set <a href="http://www.wellesley.edu/InstResearch/Common%20Data%20Set%202007.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.wellesley.edu/InstResearch/Common%20Data%20Set%202007.pdf</a> , you'll see that they had a similar size incoming class of 590, but they're all women. In other words, Wellesley and other women's colleges are drawing on just half of the population for applications. All spots in the class can only be filled by women. If Wellesley were to go co-ed (god forbid!!!), would application numbers go up? I bet my bottom dollar it would. Would the acceptance rate go down? I'm sure it would, as I don't think Wellesley has any plans to do a major expansion of facilities to accommodate huge numbers of students.</p>
<p>In other words, acceptance rates, I believe, are an imperfect method to rely upon to say which school is "better" than another. Certainly, comparing the acceptance rates of single-sex schools vs. co-ed schools is like comparing the proverbial apples vs. oranges. </p>
<p>As for Barnard, their most recent common data set: <a href="http://www.barnard.edu/opir/CDS2007_2008.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.barnard.edu/opir/CDS2007_2008.pdf</a> shows they received about 500 more applications than Wellesley, accepted about 100 few applicants, and ended up with a slightly smaller class. Personally, I believe that the academics at the Sister schools are very comparable to one another and it's not about which Sister school is "better" than the other, but which one is a better fit for you. </p>
<p>As a side note, check out the common data sets for the schools that you're interested in. It's an awesome time killer and you can see loads of detailed info such as average per-borrower cumulative undergraduate indebtedness (Barnard: $17,630, Middlebury: $19,981, Wellesley: $10,376), freshmen retention rate (Barnard: 95%, Middlebury: 95%, Wellesley: 96%), six year graduation rate for 2001 cohort (Barnard: 89%, Middlebury: 91%, Wellesley: 92%), and so on and so forth. If you like numbers, this is your goldmine.</p>
<p>Go the school's website, and do a search for "common data set." That usually does the trick. If not, check out a school's institutional research department.</p>
<p>OK, but I think the numbers can be deceiving. Sure, some places have more selective acceptance rates, but by how much? Up to a point, certainly, acceptance rates belie the kind of school you're talking about (10% is clearly a more challenging place than 90%), but once you get down to the top few LACs and universities, things start getting muddier, in my opinion. At that point it's not really useful anymore to point to acceptance rates as indicative of a "better" school. Just my opinion :)</p>
<p>(Oh, oops. Posted this just before jacinth-ambrose. Listen to her, she's saying the same things I am, just with information to back her up).</p>
<p>For what it's worth, my d. turned Williams for Smith, because of higher educational quality for what she wanted to study in the latter. (Actually, it wasn't really close.)</p>
<p>Oh no problem LaMariposa. I think your point is perfectly valid, that when it comes down to the top schools (however we're defining them), then the acceptance rate is more a reflection of population and application trends than anything else. Schools are getting more and more applications because of various reasons - more high school graduates than before, easier to apply to schools online now than having to rely on snail mail in the past, more schools participating in the Common Application, etc. - but they're not accepting more students (mostly due to size and facilities constraints), and so the acceptance rate goes down.</p>
<p>Yeah, I think someone would have a hard time finding any school whose acceptance rate has been going up over the past decade.</p>