<p>Don’t feed the ■■■■■…</p>
<p>My S is a Williams grad, and I <em>do</em> consider Wesleyan on a par with Swat, Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, et al.</p>
<p>Some endowment difficulties do not destroy the pedagogical integrity of the school, and admit rates are roughly equal.</p>
<p>Wesleyan was never my S’s dream, so when accepted to both, he chose Williams. His reasons were very person – he wanted to go a little further from home (Wesleyan is across the Sound from us and very reachable by ferry), he didn’t like the central green being the football field, and he didn’t like the shag carpeted music practice rooms. He’s a violinist and expected to spend a lot of time in them. He thought he’d be allergic since they were a little mildewed.</p>
<p>In retrospect, I think he might have had more in common with the student body at Wes, though he did have friends and a wonderful time at Williams. He was looking for more of a focus on classical than contemporary music, but the young man I know of in Classical music at Wes got into a very prestigious grad program.</p>
<p>Those kids who fall in love with Wes are practically fanatics, and in my experienced they are not less accomplished than the Amherst/Williams cohort.</p>
<p>So, for me, yes, Wes no longer tops the USNWR listings (well, I’m not sure it ever did because those are fairly recent), but is that how we really want to judge a school?</p>
<p>BTW: I spent a weekend in Middleton and was charmed by the town, and I saw other parts of Wesleyan than the main area – a concert was in an old building on a contiguous street and was charming.</p>
<p>@LesleyCordero: Don’t get me wrong. When I submitted my application, I was quite excited about the prospect of attending Wesleyan. I did not mean to denigrate the fine institution with the label of safety school. In fact, this is the first time I have referred to it as such. It seemed an apt response to “sour grapes” comment. The reason that I did not choose to go with Wesleyan was not part of some USNWR issue, but the tales of difficulty with course selection and housing that students told me about when I visited.
I wish you the best and good luck at garnering admission!</p>
<p>Well, don’t get me wrong. Very few of us Weskids (of all ages) are dewey-eyed romantics. We know Wesleyan has shortcomings. What I was trying to say, in post#2, however inartfully, was that we generally don’t care about the things that caused the OP to look down his nose at the campus; we like the rickety old houses that line High Street; we like the contrast between them and the stark limestone monoliths of the Center for the Arts. Mythmom - we even like the fact that the central green is a football field - offseason, a blanket of snow can turn it into as fine a picture postcard as you will find in all New England.</p>
<p>What we DO care deeply about is access and affordability, so that kids from all over the United States and the world can continue to attend without fear that their future’s will be burdened with debt. That is the single most important item on the upcoming capital campaign’s agenda. </p>
<p>It is also the reason that Wesleyan will probably be switching to a need-aware financial aid policy for the next few years. As others have pointed out, we have a small endowment in comparison to our peers (and, they are our peers in every respect.) We don’t use it to tear down a library for the sake of giving it a more “traditional” look (ours is quite traditional looking, thank you) or, to raze two dormitories only to rebuild them again, in order to make them more dazzling (that goes against every Yankee bone in our corporate body, quite frankly.)</p>
<p>However, we do use the endowment as the principal means for making Wesleyan as affordable as we can and for as many students as we can. It is the single fastest growing part of the budget and at last glance was estimated at more than $40,000,000 a year. The endowment needs a time-out.</p>
<p>Ironically, this is one reason I question the authenticity of the identity behind Oldscarecrow at post#66. If Old scarecrow were truly a professor of history at Wesleyan in the 1980s, he would no doubt be aware that that was the last time that Wesleyan had a need-aware financial aid policy. Yes, even though it’s endowment was bigger at the time than Amherst and Williams’.</p>
<p>Hopefully, it will have the same outcome this time around and be reversed after a successful campaign for funds.</p>
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<p>johnwesley: I love colleges. And I love Wesleyan. I am a college professor, and visiting colleges is a combination of viewing the architecture as if it was a cathedral and something much more mundane, seeing how the sausages are made in another factory.</p>
<p>Because of its vibrancy, I am impressed by Wesleyan, and I enjoy extolling its virtues in my posts.</p>
<p>However, your backhanded jabs at other institutions are counterproductive. Are you really so insecure that you need to bash Williams for replacing its library? I can’t be sure, but I think your other snide remark is about Amherst (which is definitely inferior – haha, just kidding.) </p>
<p>Costs analyses showed that revamping the existing Sawyer Library to bring its usefulness into the digital age would cost more than replacing it. And the new library is not being built to “look old.” The facade of the building is an existing building (how do your Yankee bones feel about that?), and the new portions are glass and very utilitarian. Money is not being spent on glitz. I don’t think you are an informed judge of whether or not Williams needs a new library. It was not that long ago that Wes build a new student center.</p>
<p>I am pleased that Wes students love their school the way it is. Many visitors to Williams don’t like that Route 2 runs through it and feel it damages the esthetics. My S liked it because it made the school feel less like the liberal arts bubble.</p>
<p>I am sorry I hurt your feelings with the comment about the football field. I suppose I should have refrained. But are your feelings that fragile? If so, Wes hasn’t done you any favors, nor are you then the most effective spokesperson for the your school.</p>
<p>^^I just find it interesting that without even mentioning either institution by name it was so clear which two colleges I was referring to! ;)</p>
<p>Wow, Wesleyan should hire you as a paid spokesperson for the college. You defend it like it is a religion, seeing no fault and all unbelievers as blind.
Whether or not they could afford to pay you is a whole different issue ;)</p>
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<p>Hi, Wes will be need aware in the next few years? When was this decision made? We were there in November and I don’t think they mentioned it. DD14 will be applying there next year.</p>
<p>It is a recent development, but I do not think it has much bearing on their decisions. They were need-aware when I applied, but still accepted me despite my not disclosing ANY financial information.</p>
<p>Wesleyan has been need-blind for the past 20-30 years (though recently not for internationals, waitlistees, or transfers), but it appears they may go a route a la Tufts and, if I recall correctly, Hamilton, in that they will be need-blind for 85-90% of the class and need-aware for the other portion. In other words, they would theoretically admit most of the class, then check how much aid the class has “used” and then admit accordingly to stay below the targeted aid budget. Nothing has been announced, but that seems where things are headed, at least until the next capital campaign can boost endowment funds.</p>
<p>I’ve been reading some of John Wesley’s simply incredible explanations about Wesleyan’s recent financial aid retreat and finally I had to comment. Only someone unbelievably biased, and, frankly, willfully blind to any problem at all at his school, could turn a very troubling financial situation relative to its peers, leading to a policy – eliminating full need blind admissions – that will undoubtedly negatively impact the economic diversity of the school into the following totally contradictory statement:</p>
<p>“What we DO care deeply about is access and affordability, so that kids from all over the United States and the world can continue to attend without fear that their future’s will be burdened with debt. That is the single most important item on the upcoming capital campaign’s agenda.”</p>
<p>If Wesleyan really cared about access and affordability above all else, it would be focusing its resources, first and foremost, on recruiting as many non full-fare tuition payers as possible, not on bringing in less qualified students (at the margins) simply because they are able to pay more money than other admits (which is the very meaning of eliminating need-blind). If they were so worried about debt, they would be among the schools that have gone to debt-free financial aid (like Amherst) or limit debt to a very small amount and a very small subset of students (like Williams, hence its ranking at the top of affordability rankings). Meanwhile, Wesleyan has been investing a lot of money in hiring away football (in Williams’ case) and basketball (from Bates) coaches, and heavily recruiting with massive admissions concessions super-talented athletes in those sports, in an effort to better compete with Williams and Amherst in high-profile sports. I hardly consider that reflective of the “first priority” claimed by JohnWesley above.</p>
<p>The fact is, the building of new buildings at Amherst or Williams in no ways demonstrates that they prioritize making college accessible less than Wesleyan. If they can build those buildings while at the same time instituting best-in-class financial aid practices, they deserve kudos for that, not scorn. In all events, these buildings are largely funded by large individual donors, and the fact is, Williams and Amherst have absolutely enormous per-student endowments relative to Wesleyan. And both have been at the forefront of improving access and affordability as they continue to award increasingly large financial aid packages to an increasing percentage of the class, effectively price discriminating by (like their peers) charging more to the increasingly small percentage of families who can afford their fees while recruiting more and more kids from families who can’t. </p>
<p>Williams is perpetually at the top of Princeton Review’s Best Values colleges thanks to the enormous amount of financial aid it gives to over half the matriculating class. Amherst’s efforts to bring in lower income kids (including community college transfers) have been well-chronicled and received a lot of publicity. Amherst and Williams are both at the very top of all top liberal arts schools in terms of percentage of Pell Grant recipients, both well above WEsleyan in this regard (and this disparity will only be increasing). Williams has also been diversifying its student profile, racially speaking, by leaps and bounds. A school that just a generation ago was only 25 percent domestic minority students most recent entering class will be over 40 percent minorities, and unlike at many of its peers, that minority student population is not overwhelmingly Asian (over ten percent each Black and Latino in the entering class). None of this is accidental. (Meanwhile, Williams’ most high profile athletics programs have gone in the tank as the school has deemphasized athletic recruiting and instead focused on admitting other types of students). </p>
<p>The facts are these: despite the money spent on building projects, which are largely funded by a few uber-rich donors who specifically earmark those funds in any event, and in no material way impacts the endowment, Williams and Amherst have been at the forefront of all liberal arts colleges in terms of diversifying their student bodies with more first generation, and lower-to-middle income students (still a long way to go on that front, but they are moving forward at least, while with its new policy, Wes is moving backwards). Meanwhile, Wesleyan has voted with its feet, and enacted a policy which will without any doubt have the effect of increasing its percentage of richer students on campus relative to the current campus demographics, not to mention relative to Amherst and Williams. </p>
<p>Now, Wesleyan may believe that it has no choice due to its underwhelming endowment (which barring raising 1.5 billion in a future fund drive will perpetually lag seriously behind Williams and Amherst on a per-student basis, so this problem is not going to suddenly go away), but it could have chosen to make other choices … cutting faculty salaries, the number or pay of high administrators, cutting back on a few expensive high profile graduate programs, cutting back on athletics hires (or entire expensive athletics programs), anything else. There are schools out there that have more financial limitations than Wesleyan that are able to make access a higher priority, but Wesleyan wants to be seen as competing with Williams and Amherst (or at least Midd and Bowdoin at this point), so it won’t cut any of these things. Wesleyan made no bold, alternative, visionary sort of moves … it chose otherwise by announcing that, henceforth, if you can pay full-fare, your odds of being admitted to Wesleyan (unlike Amherst and Williams) are better than if you can’t. Who do you think that will inspire to apply to Wesleyan? And who do you think that will dissuade from applying? it doesn’t take a Wesleyan degree (or maybe, it takes someone who is NOT a Wesleyan grad to be fair about this) to figure it out.</p>
<p>Instead, John Wesley offers a tortured rationale that Wesleyan, essentially, has to take a one step backwards in order to take two forwards. That simply makes no sense. If I was a big money donor (if only!) looking to devote my funds to an institution that cared about access, I wouldn’t be inspired to give by this announcement … anything but. Now, if Wesleyan did something bold and progressive and said hey, we are making access a top priority, we will cut to the bone in other areas to make this goal happen and be a model for other liberal arts schools, THAT might peak my interest and my giving trigger-finger. But, call me naive, I fail to see how announcing that Wesleyan will essentially screw over equally qualified poor kids at the margins in favor of rich kids who can afford full fare is going to tickle the fancy of prospective donors who care about access to make giving to Wesleyan a top priority. If Williams announced that it was cutting back on something that I cared deeply about when I felt there were other areas worthy of cutting, I’d be angry, not suddenly magnanimous. And I certainly wouldn’t believe it if they claimed that this area was a top institutional priority, one they were cutting back on in order to (huhhhh?) show just how much they cared. IN sum, people want to give to institutions they care about when those institutions are successful at and emphasize values they care about, not when they make a public announcement that they are going backwards. It’s why schools with crappy football programs are less successful at attracting boosters than USC and Alabama. </p>
<p>Only in John Wesley’s biased view can such a policy ever be considered as putting you on equal footing with your peers in terms of promoting access to the economically disadvantaged, let alone his, frankly, laughable claim that this reflects an institution that cares “deeply” about affordability and access. To make another football analogy, it’s as if Swarthmore, when they had cut their football program a decade or so ago, said, our team is struggling, but cutting that team instead of trying to improve it in fact reflects our “deep commitment” to football. Wesleyan could have chosen a myriad of ways to tighten its financial ship. It chose the one way that will attract a higher percentage of marginally less-qualified wealthy kids to campus. That is the only fair way to interpret what Wesleyan has actually done here.</p>
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<p>Do I detect a theme, here?</p>
<p>Ephman, your screed is nothing if not amusing. You tout the successful effort that Williams has made to expand minority enrollment – which is commendable – and simultaneously castigate Wesleyan’s new admissions policy as leading to “bringing in less qualified students (at the margins) simply because they are able to pay more money than other admits.” But wait. Don’t we all know that the recruitment and acceptance of more minority students has been predicated, at least in part, on discarding traditional notions of what makes a “more” or “less” qualified student? Utilizing standard measures of qualification, such as test scores, grade point averages, participation in and high scores on AP tests, etc., the minority candidates would often compare unfavorably to rich, white students. Yet, we endorse turning a blind eye to those objective criteria, because we want to create institutions with more diversity, and we want to educate future leaders in our minority communities. What we cannot, in intellectual honesty, state, is that factoring “money” into the equation for admissions will result in taking “less qualified students” who are “at the margins.” Indeed, I would think those students are likely to possess more compelling “classic” admissions profiles than the norm – but less attractive “demographics” in terms of ethnicity. Criticism of the new limitations on need-blind admissions is legitimate (though I think the new policy can be defended), but not on the grounds you offer.</p>
<p>Your suggestion that Wesleyan should do things like cut faculty salaries, rather than limit need-blind admissions, is in my view ridiculous. What (should) attract students to a school is outstanding faculty and programs. Cutting faculty salaries or reducing faculty size is a sure way to erode faculty quality, increase class sizes, and diminish the learning experience. Indeed, when I read your missive, it seemed to me that you were more interested in suggesting ways that Wesleyan could commit institutional suicide than you were in proposing good faith solutions to fiscal issues. And frankly, the whole tone of your posting suggests you are someone who is focused on promoting the virtues of your college, and running down the competition. You probably are too blind to see it, but you come across as petty, parochial and mean-spirited. </p>
<p>For someone who wants to pose as a champion of minority recruitment, and anti-elitism, you can’t help yourself when it comes to showing your true colors, which you did when you wrote “but Wesleyan wants to be seen as competing with Williams and Amherst (or at least Midd and Bowdoin at this point)”. Ooh, poor Wesleyan, to be relegated to the second tier of such colleges as Middlebury and Bowdoin, and not the lofty level of Williams and Amherst. It breaks my heart!</p>
<p>Finally (and only because I don’t have time to write more, not because I don’t have other criticisms that could be leveled at your posting), your suggestion (without any documentary support or proof) that a fall-off in the success of certain high profile Williams athletics teams is due to the fact that the school “has deemphasized athletic recruiting and instead focused on admitting other types of students,” is sad. As you see the world, the natural place of Williams is at the pinnacle of athletic accomplishment, and the only explanation for its failure to dominate is a de-emphasis on athletics. It apparently would never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, some of the other NESCAC schools are fielding decent teams without unduly “emphasizing” athletics.</p>
<p>And for the record, I didn’t attend Wesleyan – I’m a Vassar guy!</p>
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<p>What a cheeky comment. Let’s see how many other schools you can underhandedly denigrate.</p>
<p>I would just like to say that in the eyes of applicants such as I when I applied, Wesleyan = Vassar = Bowdoin = Amhert = Pomona = Swarthmore. I applied to all those schools knowing they were all different, but I saw them as equals in selectivity and prestige. Of course I knew there were slight flunctuations in selectivity, especially after decisions came out, but I regard these schools as equals.</p>
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<p>Wesleyan = Vassar = Amherst = Bowdoin = Swarthmore = Williams = Pomona = Claremont McKenna = Haverford = Middlebury = Carleton = Hamilton</p>
<p>But dscmiss, lets just be honest here:</p>
<p>Im pretty sure the sequence went sth like:
Wesleyan < Vassar < Bowdoin < Swarthmore < Carleton < Hamilton < Claremont McKenna < Haverford < Williams < Pomona < Amherst < Middlebury </p>
<p>Right?</p>
<p>I agree that my post probably could have done without the snide comment about Midd / Bowdoin, so for that I apologize. Everything else (the substantive portion of my post, which represents 99 percent of what I wrote) I 100 percent stand by, and note that neither John Wesley nor anyone else has substantively rebutted it (other than Mawmer’s absolutely laughable attempt to do so, which I’ll get to in a moment).</p>
<p>Here is the central point: John Wesley is going around saying that Wesleyan’s highest value is making college affordable / inclusive. If you don’t like football analogies, here is another one: it’s like eliminating a philosophy department and then claiming that your school highly values the discipline of phiosophy. It’s, simply put, a facially ridiculous attempt to defend a policy that has been made due only to financial exigency, and which betrays the core value of making college equally accessible to applicants regardless of ability to pay. Wesleyan may not have had a feasible alternative due to its endowment issues, but that indicates a real problem for Wesleyan, not something to trumpet as an institutional virtue. Having a dramatic edge in endowment matters, and not just for building new buildings. And this proves as much.</p>
<p>Now, on to Mawmer’s simply ridiculous argument that admitting less-qualified full-pay students is the equivalent to looking beyond SAT’s and grades for other categories of admitted students (particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds like urban or rural poor). The first is a move out of desperation, the latter is a move out of desire, and that is a huge, huge difference. Really, I hardly even need to respond, but I will in case it’s not clear how silly this analogy is. Colleges like Wesleyan, Amherst, Williams, etc. that have a tradition (until relatively recently) of being lilly-white, rich, prep school destinations have worked hard to make their student bodies at least somewhat more representative of the general population. Virtually everyone at these schools (and I guarantee anyone who identifies with Wesleyan) views this as a very good thing. Wesleyan’s new policy will be a step backwards, as it will make the school even more skewed than it (and all its peers) already are towards the very small percentage of the American population who can afford to pay. This is in no way, shape, or form a good thing. Saying, hey, it’s OK if you are slightly less qualified, if you are rich enough to pay, is a step backwards. It’s really as simple as that. Meanwhile, saying that we will look beyond SATs and grades and to other factors (other than how much you can help fill a school’s coffers) in order to diversify our school (rather than just accepting more rich kids) is generally considered to be a good thing. That Mawmer can’t see this is a bit mystifying. </p>
<p>Also, Mawmer doesn’t seem to understand what eliminating need blind admissions actually means. It is as simple as this: in certain cases, someone whose overall admissions profile (whether it be grades, SAT’s, talents, or other factors) would not be sufficient to earn admission in place of another applicant, will be admitted, because they can pay and the competing applicant can not. Now, does this mean these kids are unqualfied, or will fail at Wesleyan? Probably not, because all of these schools are inundated with talented applicants that they are forced to reject, so the difference is really at the margins. But it DOES mean that someone who admissions would PREFER over that applicant will be rejected for no reason other than they can’t pay full fare. That is troubling. And that will, at the margins, necessarily hurt the caliber of the incoming class (caliber being a far broader concept than merely SAT’s and grades, which we all agree paint an incomplete picture). More importantly, it will make Wesleyan skew even more towards a school were a disproportionate percentage of admitted students come from wealthy families. Which seems, to be, to be contrary to everything Wesleyan promotes as its core values / image. </p>
<p>The Williams athletic comment by Mawmer is simply misinformed. This is a side tangent to this discussion but I won’t go into detail, but the FACT is (and yes, it is a fact) that over the past decade Williams has severly curtailed athletic recruiting, limiting the number of recruited athletes and eliminating the lower band of recruited athletes, while some (but not all) of its peers have not taken similar steps. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that while Williams is still as strong as ever in the sports that require few recruiting concessions (like tennis and swimming), in sports like basketball, hockey, and lacrosse, Williams has fallen back to the pack at bit. There is nothing wrong with this, necessarily. My point was just to give an example that schools speak with their feet when it comes to institutional priorities. Wesleyan has demonstrated that, contrary to John Wesley’s unsupported claim, reaching out to applicants at the lower half of the economic spectrum is not its foremost institutional priority. Meanwhile, Williams, and to an even greater extent (see, I can praise a rival), Amherst, has been intensely focused on recruiting these kids, as evidenced by its high affordability / financial aid ranking. I think the relative composition of each campus, in terms of being reflective of matriculants from diverse (particularly economic diverse) backgrounds, will prove this going forward, and the difference will become more exacerbated unless Wesleyan very quickly reverses course.</p>
<p>^^I can’t believe you devoted an entire paragraph to defending Williams athletic performance. You guys just can’t help yourselves, can you?</p>
<p>my daughter is thinking about applying to Wesleyan and not Amherst because she stated that even though Amherst is finding ways to try to increase diversity, the student body as a whole is still segregated by interests: musicians stick with musicians, athletes with athletes,-- I do not think that a community suddenly becomes more diverse just by who is selected. The students have to WANT to mingle and learn from each other. That does not take money; that takes GUTs and DESIRE.</p>