What Is Bates' Reputation?

<p>I want a non-biased opinion with set examples please. What will a Bates degree do for me? And where will it do it? I am looking at top law schools and maybe working right out of college. Nobody in my area (New York), has really heard of Bates and I am worried about getting a job in NY or Boston after coming out. Is it really a top school or does the SAT-Optional effect bring in less intellectual students? Please help me.</p>

<p>Oh come on…Bates actively prepared me for my professional goal-med school-had a rigorous enough academic program that arriving was not culture shock-and prepared me well enough so I was accepted to 5 out of 7…I came from a public school background where no one went to top schools, and my parents had no clue about colleges or professional careers…Bates was 32nd(ish) of US news and World report top LACs last year, and is on the top 10 of colleges ranked for “do-gooders”. While not exactly unbiased, I am proud to be a Batesie.</p>

<p>My husband went to MIT, where they literally “ate him alive”. No one cared what or how he did.While he also reached his professional goals, he had a lot more stress in college, and really had to teach himself, or flunk out.</p>

<p>We both encouraged our children to skip the big name schools for the smaller more personal LAC for undergrad work.</p>

<p>i fully agree with her. And im from Nepal, i love the ‘feel good’ factor abt bates…though i have never visited bates, i have applied there for ED program. I know a few seniors who went to MIT,a ‘top paying’ college, he tells me that if u want to grow to the fullest adn i mean both intectually and academically, try out LACs…few were even particular about bates…but then again it depends on personal perspective more than anything…as for me, fingers crossed for mid dec results!</p>

<p>Don’t know who you’re talking to, OP, but my experience has been that Bates is well known and highly regarded in Boston and NYC.</p>

<p>I’ll second that. My brother owns an executive recruitment firm in New York City and is very excited that his nephew has applied to Bates. He feels it has an excellent reputation - and it does.</p>

<p>Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, and Middlebury are all more or less in the same category of schools</p>

<p>Bates has a great reputation in both the professional and academic worlds. Post-graduation, finding a job or getting accepted into graduate school should be well within your reach. Of my friends who graduated last year, one is teaching English in Japan through the JET program (and just took the GREs), one is teaching in Spain and applying to grad school for linguistics, one is working at Brigham Young Women’s hospital in Boston doing psychology research, and one is working as a paralegal while debating between going into Public Relations or applying to grad school for Spanish Literature. This is just a sampling of what a few recent alums are doing while trying to navigate the “real world.”</p>

<p>I’m from New England, and here, Bates is money in the bank (metaphorically). I’m a Mule, so naturally I hate Bates with every fiber of my being (ok, not really). But, I respect it for the institution of solid higher education that it is-- and I’m not alone. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, RI, Connecticut, etc. (the northeast, really) who aren’t impressed by the name Bates. As you travel further West, though, knowledge and admiration of Bates begin to lose their ubiquity… with the exception of Universities, academicians, and ski bums/crunchy granola middle-and-upper-class folk. If you’re concerned about law school adcoms thinking “***? Where’s Bates?”, well that’s really a non-issue. Every Law adcom will have heard of (and will certainly respect) the NESCACs.</p>

<p>Many of my best friends are Bobats (keep that on the D/L), and they seem to have had nothing but success post-graduation-- one of them is here with me at Yale working on her grad studies (And when I was applying, the program director at Yale [not Law] actually said these words to me: “Colby? Oh that’s a GREAT school.” I can say without doubt that his response would have been the same for Bates… and, if I can make this paragraph any less grammatically correct, I have met many folk at Yale Law who rave about Colby, which, again, I would definitely say goes for Bates as well).</p>

<p>Sorry for the Colby-based Bates-is-great logic, but it’s definitely true.</p>

<p>Cheers, and good luck with the admissions process!</p>

<p>Current US News (Liberal Arts Colleges) ranking for Bates is 21</p>

<p>My S is a recent Bates grad and living in NYC with three of his Bates roomates. All of them had good jobs in Manhattan within a month or so of graduation, two of them at the largest, best-known banks (working in investment management) and another with a hedge fund. His other Bates roomates have similarly great first jobs in Boston and Washington.
While there’s not much on-campus recruiting at Bates due to size and location, the networks seem to work very well for graduates. I would not worry too much about Bates’ reputation, at least in the Northeast.</p>

<p>NESCAC schools have amazing reputations. My advice is to throw darts and if you can’t get in that one, throw another until you hit one you can get in. The whole group is like a great big college club and you will run into successful people that went to one and you will benefit. If you can’t get in any look at the schools just below, St. Lawrence and Dickinson are two that come to mind, Muhlenberg as well.</p>