The obvious reason is that many such colleges get academically weaker students who are less likely to be able to handle college work.
Academic support services may matter to some extent, but a college with 2.5 HS GPA students is not likely to see graduation rates like those of a college with 4.0 HS GPA students.
Affordability is another big reason that students drop out of college.
However, a given student’s own academic and financial characteristics will be much more influential for that student’s chance of graduation than the college’s overall graduation rate.
I suggest looking into Birmingham-Southern College, a SLAC in Birmingham, AL. I know several kids who have attended/are attending; one parent described it as a “nurturing” place; another was pleased to have gotten a tutor through the school for her son, who has had some medical issues related to athletics.
Another point to keep in mind when looking at these LAC’s is to consider their overall financial stability. A lot of these schools may have been shaky before the pandemic and worse off now. Several schools that have been recommended here are on Scott Galloway’s “Perish” list. Examples are: Lawrence, Ohio Wesleyan, Wooster, Knox, Beloit, Elon, Denison, Clark, Cornell College. Are colleges at risk of closing? - #21 by chmcnm I know that many have challenged Galloway’s methodology but the overall point is that it’s worth considering the school’s financial stability.
The methodology that generated Galloway’s list is pretty slim, in my view. One of the factors was number of google searches for the institution’s name . . . . I recognize that I am prickly about that bc Denison is listed as “at risk,” despite having nearly $1 billion in endowment, increasingly selective admissions (28%), strong, multi-year growth in the number of applications etc.
edited to add – of course, families should research financial stability of schools, maybe roughly those outside the top 50 as a rough measure of stability, to be comfortable things are “on track.”
Denison COA is about $75k/year. Elon is probably close to $60k/year. How many full-pay students do they actually have? How many of their student’s families are willing or able to go $200-300k in debt? Applications might be up but that’s misleading. College enrollment is down and expected to go lower (much lower) around 2026. Then there’s liabilities like pensions and health costs. Those costs have exploded.
And even though Denison has a $1B endowment how willing will they be to tap it for deficits? Endowments seem to be sacred cows.
That said, I think most higher ranked LAC’s should be OK, at least for the short to medium term. LAC’s outside the top could be in trouble. Consolidations might accelerate.
This is meaningless assuming a true cost to the college is around the same for both places. IME, most parents/students will choose the college that offers more aid and the highest sticker price over the one that offers less aid and a lower sticker price if the two end up within range of each other.
In this case, Denison costing 75K with 35K in merit aid annually would be chosen over Elon costing 60K with 20K in merit aid even though both would be 40K at the final tally.
My theory is people love a deal and automatically assume the one with the higher price is the better one. I’m pretty sure colleges figured this out long ago when all of them started raising prices to match or exceed their peers (or wannabe peers) and more merit aid started to show up. There are very few low cost colleges for a reason. They’re perceived by most to be lower quality. Whether they are or not isn’t an issue. Colleges without good looking buildings/grounds and dorms/gyms are also considered to be “old” and “not worth it” by many, so spending money improving was essentially necessary to be considered.
Any full pay students without merit is merely a bonus.
What about the University of Victorica (UVIC) on Vancouver Island in BC? Excellent smaller university experience in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available for international students. They have a wonderful co-op program. Admissions process likely more straightforward than US institutions. Could consider a reduced academic load to ease into the college experience. Food for thought.
I wasn’t comparing the two schools in any way. I was just pointing out how expensive they are and how very few Americans would be full-pay at either. The delta between COA and what’s actually paid has to be made-up somewhere. How the difference is made-up could impact the school’s financial viability.
Denison was “dinged” on the Galloway model because it gives good merit aid to middle class families, and thereby is seen to rely heavily on merit aid to build its class – a negative on the Galloway model. Denison has indeed used merit aid to attract middle and upper middle class students for whom $20k in merit matters, with the result being that the student body is fairly evenly represented across a range of incomes, creating a diverse, vibrant community. Some LACs which do not give merit but do meet full need can wind up with an economically unbalanced class – either very wealthy, for whom full pay is not an issue, or low income, who are getting generous need based aid, without many middle class/upper middle class students. I was involved in various committees while my student was at Denison and had an-up close view of strategic planning and am more than confident that Denison has planned intentionally for the declining student population.
As an aside, I don’t think any family should be willing to go $200-300k in debt for one student’s undergraduate education, so I would hope that very few families are willing to do that, at any school.
My difficulty with the Galloway study was that it purported to be data-driven but the formula had some very silly factors in it. And Galloway is not a disinterested professor publishing his results – he runs a consulting business so his study functioned to increase his own “brand” recognition and get people talking about him.
I don’t think Elon is known for being generous with aid. If I am reading the CDS correctly it looks like roughly 1/3 of students get significant need-based aid (avg 20k) and the non-need based aid average is about $7k. So that sounds like roughly 2/3rd of students are around 85%-90% of full pay. Y’all feel free to check it yourselves. I may not be reading it right and am certainly no expert on those things. Per their website the Total Cost of Attendance is $52,147 before any aid.
ETA: also enrollment at Elon has pretty much been steadily increasing over the past 2 decades.
I agree about Vassar. The money may work because they give great financial aid and he’d have an admissions advantage being male. However, the workload is intense. My D recently graduated from Vassar and had multiple semesters where she had 25 books to read across four courses. Granted she was an English major, but a lot of her heavy reading classes were in other departments.
I’m talking in general, not specifically Elon. They’ve done well. Other schools not so much. Enrollment in the US has declined over the past 10 years and will continue in the foreseeable future. 2026 will be interesting. There will be winners and losers. Looking at a school’s finances and enrollment history is something to consider going forward. That’s all I’m saying.
When you say this it sounds like you are talking specifically about Denison and Elon.
I think Scott Galloway is wrong on Elon. That’s all I was pointing out. Elon has a lot of love here on CC. It’s not my favorite (I live about 30 minutes from it) so I’m not sure why it is doing so well and gets so much love on CC, but the fact is that it IS doing well and I have no idea why that guy put it on his “perish” list.
Galloway’s model is IMO pretty ridiculous, but due diligence of some sort with regard to finances is necessary.
For example, Earlham was mentioned upthread, and I’m a fan of the college’s educational philosophy and think that it would fit the OP’s request wonderfully—and as a bonus, if their policies are the same as when my oldest applied, they only require a 2.0 to keep their merit scholarships!—but they’ve been running small but meaningful structural deficits for years. Yeah, they have a decent-sized endowment and as a result are nearly certain to remain a going concern past the next five years, but it also means they’re going to be in a constant state of budgetary tightening, which isn’t really all that comfortable a place to be in.
But that kind of dive into assessing financial stability doesn’t lend itself to a cleanly quantitative model. Unfortunately, qualitative analysis of finances takes time, and so (aside from something simple you can run as a filter at the outset like “no private colleges with an endowment under $X million”) seriously looking at finances probably needs to be deferred til you’re at the “long shortlist” level.
My S21 applied to mostly CTCL schools (plus Dickinson and Wheaton). The accuracy of the NPCs varied (details below).
Also, I believe S21’s merit awards (tuition discounting at these “buyer” schools) were based on factors outside of grades and scores - I think the fact that he was a male applying from an area of the country that many of the schools on his list don’t get a lot of students from factored into things. He also demonstrated a lot of interest…doesn’t matter at some schools, of course, but I think it was helpful in his case for this category of school.
The last time I ran the NPCs was in September, shortly before filling out actual FAFSA and CSS.
Beloit came in ~$4K below NPC
Clark ~$5K above NPC
Denison ~$5K above NPC (most expensive school for S21)
Dickinson ~$6K below NPC
Hendrix ~$5K below NPC (least expensive school for S21)
Kalamazoo ~$5K below NPC
Knox ~$5k below NPC
Wheaton ~$4K below NPC
Willamette ~$6K below NPC
Wooster ~$2K below NPC
Hendrix, the least expensive school for S21, came in just below $22K for 2021-22 (one child in college - he’s our oldest). Denison, the most expensive, came in just above $42K. There were definite surprises on the list - I’d thought Denison and Dickinson would be relatively close (as their NPCs were about $2K apart) but they ended up being ~$10K apart.
In case the schools on my S21’s list are of interest, the 3 least expensive for us were Hendrix, Kalamazoo, and Beloit. Kalamazoo has a very open curriculum which might be appealing so that your S21 doesn’t have to do as much of a liberal arts core. Kalamazoo does have a foreign language requirement but not much in the way of distribution/core requirements beyond that. I don’t think I’ve seen that school mentioned in this thread (though I might have missed it) but as it came in as our 2nd lowest cost option, it might be worth a look. We definitely got the impression (from things like the webinar for parents of admitted students) that it has a highly supportive culture.
Seconding Kalamazoo - decently challenging but very supportive; caveat, it’s on a 10-week term system, so it goes fast, and your first term you basically take one reading/writing course to bring up to speed ar the college level +2 classes that youre recommended shpuldbplay to your strengths because it goes very fast. He’d likely get a lot of merit at Susquehanna and Roanoke, probably Beloit. Hendrix is very suppoetive/challenging too, but you’d likely need to apply EA to get the best merit.
Yeah, I recall that, a lot of judgement and not too supportive especially because she challenged adults on the thread on whether you as a professor would get a tuition discount if either kid went to UCD.
Adults will rarely challenge another adult the way they challenge kids on c/c. I’ve pointed that out before, anyway good to see this thread is more civil.
As for your son, I really would eliminate any college that has an intensive writing requirement early on in the curriculum, which happens at many LACs. Your son really would be better off at a place like Davis, where there’s flexibility in when you can take GE or university requirements, possibly get credit for them at a community college or test score. Your son could take the quantitative class, science class, music and maybe a fourth his first quarter at a UC (assuming it’s not UCB where they’re on semester). Then you could take the reading/writing requirement second quarter after he’s adjusted a little or the summer at a community college, even wait till sophomore year first quarter and take other requirements - maybe econ for social science.