<p>Where does Whitman College stand amongst top LACs?</p>
<p>Solid, but not top.</p>
<p>If you’re serious about enrolling at a liberal arts college, you can forget prestige.</p>
<p>I know it shouldn’t be a deciding factor but when it all comes down to it, I am a competitive guy and want to know I am getting the best education I can…</p>
<p>Getting the 'best" education and prestige don’t always go hand in hand.</p>
<p>Outside of the Pacific Northwest, very few people have heard of Whitman. You should not, though, select a school based on prestige.</p>
<p>i’ve heard of it twice now, and know nothing about it, and I have 1600 posts on a college admissions web site, so take that for what you will(depending on whether you want people to recognize your alma mater)</p>
<p>Whitman is a great school, not prestigious but you will get a great education there.</p>
<p>Not AWS-level top but definitely a very good school where you can get a strong education and meet interesting, intelligent people.</p>
<p>Forget about prestige if you decide to attend a LAC (unless its AWS + 1/2 more)</p>
<p>It depends on what’s important to you, getting a good education or impressing your friends. Choose a school for yourself, not for what other people think about it. Whitman is well-regarded among the people who really know about quality education.</p>
<p>It’s small (~1,500 students), it is western, and it lacks the notoriety of its Pacific Northwest neighbor, Reed. But it offers pretty much the same product as any first-rate eastern liberal arts college. It deserves to be considered a peer of schools better known back east such as Bates or the former Seven Sister schools. In addition, it offers some distinctive features that those schools don’t, in particular a significant number of merit scholarships and its outdoor programs. Check out Whitman’s “Semester in the West”.</p>
<p>The school’s administration is well aware that in reputation, it lags many of the schools it considers its peers. They are trying to change this. If you are attracted to Middlebury or Bowdoin, but consider them distant reaches, then Whitman might be an excellent “match” school for you. Ditto the less-isolated Colorado College (if you’re o.k. with its distinctive, one-course-at-a-time “block plan”.)</p>
<p>The prestige thing was a bit of a concern for my daughter, also. But at the end of the day, she chose Whitman over Berkeley, and she has met many other students who ended up choosing Whitman over the more “prestigious” schools they were accepted to–Stanford, Penn, Brown, Pomona, Vassar, etc. Whitman can hold its own in academics and calibre of student body.</p>