<p>Congratulations to your son for his acceptances, and hope that he finds Whitman a great place. </p>
<p>I am going to assume that MONEY is not an issue in any of these choices, since you have not shared that information. With the information you shared it seems your son might find a better FIT & BALANCE from the schools you listed in the following order:
Macalester
Reed
Whitman
Occidental </p>
<p>Best of luck to you and your Son.</p>
<p>ccc02018, I haven’t heard all the details yet, but hope you’ll feel better soon.</p>
<p>Can you explain the process to us? I think many readers would find that very interesting and useful, especially students. Thanks :)</p>
<p>Hooray! rejnel, thanks for the update. I hope your S has as wonderful a 4 years at Whitman as mine has, it’s a very special place.</p>
<p>Congrats to that boy of yours. I didn’t have much to add to the conversation at the time but have to admit I was silently pulling for Whitman. One of my D’s super-smart friends is heading there next year and we have always loved Walla Walla.</p>
<p>Congratulations to your son, OP! Whitman is a great college.</p>
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<p>My point is that many (most) of the people making these assertions have never spent extended periods of time on these campuses are are just repeating what they’ve heard from others. Very liberal colleges come up a lot - particularly Swarthmore and Reed - with the assumptions that because they are very liberal, conservative students will be tarred and feathered there. I’ve never spent extended time there, either, so I don’t know for sure. But I am skeptical, just like I am skeptical of the “stereotype” of most colleges. They’re reductionist.</p>
<p>We use reductionism to reduce complexity to a manageable level. One loses accuracy, but compromises are usually necessary to produce a workable model when one has finite resources. I have spent extended periods on College Confidential and I find the range of opinions on most topics here to be very narrow and the range of opinions of those claiming to be students of certain elite LAC’s to be much narrower still. I start with the fundamental belief that outside of Logic and Mathematics, the hard sciences, and direct applications that follow from those disciplines, e.g. engineering, all hypotheses about the world can be nothing more than opinion, which implies that a narrow range of opinion in any forum most likely derives from the pressure of social convention or the desire for social approval, and not from a significant number of different minds arriving at the same conclusions independently.</p>
<p>ME: My husband and I stayed out of the decision almost entirely (which gave us front-row seats to our son’s process–fascinating!).
MYOS1634: Can you explain the process to us? I think many readers would find that very interesting and useful, especially students.</p>
<p>I’m happy to share what I can, but what I really should have said was that he was processing for weeks in all sorts of ways that were obscure to us, even as we stared at him and tried not to say too much or prod too much. This came after 10-12 months of free-wheeling conversations, research both orderly and haphazard, thorough analysis of our finances (about which we were forthcoming with him), and his applying at probably a few too-many schools.</p>
<p>Of 13 schools, he was rejected outright at three with selectivity in the single digits, waitlisted at two just a tiny bit less competitive, and accepted at 8. Eliminating the safeties left our state’s flagship (in an OK state system, not a great one) and the four I posted about. We were never really serious about a state school. All of my education is from the University of California, and I now teach at a small LAC, and for my money there is no comparison for undergraduate education. That said, there was a day about three weeks ago when I came across this bit of advice: “Go to a state school, graduate without debt, and have enough left over for a down payment on a house. Thus you will leave school in the position most people spend ten years striving for after graduation.” Even for a liberal arts true believer like me, this did give me pause. My kid is smart enough, actually, to get a decent education almost anywhere. But getting into and saving for the “good school” had been a focus for all of us for long ago that we just couldn’t really see changing tracks. Perhaps truly a failure of imagination.</p>
<p>Occidental was mostly of interest because of a potential scholarship that they didn’t end up offering. Once that was off the table, it was easy for him to eliminate Oxy for location reasons. In the thread above, you will see someone arguing that it’s silly to rule out southern California, but most people acknowledge that location is pretty important. Most people also acknowledge that gut feel is valid, and ultimately, that’s what it came down to with the rest of his choices.</p>
<p>He visited Reed College, found it interesting, but had kind of a strong negative response to the students he met. My husband went to the family part of the visit with him but stayed out of the way otherwise. In the background, he also called an old friend who’d gone to Reed to get his take. And from both the exposure he got on the visit and the chat with his friend, he got a specific sense that it wouldn’t fit our kid. He shared this with me, not with our son. So it was very interesting when our son told us, a couple days after the visit, that Reed wasn’t a fit for him and articulated almost the exact things that had been flags for my husband. (I really don’t want to put down a student body in this forum, so don’t want to go into it–but if you are considering Reed and want to PM, I’ll talk more for what it’s worth.) </p>
<p>This left Macalester and Whitman, both of which had offered attractive aid packages, and both of which have excellent reps as rigorous, interesting schools full of down-to-earth students. Mac has the attraction of the Twin Cities, is a little bigger, maybe a little more exciting. Whitman has the attraction of the Pacific Northwest (which we are all gaga over), and we consistently found that Whitman alumni love their school deeply–it just seems like a very special place. </p>
<p>We had had a slightly bizarre visit to Whitman last fall–nothing terrible (I wrote more about it above) but enough weird little unfortunate things that I was sure it has left a bad taste for him. Mid-April, he flew by himself to visit Mac. He stayed with some wonderful friends of ours, sat in on a bunch of interesting classes, didn’t take a tour (though I’d told him 40 times he MUST) but did eat the food, and generally seemed to have a great time.</p>
<p>Then he went into a cocoon for two weeks. We really didn’t know what was going on. As parents, we would consider forcing a child to open up to us if we were concerned about health or drugs or something, but this is a healthy, high-functioning, generally happy kid who just needed to go away and process. Mail kept coming from the schools; sometimes I would mention it, sometimes I wouldn’t. As May 1 got closer, sometimes I’d see The Hidden Ivies or Colleges That Change Lives propped open, or our file from one of the schools pulled out. Once or twice I asked if he was talking to anyone else–friends, teachers–about schools, and he said no, other than that “people say they’re both good colleges.”</p>
<p>April 30 came, and we needed a decision. I was sure he would choose Macalester. I was leaning toward Whitman myself, perhaps 80% because it’s closer to us, and because I felt that was selfish, I hadn’t expressed my opinion till he asked outright that evening. Then I said “I also feel I’m being selfish, and Macalester has some strengths I think you would love.” My husband said roughly the same thing. </p>
<p>We talked quite late. He was openly talking for the first time in a couple weeks, so that was nice! I went to bed thinking he’d chosen Whitman, and I felt really good about that. In the morning, he asked for another 12 hours. Dear lord. But fine. Apparently he went through several swings the rest of the day, but came back solidly for Whitman in the end. I don’t know what the final tipping factor was–if there was one–and I may never know. </p>
<p>This all seems really intense as I’ve written it, but really my son’s had a great, interesting senior year, with this college business only one part of the story. If YOU are applying next year, I hope you will have fun with it and just look for like-minded people who seem to enjoy what they’re doing!</p>