| joshnewcollege, congrats to your brother. I think if he felt more comfortable with the students and feel of Oberlin, that's a good reason to go there.
Some observations on a couple of your other comments:
- It would be very hard to classify the Grinnell student body as 'traditional'. I would agree that some Oberlin students are probably more aggressively non-conformist than Grinnell's (although others may disagree), but both colleges are certainly way on the liberal and progressive end of the spectrum. So much so that I'm a little concerned whether S at Grinnell would have an adequate exposure to and debate with conservative ideas that I think should also be part of a truly liberal education.
- Among academics, I would disagree that there is a substantial difference between the perception of Grinnell and Oberlin. (We happened to check with several academics as well who had a different perception from the ones you spoke with, but frankly neither our effort nor yours constitutes a large sample size.) A better sampling is the "peer assessment" component of the USNWR LAC tables - over 2000 responses from academics - where the two colleges appear statistically indistinguishable - 4.3 out of 5 for Grinnell, 4.2 for Oberlin. (While I'm not a fan of the overall USNWR rankings, I do think the individual componets are sometimes useful.) |