<p>You have to count “beds” consistently. Gibby was talking about freshman beds. The new colleges are going to add about 200 freshman beds. Had they been available last year, it would have reduced Yale’s applicants/beds ratio to 19.3 from 22.3. (In reality, when they become available the new beds are likely to encourage even more applications to Yale, as people overvalue the reduction in selectivity they will cause.) Meanwhile, Wesleyan attracts 12.5 applicants/bed, which is admirable but an indication that it is less popular than Yale.</p>
<p>I happen to know a lot about Wes. My dad went there, and it changed his life, no question. He is a very loyal alum (as is his fraternity brother, Herb Kelleher, the founder and longtime CEO of Southwestern Airlines). One of my best friends from high school went there, and she had lots of cute, social friends, so my other best friend from high school and I would go to Wesleyan from time to time to play, and they would come down to Yale to play with us. One of my wife’s closest college friends – also the girlfriend of one of my roommates for several years – married a guy from Wesleyan, and another good friend of ours around town here is a Wesleyan alum. Then for some reason my block has produced a steady stream of kids going to Wesleyan (four in the past 10 years), and one of my virtual nieces is there (a kid I have known since before she was born), and my son’s first girlfriend is a recent graduate.</p>
<p>Wesleyan is a great school. People tend to love it – and I’m talking a wide variety of people here, from transgendered African-American studies majors to frat-boy econ major jocks who vote Republican. There is a good mixture of fun, intellectualism, social activism, and artiness. There is an overall cast of extreme political correctness, but at the individual student level it’s far from simple dogmatism (in most cases). People don’t take it that seriously, but they are proud – even those more to the right – of being thoughtful and inclusive about people who are often ignored, and of everyone confronting difficult social issues together on a daily basis. (I note, however, the Wesleyan is probably not a good place for someone who is an extreme social conservative with strong, religiously based opposition to things like gay marriage and abortion, and a need to preach those positions publicly.) Educationally, it is very rigorous. Socially, it is probably most popular among affluent, sophisticated kids from private schools (or wealthy public school districts) on the East and West Coasts, but kids from those schools who don’t want an environment where they will be flashing their wealth around and dressing up a lot.</p>
<p>Wesleyan is solid in all the things you would want it to be solid in – economics, political science, philosophy, literature, lab sciences. It also has fields of real excellence in the arts. Its ethnomusicology graduate program is tops. It has produced a few indy pop stars recently (MGMT, Das Racist, Boy Crisis). And its film studies program is one of the few liberal arts programs that has a real track record in Hollywood. Among the most prominent members of the Wesleyan mafia are Michael Bay (Transformers and a dozen or so other blockbusters) and Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, The Avengers), and the current art-house hit Beasts of the Southern Wild was made by a collective of Wesleyan grads from 2004-2006.</p>
<p>What it isn’t is a major university. It’s big for a LAC, but still only a little more than half the size of Yale college, and it has very few graduate students and a small faculty (relative to Yale). It’s the standard LAC-uni trade-off: more intimacy and faculty attention, but less overall intellectual activity and excitement, fewer courses to choose from, and you are learning about things that are happening elsewhere most of the time. </p>
<p>And Middletown is just big enough to be a little seedy, but small enough to be really uninteresting, and not to support even the modest lively commercial district that surrounds Yale. People at Wesleyan spend a lot more time than people at Yale scheming how to get someplace else. (Including study abroad, which I believe is much more popular at Wes than at Yale, in large part because people at Yale don’t see a lot of value in going some place else to study anything.)</p>
<p>Wes has built some new dorms in the past 20 years, so its dorms are not as monolithically crappy as they once were. But a bunch of the crappy ones are still there. You don’t go to Wes for luxurious living accommodations (although they have some great houses that seniors can live in). Yale is spending about $750,000 per bed in its new dorms, to ensure they are up to the standard of Yale’s other dorms; a tenth of that would do the trick at Wesleyan, and then some.</p>