200 more students - impact on housing and dining?

wtidad
Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:24:41 +0000

My daughter is drawn to Amherst for the usual reasons of perceived fit. I am concerned about its financial condition, but I’m not sure that she appreciates or cares about the difference between an endowment of $1.7 or $1.3 billion. Though of course, taking a haircut like like may indeed impact the student experience.
She is intellectually-minded but not a social outlier; not an athlete but likes to be around a wide range of people, including athletes (her brother is a football player at another NESCAC college). She’s also a top student and, like many AWS applicants, has HYP numbers but prefers an LAC.
She has visited Swarthmore and Williams and has friends at both. For her, Amherst seems to strike just the right balance. She found Swarthmore too preciously and self-consciously intellectual and too many of the students rather odd; “I don’t want to go to a college where I’m one of the coolest people there,” was her reaction; she liked Williams very much, particularly the tutorials, but didn’t like the one-horse town aspect, and the physical isolation. Amherst seemed to her to have a good mix of types, including the future-PhD type like herself (would be my guess) - without the Swarthmorean sense that if you’re not thinking deep thoughts 24/7, you don’t rate. Again, just her perceptions, but I must say that in visiting the schools with her, I shared them.