It’s not just Middlebury, but I chuckle when my neighbors tell me their children are spending spring break in Dubai or Ibiza with their college friends. We are full pay and I am happy to sent my children to countries where they can perfect their foreign languages skills. Luxury vacations with friends will not come out of my pocketbook.
Hello everyone! I’ve been in meetings all day. I see some people asked if there was a decision yet. Not yet, but he is leaning towards Grinnell. Many thanks for all of your comments! They are incredibly helpful.
I’ve found this discussion very stressful as we could easily be having the same discussion with our S17 this weekend. He’ll be attending Grinnell next year with merit aid. Most of the other schools he was considering simply do not offer merit aid. He decided to apply ED1 to Grinnell, so we’ll never know about what would have surely been much more expensive competing options.
So, what would I do in your shoes? Generally, I’m a strong advocate for students picking a school based on their perceived assessment of “fit”. Fit perceptions become self fulfilling prophecies. 100K is a substantial differentiating factor, however. Some things I’d take into consideration are:
What happens to the 100K if it is not spent on college
What percentage of your family's overall savings is 100K
How long would it take your family to save up 100K
How strongly does your son perceive a differentiation in fit
Is that perception based on a good long visit with significant contacts or a quick overview visit
Is there a logical, tangible differentiation beyond fit perceptions (such as major or being on the ski team)
Depending on the answers to the above, I could imagine spending the 100K for perceived fit, but only in a situation where the perceived fit differentiation was significant and the 100K was not important to the family’s financial situation or could quickly be replaced.
I’m also interested in the discussion because I went to Grinnell and spent two summers at Middlebury’s language school (German). I had an incredible experience at Grinnell and can highly recommend it. I also was extremely impressed with the summer language program at Middlebury. Full immersion is the way to go with rapid language learning. The town and surroundings are beautiful as well.
My college choice was all about fit. My son’s choice was the same. I am amazed how the Grinnell vibe has not changed in 30 years. Very international. Friendly, unpretentious, intelligent and hardworking students. My perception is that Grinnell/Oberlin students are generally less preppy and image conscious than Middlebury students and more likely to be nerdy, quirky and politically active. Of course every LAC will have a mix of students and I’m sure your son will find peers at any of the three.
Responding to some of the interesting arguments from other posters:
I agree Middlebury has much more name recognition and a stronger alumni network in Boston, but Grinnell has much more name recognition and stronger alumni networks in Chicago or Minneapolis. In San Francisco or Seattle, it's probably a wash. I'm not sure where Oberlin grads gravitate. NYC?
All three schools will serve your son well for grad school/professional school. More important is him doing well. He'll do better where he's most comfortable.
US News rankings jump around on purpose. They create more buzz that way. 30 years ago I paid way too much attention to the US News rankings. Grinnell was #9 when I applied, Oberlin was close behind. Middlebury was 20th or above if I remember correctly. I suspect 10 or 15 years from now they will be reshuffled again. I'm also sure I could have been just as successful if I had attended then #20 or so Middlebury as then #9 Grinnell. The main value in the US News rankings seems to be bragging rights among high schoolers.
Good luck. I’m curious about your son’s choice and why.
Considering most of Oberlin students overwhelmingly hail from the urban NE, West Coast, and Chicago, those would be the areas with large Oberlin networks.
New York and California are among the top 4 states for where students hailed from when I attended…and from what I’ve seen from subsequent statistics…I doubt that has changed.
[quote] @calmom But someone attending Middlebury or Grinnell is unlikely to stick around post-grad – where would they work?**
Perhaps NYC or Boston in the first case and Chicago or another midwest city in the second. I think recruiters not only know the reps and have connections (and alumni) at schools in their region, but it’s obviously easier for them to get to them, and for applicants to get to employers who are nearby (even if that means trekking out of the cornfields or mountains and traveling a couple of hours).
@arcadia - A lot of schools offer merit to be competitive with schools perhaps a notch above them on the food chain. They are trying to attract higher stats kids, who may have several offers from other schools and are trying to get them to commit with financial incentives. Some schools may not be need blind or meet 100% need, so they reserve some of the financial aid budget for merit.
The following is an an excerpt from an article about the Fordham faculty health care issue and presents the pov of a great many faculty members. To be taken with a grain of though for sure, because the faculty is arguing for more spending on faculty benefits, so is pointing out what they feel are misguided assets.
Yes, merit is a recruitment tool. Among other things, it’s hard to lure 17-year-olds from the coasts to the Midwest if they have other options, and lots of Midwestern schools use merit strategically to overcome that. Leaving aside geography (yes, all other things being equal, I’d pick Vermont scenery/commute over Iowa scenery/commute), the question is not what the motivations are, but how it plays out. Who ends up coming to each school, and what kind of community do they create? Whether that community appeals to you is another matter. It sounds to me as if OP and son are being very thoughtful about that.
@wisteria100’s post highlights a whole other problem: How rankings give colleges incentive to game the system by targeting recruitment at high stats kids … or, alternatively, encouraging more applications to increase selectivity, or locking in students with early commitments to increase yield. It gets crazier by the minute and I’m dreading going through this with my next kid.
But the bottom line here is the schools in hand, and which presents the better option for OP in this moment. Only they can decide, but they have access to a lot of good information.
Obviously,thousands of high achieving students every year pick the option to pay the 100,000 to go to an elite school.Most of those students could opt to get full tuition or very large merit aid from schools that they/parents feel are not the perfect fit either academically or culturally. Many of us here do not select to have our children go to a CC then transfer into a 4 yr program. That too some would say is a waste of tuition money. Not sure of the students major or career choice but that IMHO is really the most important fact in making the college choice.
Best of luck
“Food for thought–why do some schools offer merit aid while others do not? It rarely has to do with endowment or finances.”
I don’t know if I’d go that far. The highest-endowed schools are often not the most generous, but all expenditures have to do with endowment and finances. Grinnell is able to be generous with both need-based and merit aid in a way many schools could not without sacrificing academic resources.
Merit money has a lot to do with supply and demand, but the demand for LACs seems to be disproportionately concentrated on East Coasters (or at least they tend to be more inelastic consumers). Thus you consistently see Midwestern LACs of the same caliber offer more merit money than East Coast LACs.
For example, Colgate doesn’t offer merit money. Oberlin and Grinnell do. I believe all of Bard’s merit scholarships all are need-based now as well. Is someone really going to make the argument that Colgate and Bard are that much better than Oberlin or Grinnell? Certainly, by alumni achievements, the opposite is the case.
PurpleTitan, that makes sense because of the high quality of the midwest public universities that private colleges tend to be strongly regional in population. The midwest privates are competing with the excellent universities for the midwest kids but can be a financial attraction to the northeasterners who focus on private colleges. After reading these forums for over a decade there is a slight distaste about northeasterners for their public universities and more competition for their private colleges. In the midwest, the publics are highly competitive and desired. For Middlebury or Grinnell, I think I agree with most posters - the education is going to be pretty equal with some small exceptions of majors and the “name recognition” is going to be largely regional.
Especially in a state like OH with an abundance of colleges, a declining HS population, and OSU rising from open admissions a few decades ago to being an above-average flagship the competition is fierce among colleges.
The HS population is flat or declining in both the Midwest and Northeast, but Northeasterners seem to have both a greater and more inelastic demand for LACs (and privates in general).
That has almost nothing to do with the quality of the education or experience.
For my kids, being in the middle of Iowa would have been less than ideal. And Oberlin has its own political flavor that might put some kids off (although I’ve noticed this year some other schools “catching up” in that area – topic of another thread, though). Honestly, we made a decision somewhat like the OP’s for both kids. One kid took the merit. One took the higher priced school. Both had great experiences that worked for them. My guess is that Midd would have won out for my kid, especially if they were foreign language focused.
While that’s true for many MIdwest LACs, that’s not necessarily true for all. For instance, while Oberlin is located in Ohio, the top areas which send the most students there tend to be from the coasts(NE/West Coast) and Chicago. I myself came from one of those top areas(New York).
Nowadays, it seems ~10% of Oberlin students hail from Ohio which is higher than it was when I attended back in the mid-late '90s.
The lack of in-state students attending Oberlin was considered such a big deal by the college admin around the time I graduated/not too long afterwards that they amped up initiatives to get more Ohio students to consider/choose Oberlin.
But in some ways Cobrat that is the exact point. High achieving midwest kids have high quality universities to attend. It is more difficult to pull the cream of the crop into the midwest privates. The cream of the crop that choose a small private school in the midwest do so because they don’t want to attend a university with tens of thousands of kids. The private colleges tuition discount to bring in geographic diversity and more likely because they can’t fill their seats entirely from kids in the region with the same academic horsepower because alot of them are attending public unis.
But if you are a student trying to decide between a private college in this region vs. a private college in that region the parsing points are going to be more around the academic strength of the major, the cost and where that kid might want to live and work in the future. e.g. the question of this thread: Grinell or Middlebury or how important it is for the parents to have neighbors or co-workers that have actually “heard” of the college LOL. There are plenty of educated people in the midwest who have never heard of Middlebury and plenty of people in the NE that have no idea what Grinell is. But academically for all practical purposes and with only a few exceptions in major it really isn’t all that different to the educational outcome.
It’s far more difficult to put a cost value on the private colleges when they are both high caliber private colleges. Some people will take the money and run and others will continue to try and parse out justifications why to pay more. It might be a far easier answer the “more question” if you were comparing Middlebury or Grinell to a private college with weaker student academic strength.