Amherst or Georgetown SFS

TheDad
Tue, 19 Apr 2005 11:47:03 +0000

Shrug. Don’t worry about reputation. There are aspects of each of the Ivy schools that make them very very good and for considerations of fit, they’re the right school for many people. What I think we can do without is the pro-Ivy snobbery or anti-Ivy reverse snobbery.

Every school has its pros and cons, Amherst included. Some things are extrinsic to the undergrad experience per se, such as the relatively high percentage of admitted students needed to fill athletics slots. Other things, like the relatively high percentage students who engage in binge drinking, are more intrinsic but within control of the student. For sheer quality of undergrad instruction, though, Amherst is difficult to beat.

My own fuzzy ranking at the moment might be something like:

Yale > Amherst > Swarthmore > Chicago > Princeton > Harvard > Brown > Williams

just to take a few schools. Ask me tomorrow and I might have a different take, except that for my particular biases, Williams has too many negatives and would always rank lower in my preference than for many other people’s. Ultimately, ranking schools is the contemporary equivalent of medieval discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.