DARTMOUTH/Duke/Swarthmore/Midd

interesteddad
Sun, 03 Apr 2005 03:11:57 +0000

Wow, you guys have thrown a lot of questions out. I’ll try to hit a couple of the high points.



Swat is known as the most “nerdy” of these. Buy any college guidebook and it will confirm this.



I don’t need to re-read the college guidebooks, I’ve spent time at Swat so I know what the kids are like. For the most part, they are smart kids from a lot of different kinds of schools. Often not the high school “in” crowd and often not wearing the latest Gap fashions. “Nerdy” is a fair description of some Swarthmore students, not of others. Some are smart jocks. Some are just regular kids who appreciate the lack of pretense and the humor of the place. But, I’m not sure that “nerdy” and “preppie” are concepts that are going to be of much help to our friend in Pakistan. Those are stereotypes that mean a lot to US teenagers, but are pretty superficial.



I go to one of the very top prep schools in the US. We send 35% to ivies, Stanford and MIT and another 25% to top 25 colleges. In the last 4 years, only 2 people went to Swathmore. 34 went to Dartmouth, 31 to Duke. In addition 18 went to Williams and 17 to Amherst, Swat’s two leading contenders.



Hey, there’s a surprise. New England prep school kids tend to choose New England colleges that are the most preppie! Who would have ever guessed? Swarthmore doesn’t have a lot of overlap in applicants with Williams. It’s biggest overlaps are Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and maybe UChicago.



Well, Duke had 18,062 applicants this year. How many did Swarthmore have?



Swarthmore had 4100 this year, 11.1 applications for each of the 368 slots in the freshman class, pretty much the same as Duke at 11.0 apps for each of their 1642 freshman slots.



DArtmouth is better known rite?..so if i was speaking frm an international point of view, wudnt tht quality make it preferrable for me?



Yes. As far as brand-name recognition, especially internationally, Dartmouth will be the most well-known because of being in the Ivy League athletic conference as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. That is a very common criteria for international students and is certainly something to consider.



at Harvard Law: Swarthmore-8, Dartmouth-34, Duke-59



So, on a per capita basis, 1 per 184 Swarthmore undergrads is at Harvard Law, 1 per 130 Dartmouth grads, and 1 per 105 Duke undergrads. Kinda long odds all around.

You have to look at the percentages of grads who go on to grad school and then what fields they study. For example, 89% of Swarthmore grads go to graduate school within 5 years. Of that group, 46% study for a Masters/PhD in the sciences or humanities, 20% go to med school, 15% to Law School, and 4% to Engineering school. Those percentages vary from school to school. Duke and Dartmouth did not submit their numbers to USNEWS, but Amherst did. 70% of their grads go on to further study. Of that group, PhDs led with 31% followed by Law at 28% and med at 15%. Obviously, they will have more grads at Law School, Swat more in med school and PhD programs. Swarthmore actually churns out a lot of Poli Sci and Econ majors, but they tend to go the PhD route – it’s the largest per capita producer of PhDs in those two fields in the US. Probably a reflection of having more “nerdy, academic” students.



Dartmouth represents the alchemical blending of a university and a liberal arts college



I don’t know about “alchemical”, but I would agree that Dartmouth’s undergrad enrollment of 4100 is at the low end of the university spectrum. Not LAC-like, but certainly more focused on undergrad than the huge private universities with 6000+.



Midd can hold its own against any of those schools



I certainly agree with that. Middlebury is a very good school. All of these schools are really top-notch. Deciding among them has to be a personal choice that depends how you weight the various criteria: location, size, style of learning, social scene, campus culture, type of students, etc. Everyone weights the various factors differently. For example, if you weight close mentoring relationships with professors highly, you’ll go with the smaller schools. If you weight name recognition more highly, you have to go with the larger schools that are better known in the general population.