Dartmouth vs Washu

College Search & Lists
201

<p>We moved from the midwest pretty recently, and Wash U was a popular choice for top students in our area. The people in my daughter’s classes who went to Wash U were absolutely super kids. Personally I like them better than the people I know who went to Dartmouth. They were very smart kids, yet very down to earth. I would guess there are differences in the overall student bodies in several areas such as sports/ fraternity orientation, importance given to prestige in decision making, ethnic backgrounds and geographic makeup.</p>

<p>My daughter didn’t apply to Wash U because it was too “typical” for her, for our area, but subsequently has said she regretted it. She visited friends who were in a summer program there and she was very impressed with the campus and the dorms. And As I said, personally I’m very impressed with the kids I know.</p>

<p>Wash U used to be everybody’s safety, but it has clearly moved up in the world.</p>

<p>I can’t imagine that kids with this talent won’t get where they deserve to go, coming out of Wash U. There might be more of a midwest tilt in destinations, though. And if you want to go into investment banking, and are the right type, than I think Dartmouth would be a more typical choice.</p>

<p>In the end, I would say go where you fit better. But if you’re not going to visit & check it out, I don’t know if you’ll be able to assess fit very well.</p>

202

<p>“dartmouth also has alot more money than wash u = better everything.”</p>

<p>Wrong. WashU has more endowment money than Dartmouth. WashU is more research oriented and is ranked much higher in several international/research oriented polls. So you can’t say Dartmouth is better at everything.</p>

203

<p>Wash U has almost 14,000 students with an endowment of 4.4 bn
Dartmouth has like 6,000 students with an endowment of 2.8 bn</p>

204

<p>Dartmouth >>>>> WashU in every sense of the word.</p>

<p>I will go ahead and “TITCR” myself.</p>

205

<p>That response is not credited.</p>

206

<p>Your objection to how the students are attracted is entirely irrelevant to how strong the school actually is. I mean, I may think it’s unfair that the Boston Red Sox spend 100 million dollars more than some other teams, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a good team. WUSTL has students who are just as intelligent on average as Dartmouth, and if I were hiring, I would have no preference. Some people might, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct or rational, it’s just what they’ve heard of. They would probably favor Cornell over Pomona too.</p>

207

<p>I don’t think you can ding Washu for what you call “performance enhancers” without dinging every other college that does the same thing. To do so is a smear tactic. </p>

<p>Washu is not suddenly excellent or suspiciously excellent. Even in the 1980s, when usnwr began its ranking, it was in the top 25. Top 25 in the nation is nothing to sneeze at, not now and not then. But its reputation was regional. That Washu’s administration launched a campaign to gain national attention by marketing what they have, an excellent academicl institution, ought to be applauded not sneered at. Washu wanted to be able to draw from a nationwide pool of talented students and started advertising. Marketing encourages prospective students to put the college, now that they’ve heard of it, on their list and visit. Washu sells itself very well to those who visit, since it is a terrific campus. I believe that students apply knowing that it is a “reach” school and hope for the best, not expecting guaranteed admission, just as thousands of Ivy hopefuls apply knowing that the odds might be against them. </p>

<p>I’ll bet a lot, probably the majority, of posters who gleefully dump on Washu have never been there. They don’t even know whether the college has something special that might actually rival their favorites and encourage applications. They just repeat what they’ve read as though it’s something everybody “knows.” And most of the sniping is from people who don’t like that Washu is ranked one or two spots over their preferred university, a matter which is of no significance whatsoever. Except on CC. </p>

<p>Washu has for some time now had measurable elements of academic excellence — high achieving students as indicated by standardized test scores and GPA, low faculty-student ratios, high support for faculty, high alumni support, high endowment support, high respect in the international academic and research community. It makes the list of two rankings of top global universities. Look it up. I don’t have links. But one could google “Newsweek global universities” or “THES university ranking.”</p>

208

<p>Wow. All I can say to some of the replies in this topic:</p>

<p>…and then you get into the real world, when you find out, for better or for worse, that no one cares about whether your school had a 4.5 or a 4.1 “academic reputation,” or whether or not your school’s yield is 52% or 34%, or if it’s ranked #14 or #11 or #39, or if your endowment per capita is 2.8 or 4.4, blah blah blah.</p>

<p>…or that most people outside the Northeast don’t even know what ‘Dartmouth’ means and outside the Midwest think that Washington University is some random university in Seattle.</p>

<p>I might as well post my story, given that when I was deciding which college to enroll in (applied to 8, accepted to 7) it ended up being between these two. </p>

<p>Here’s what I kind of had in mind for a college: big college in a major city, plenty of opportunities, students walking around with bright green mohawks, holding protests in the cafeteria over stupid stuff just because they can (i.e. not paying the cafeteria workers enough), wearing plenty of tie-dye, playing instruments on the sidewalk, smoking pot on the sidewalk (Not that I do it, but I thought it would’ve been fun to be in that type of environment), walking around with Starbucks (granted when I enrolled in 2001, Starbucks was still cool), traditional semester system.</p>

<p>I picked Dartmouth. Why? Honestly, I have no idea. It turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life. I guess somehow I felt its Ivy League reputation would help me after graduation. It didn’t. (And for the 99.7% of us that aren’t going to be investment bankers in the northeast, it probably won’t help you either.) Would WUSTL have been perfect? Hell no, but it still would have been a lot better choice for me. Looking back though, I think I just should have applied to a totally different set of colleges.</p>

209

<p>DCD,
I was wondering what made Dartmouth so miserable for you?</p>

<p>Just curious.</p>

210

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<p>dcd: quite frankly, neither of these two schools fit your requirements, and Hanover least of all. I can think of a few others that would have been much better fits. I realize you answered the obvious question (“I have no idea.”), but I still don’t understand why NH when you are a non-preppy, city-type? Was it the “ivy” moniker?</p>

211

<p>Lol I didn’t really like Columbia and thought Dartmouth was the most amazing college experience ever. This is why picking for fit is important. As for not helping after college, I think that’s ridiculous. There are countless opportunities at all the top schools, but you have to be proactive.</p>

212

<p>College Yahoo: Oh, I could go on and on about many things – because seriously, just about anything that could have gone wrong did – but I’ll just explain in detail the three worst of the worst.</p>

<p>One, the people dynamics. When I was there, there was an unwritten rule that if you don’t know someone after your first year, you can’t allow yourself to meet them. This sounds preposterous, but it’s true. I have no idea why people follow this rule. I am the type that is always open to meeting new people and making new friends. Well, I started off the bat with what I thought was a great group of friends in my hall. I gradually got to make my way around campus and made various friends from other places. Then my first group of friends started totally flaking on me and not replying to my blitzes anymore and not inviting me out anymore. There were more than one time when I asked them to dinner or an event and got no response; went to the cafeteria or that event anyway and saw every single one of them except for me. I confronted them and they were like, “well, we’ve know that you hang out with other people.” Then I’m like “yeah, and there have been times I’ve asked you along and you said no or gave me no response. Why not?” And they’re like “because we don’t know them.” <em>bangs head against desk</em> And then I watched in disbelief as my new “friends” did pretty much the same thing. By my senior year it got to the point where I didn’t want to try to make friends anymore because it just wasn’t worth it. I’m still flabbergasted by that entire mentality.</p>

<p>Second, the academics. They were bad. Some of them were worse than bad. They just throw as much at you and expect you to do it all. They don’t teach you how to learn, they don’t teach you how to think, they just make you work and for no purpose. I tried to take a wide variety of classes. At first, I had emperor’s new clothes syndrome. I thought since the classes were hard, that must automatically mean the classes were good. Not so. Yes, the professors are accessible. Yes, they’re all very smart. That doesn’t mean they all can teach. I went in with every intention of being a math or science major. That didn’t last. And just about everyone I know, who went to Dartmouth with every intention of being a math major, now hates math. Including me. From talking to other people, this isn’t the case at other schools. Not even other high-caliber schools. I blame the quarter system for this partially, and they claim there’s a set curriculum they have to cover each term regardless of 10 or 15 weeks, but the professors really don’t have to make the pace unreasonably fast and could go into detail about the why’s of problem solving rather than keep on repeating “we have a lot to do, and not very much time to do it” (Umm… then why don’t you just give us less to do?). The social sciences, for the most part, were just as bad. To be honest, I believe that going to Dartmouth has stunted my intellectual growth. I’m a worse thinker now than I was when I entered college. They throw so much at you, make unreasonable expectations of you, and then what ends up is you get so burned out and have so little time to get too much done that by the time you’re halfway through you just want to get it over with and don’t really care about whether or not it’s good. This is not a good education. And yet I still got A’s and B’s on all my papers and classes. I think the reason for this is after reading so many bad papers, the professor starts not to care about grading them either. Of the 30-something classes I took, I can only think of 3 of them that I’d consider “good” and maybe about a dozen that were “okay”. The rest were “bad” or worse.</p>

<p>And third, the uselessness of the Dartmouth degree outside the Northeast. I always knew I wanted to live in California. When I looked for internships here when I was at Dartmouth, none of them took me seriously because I wasn’t local. (Nevermind that I traveled 1733 miles from home to go to college, so why do they think there’s no chance I’d travel to an internship?) So I moved out here afterwards anyway. And it’s the same for jobs. Hardly anyone in California knows what Dartmouth is. I have been asked more than once if it’s two-year or vocational. It seems that the people making the hiring decisions have the same mentality too. For all I put up with, this is not acceptable. So here I am, third year out, working at Starbucks, because I’ve been rejected by every other job and grad school I’ve applied to. Which I guess is okay, but I didn’t have to go to Dartmouth in order to work at Starbucks.</p>

<p>And all throughout college and beyond, I tried to stay upbeat and optimistic. They told me attitude is everything. But gah…I just don’t know what to do with my life anymore.</p>

<p>bluebayou: Yes, I’m very well aware of that now. As I said, I should have just picked a completely different set of schools to apply to. (I think I would have done quite well at, say, Berkeley, though that might have been difficult for out-of-state. Or Boulder… or maybe UW or NYU. Even UVM would have been better. None of which I applied to.)</p>

<p>I guess somehow convinced myself that academically, Dartmouth would have been the best fit (and even that ended up not being true), and that’s what’s really important. I visited it, and it wasn’t really what I wanted, but four years didn’t seem like too long to make do. I was wrong. Also, when I visited, everyone looked so happy to be there. There were such good vibes in the air. I thought what the hell, I’d be happy too. Once again, I was wrong. </p>

<p>I had concerns about it before enrolling. I expressed my concerns on a few college discussion boards and was convinced by well-meaning '04s that Dartmouth had something for everyone. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. :-&lt;/p>

<p>It might have been the Ivy moniker. But I didn’t even apply to any of the other Ivy league schools (All of which would have been a better fit than Dartmouth.) So truthfully, I don’t even know what it is. A little bit of many things, probably.</p>

213

<p>I’ll respond to this later but I would say I made more than half of my friends sophomore summer and beyond…I just had the exact opposite experience from you. The academics were the best of any school I’ve heard of, the people were amazingly friendly (I hung out with 15 Dartmouth people at least this weekend and I’ve been out 5 years), and the placement outstanding (I got into a top 5 MBA as the youngest in my class and got a great job after college).</p>

<p>Funny, people were mentioning how Dartmouth was like a family and how its the “Dartmouth mafia.” Its such a tight-knit school and I believe the vast majority love it like its home.</p>

214

<p>BTW: What do you want to do? My advice is to get list of alumni and contact them for “informationals.” In places like LA networks are everything, and by not participating in the alumni community out there you aren’t going to get the advantage Dartmouth gives you. Check out <a href=“http://www.dartmouthentertainment.com%5B/url%5D”>www.dartmouthentertainment.com</a> for alums in the area. Random California HR depts aren’t going to respect any liberal arts degrees, but fellow Ivy alums will. You have to start going to people who aren;t going to say “no.”</p>

<p>Email career services and get a list of alumni in SoCal. Then come across like a well-meaning kid looking for advice and after meeting a few people you’ll become a lot smarter and you’ll likely find a job.</p>

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<p>^^^Yea, I feel your pain, dcd. Big Green has a lot of warning signals most of which you’ve hit. But, I’m also aware of people, every bit as <em>alternative</em> as you, who seem to do okay there. You may have hit just the tail wind of the last of the Old Dartmouth of four or five years ago.</p>

<p>I have to disagree with Slipper to a certain degree, however. If you weren’t able to negotiate your way around a bunch of nineteen and twenty year olds when they were living on the same campus, what makes him think these same people are going to be any easier to get along with as alum? The real world generally doesn’t make people any nicer or easier to get along with, especially now that they’ve got payrolls to meet, inventory to control and soccer games to coach. If they were snarkey in college they’re going to be even more so now.</p>

<p>My advice would be to start all over with a masters degree in something. something close to L.A. I find it hard to believe a Dartmouth degree can’t get you into grad school. What grad schools did you get rejected from?</p>

216

<p>[quiote]When I was there, there was an unwritten rule that if you don’t know someone after your first year, you can’t allow yourself to meet them.

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<p>This has definitely not been my D’s experience. She me a lot of upperclassment freshman year, and even more students sophomore and junior year. Like Slipper she had an amazing time at sophmore summer, not to be out done by what she calls Junior summer in NYC as she knoiws a lot of Dartmouth people working this summer in NYC (she went out to brunch with about 8 of them yesterday, had dinner with another group and meets up with fellow dartmouth students throughout the week. On their cheap days, they go over to happy hour at the Dartmouth club). Right now she has 2 friends who are interning in California thius summer -both of them found postions b contacting alumi in the area.</p>

<p>She hasn’t gone the typical Econ or gov’t route but she has had a great time and I beleive that she has had a great education. She was not the least big concerned about the “middle of nowhere” because she has lived in NYC all of her life and knew that she would be coming back so Hanover is a refreshing change of pace. SHe has never wavered about her decision and has no regrets about choosing Darmouth.</p>

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<p>ok, I’m lazy so instead searching for this question, I’m just going to ask it: Which school is better in terms of Business? Is it better to have an Economics degree from Dartmouth or a Business degree from WashU?</p>

218

<p>… not even close— Dartmouth.</p>

<p>Listen, I honestly do not know why there’s 15 pages of debate about this but I’m going to give you the god’s honest truth:</p>

<p>98 out of every 100 people you ask in the professional world will tell you the the average Dartmouth student is more intelligent + that Dartmouth carries a much heavier name brand. WashU is a Ivy-safety at the very best. For a school that obviously games USNews to the max and shamelessly engages in yield-protection and yet still manages to get something like 30% yield, WashU already has more recognition than it deserves.</p>

<p>Just go read that new york times article from a couple of weeks ago---- even NYtimes stated it as an ivy safety.</p>

219

<p>You can’t understand why there’s 15 pages because you didn’t bother to read them and consider a pov outside your own regionally and professionally focused box. </p>

<p>The fact is that this is a big country and the Dartmouth name doesn’t carry any heavier weight outside the NE than a lot of other colleges, including WU. Those of us who don’t live in the NE and don’t expect our students to stay in the NE to make their careers don’t give a hoot what 98 out of 100 of the people in the professional world in NY or your area of the country think. </p>

<p>Didn’t you read the post by dcd? Outside of the NE region, it’s very possible to run into employers who’ve never heard of Dartmouth, don’t know where it is or whether it’s a two-year or a four-year. That’s probably just as true for WashU, but the point is that Washu students are not leaving college with worthless degrees as they fan out across the U.S. to apply for jobs while Dartmouth grads can go anywhere and have rose petals strewn at their feet wherever they go. </p>

<p>My neighbor’s daughter graduated from WashU two years ago with a degree in business and got a job straight out of school with a large consulting firm in L.A. that works with media and recording industry accounts, a job that came about due to several internships she had gotten in the area as a WU undergrad. It’s what Slipper said: opportunities to set yourself up for success abound at numerous colleges, but you have to be proactive about finding them. The ranking “debate” is noise in a teacup. And that’s the god’s honest truth.</p>

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<p>truazn,
Your difficulty in understanding is that your worldview is driven by the NYT. Fine if you want to work on Wall Street or in the Northeast, but the NYT is often pretty clueless when it comes to the rest of the country and bigred07 is right that this is a big country. Both Dartmouth and Wash U are exceptional colleges with outstanding students and each would be stronger professionally in their home regions than the other. In other regions, Dartmouth’s Ivy affiliation provides great brand power (a very, very large part of which is due to HYP), but Wash U is terrific school and I think you are confusing lack of familiarity with lack of quality. Furthermore, these schools are quite different in feel and locale and students should almost certainly prefer one over the other based on personal fit.</p>