Dartmouth vs. Williams vs. Amherst

JHS
Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:35:35 +0000

Dartmouth and Williams have very, very similar feels and cultures, except Dartmouth has frats and Williams banned frats a long time ago. If anything, Williams is probably a bit more academic these days. Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore are more or less the HYP of LACs (not that they match up one-to-one), so in terms of prestige-where-it-matters Williams and Dartmouth are close enough so that really isn’t an issue. Kids who like one generally like the other, and vice versa. My kids were very familiar with Williams because their grandparents lived nearby, and when my son and I visited Dartmouth together, after the first few hours his comment was “And this is different from Williams how?” (I had never been to Dartmouth, and I had expected it to be more different from Williams than it was.)

Anyway, objectively, it’s almost impossible to come up with an argument for paying anything significant to go to Dartmouth vs. effectively being paid something significant to go to Williams. There’s nothing actually important to trade off between them, except for trivial things, and lots of those go in Williams’ favor. (It’s prettier, the tutorials are totally cool.)