<p>I graduated from Swarthmore in '03, and the school is not the slightest bit competitive. I’m a first-year student at Stanford Law School now, where you can’t shake a stick without hitting a few dozen Ivy Leaguers, and people here compete on everything. The only grades you get as a first-year law student are from the final exam - there are no papers or midterms - so the first-year students compete to brag about how little they work. It’s a way of saying, “I’m so smart that I don’t HAVE to work all that hard to do well”. Showing off how much richer you are than the other students is also encouraged. Nothing like that was true at Swarthmore. Talking about grades was taboo, and people didn’t use proxies like bragging about how they don’t have to work hard. The egalitarian Quaker ethic makes a big difference too - displays of wealth are strongly discouraged.</p>
<p>I can’t speak to Haverford, though.</p>