Examples of Highly Similar Schools

College Search & Lists
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So often we hear kids say their Dream School (!) is Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford – the usual highly rejective suspects. But the chances of getting into these are pretty slim, so the kid should have similar schools in mind as back-ups.

What are some small (or large… go nuts if you’d like) groups of schools that are similar in multiple dimensions? I’ll start off with a few examples:

  • UChicago, Columbia (core…)
  • Yale, Harvard, and Rice (residential colleges)
  • Vassar, Wesleyan U
  • Emory, Vanderbilt, Washington U

My hope is that kids will glean this thread to help them build their lists.

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I think this is a great suggestion but perhaps the focus should be on “highly similar but easier to be admitted to” schools. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to suss out that Cal Tech has a lot of similarities to MIT (and some key differences). But for the MIT or bust kid, it might be helpful to point them towards RPI, Cooper Union, etc. (depending on the field of interest).

I’ll go!

If you love BC, Georgetown, Notre Dame, check out Providence and Holy Cross.

If you love Amherst look at Connecticut College.

If you love Swarthmore look at Goucher.

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On my engineer’s list for hands for career readiness focused programs (reach/match/safety)- Purdue, RPI, Clarkson

Family members’s list for bio/pre med (reach/match/safety) - Northwestern, Case, Pitt

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Or Santa Clara or any of the other Jesuit colleges in particular. And they have a core course requirement too.

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Smith College, Bates, Dickinson, Rhodes College (civic engagement, intellectually curious, hands-on faculty, lots of students study abroad, high degree of involvement with local community)

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I tend to have a mental image of a college family tree, with branches that are closer or farther to each other in a multi-dimensional space.

Anyway, for medium-sized private core curriculum colleges very strong in humanities and social sciences in big-metro locations (what I would see as a common description of Chicago and Columbia), I would immediately be thinking in terms of Jesuit colleges. So many of them ALSO fit that sort of description, and fall along a broad range of selectivity.

True residential college systems are pretty scarce, it is a very expensive model. But you could check out options as diverse as SUNY Binghamton and the Claremont Colleges, or maybe the BiCo (Haverford and Bryn Mawr), or even Five Colleges (I guess Four now? RIP Hampshire).

Vassar and Wesleyan I think of as particularly academicky LACs. There are SOOO many of those, again at a wider range of selectivity, and indeed merit opportunities. But this is the sort of list I think can include womens’ colleges (as appropriate), Carleton, Grinnell, Haverford, Oberlin for some, Macalester, Kenyon, Whitman, forum favorites like St Olaf and Kalamazoo, Hendrix, and so on.

Emory, Vanderbilt, and WashU to me are all examples of how elite families outside the Northeast wanted to create their own Ivy-style universities closer to home. Thinking broadly, that actually includes institutions like Stanford, Chicago, Duke, and Northwestern. Also the aforementioned Rice. Wake Forest, Rochester, and Case Western. Maybe CMU, although it has a more distinctive format. From there, I think you can go in some different directions. Arts and Sciences sorts of kids might well want to consider some of the highly-resourced LACs. Some kids might want to look again at Jesuit colleges, starting with Georgetown and BC in fact. Maybe some of the publics that have a bit of an unusual history and format, like William & Mary, Miami of Ohio, or perhaps even Pitt.

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Yeah, there are so many urban private schools of similar quality located outside the northeast. I’d add Georgetown (DC), Tulane (Nawlins), and SMU (Dallas) as other examples of high-profile, selective, private, urban national universities.

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If you love the One Course at a Time model of Colorado College, Cornell College is less rejective with more economic diversity.

For experiential project based engineering Cal Poly and WPI are east/west options.

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Sewanee/Rhodes/Furman

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Here are a few Pennsylvania colleges that I think tend to get looked at together:

Franklin & Marshall
Lafayette
Bucknell
Gettysburg
Dickenson

All slightly different vibes, but I think they tend to recruit from similar circles too.

And then, you could probably also cross-shop these with Union College in Schenectady as well.

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Not that I buy into the distinction entirely, but when I think of Amherst and Williams, I think of notably “pre-professional” LACs which might include Claremont-McKenna, University of Richmond, Muhlenberg, Denison, Lake Forest, Morehouse, and Spelman.

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…and Trinity

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I have found I basically need more than just the two categories, Academicky and Pre-Professional. Really, the whole point of LACs to me is to highly customize your LAC choice. So on this and other dimensions, it is more like picking a point on a sliding scale, versus all one or the other.

So Amherst and Williams to me count as more pre-professional than Wesleyan, say, but maybe not quite as much as Richmond. To be very blunt about it, I am not likely to recommend Richmond to an academicky kid (absent unusual circumstance). But I could see an academicky kid wanting to, say, visit both Williams and Wesleyan before making up their mind.

This is not exactly groundbreaking, but people sometimes respond to Ivy League analogies. To me, Amherst and Williams are broadly similar in mix to Dartmouth in this sense (or maybe Harvard, if you prefer). Wesleyan to me is more Brownesque. Richmond . . . Wharton? Obviously not all business, but that is sort of the vibe of the students I know particularly drawn to Richmond.

Of course there are Wharton types at Harvard or Dartmouth, same as Amherst or Williams, but not necessarily at that level of concentration.

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? You’ve lost me here.

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For example, my sense is there are more students at Amherst who end up interested in things like, say, finance, consulting, medicine, or law, than at Wesleyan.

I just looked up the first destination surveys at Amherst and Wesleyan respectively. Amherst has more subcategories listed than Wesleyan. But for the 75.5% going into employment, Amherst had 6.0% finance, 5.7% management consulting, 5.4% consulting, 4.7% investment banking, 3.6% investment/portfolio management, and 2.5% data and analytics, which adds up to about 21% of all first destinations. For the 69% at Wesleyan going into employment, it was 12% Financial Services and 4% Consulting, which adds up to about 11%.

More at Wesleyan were going on to further education, 18% to 15.1%, but we don’t know which degrees. However, I do know in College Transitions Pathways to Medical Schools study, they had 2.60% going to any medical school for Amherst (I note this is likely an undercount), and 1.53% for Wesleyan. In their Pathways to Law Schools study, it was 8.47% for any law school at Amherst, 5.54% at Wesleyan.

And then just anecdotally, I know pre-professional-type kids who would consider Amherst, but not Wesleyan.

So that’s the sort of thing I have in mind. There are obviously students/graduates of all major types represented at all these LACs, but my impression is there is more weight toward these sorts of educational paths/careers at Amherst. By these metrics, it is maybe nearly twice as many, give or take.

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I don’t think the vibe at Williams, Amherst OR Wesleyan is particularly pre-professional in the way most students experience it. Each has a solid, hard core group of “finance bro” types, but that’s by no means the majority. And all three also have a “life of the mind” group, the artsy/theater/music kids, and the outdoors/I’ll be hiking this weekend kids.

Spend some time on a REALLY pre-professional campus and you’ll feel the difference immediately.

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Right, I think this is a spectrum, not two distinct groups.

So, “more pre-professional than Wesleyan” does not mean “and therefore as pre-professional as Bucknell”.

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If there are any Midwest schools that fit this vibe, someone list them please!

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Isn’t this Rose-Hulman in Indiana?

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Purdue is very hands on project based. Rose Hulman is also known for being hands on and an easier admit than Purdue.

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