How prestigious is Davidson?

mattmom
Wed, 26 Oct 2005 10:36:48 +0000

dke, I have not been to Winston-Salem, so can’t say definitively. Both schools have easy interstate (77/85) acccess. Davidson might be more convenient for those traveling by air, since it is about half an hour from Charlotte’s airport, which is a USAir hub and also has decent Continental service and connections. The town of Davidson is small and pretty; stretch of I-77 going south toward Charlotte is quite suburbanized and offers a lot of shopping and movie options. I believe a light rail system is being discussed for Mecklenburg County, which would make getting into Charlotte easier for people without cars but that may be in relatively distant future. I imagine Winston-Salen has more going in because it is larger than the town of Davidson, but college tend to make their own activities anyway. I would not want to characterize one location as better.

CousinBill, a southern LAC will probably never have quite the name recognition or cachet as a northern one, especially in the north (where I am from). The issue of regional stereotyping and even bias has been discussed on other threads, probably at excessive length. It is also true that some of the northern schools (Williams especially) have way larger endownments than Davidson does, and having more money means you can provide more programs; that said, Davidson has a decent amount of money and has terrific facilities and outstanding faculty, but there’s no doubt it is always nice to have more money. Anyway, the statements earlier on this thread pretty much sum it up. MOWC said it well. LACs in general have little name recognition among the masses. The ones in the traditional NE base have wider recognition among people in that region, who have probably been the traditional customer base for such schools. Graduate and professional schools know Davidson well, and Davidson is also part of a pretty aggressive new consortium to encourage corporate recruiting at small selective colleges.

To respond to your other specific quesiton, Davidson probably has gotten slightly harder to get in to the last few years; if you check the Web site you will probably find that the acceptance rate has declined (now about 25% and had been over 30% just a couple of years ago); That may be a function of increased name recognition and also I think becuase as it becomes harder for kids from the northeast and mid-Atlantic to get in to Williams etc, thier are willing to look farther from home. It is sort of rising on the radar screen of a very small and rather seelct group of people but I doubt it will ever be a major brand name. And that is fine. Really, out there in the real world, very few schools are brand names. On the positive side from your admissoins point of view, Davidson is one of those schools where the ED admission rate is mich higher than the RD rate, so if you are applying ED and are well qualified, you probably have more than a fighting chance. (And judging by the other schools you have mentioned in other threads, it sounds as though you must have pretty good credentials.)