What on a visit gave him that impression (whether or not it is true in general at that school)?
@circuitrider Interesting point, but I respectfully disagree.
@ucbalumnus The students he met did not impress him and told him about what (little) they had done in high school. Not necessarily an example of humility as it was of tokenism. Maybe it was just the subset of kids he met, but he told me that he felt years of working hard, doing well on SATs and in classes felt wasted when students got in with SATs much lower than the average and their main hook was being a URM. By no means do I oppose affirmative action, I just don’t believe in lowering standards to artificially increase diversity. I’m hoping that this is just the minority, and other URM students were certainly qualified. Wes is a great school don’t get me wrong, though.
@circuitrider Carleton and Haverford bring more PhDs to the table than Wesleyan and Wellesley, an important metric not to be overlooked.
@shavree287 wrote:
Well, let’s not forget that Swarthmore will go down in history as the LAC that rejected Obama because they thought his SATs weren’t high enough.
Wesleyan, FWIW, is now working on its third generation of URMs admitted in significant numbers since the mid-1960s:
http://www.wfsb.com/story/28605382/sources-obama-daughter-visits-wesleyan-university
I’ve read just a little about that, CR, but I’ve never seen anything regarding a relationship between Swarthmore’s decision and Barack Obama’s SATs?
Shavree - I think you’re agreeing with me, yet you make your comment as if you disagree.
@circuitrider Well Obama ended up at a LAC, Occidental, anyways before he transferred to Columbia.
Those articles also do not mention anything about SAT scores.
That could be kids trying to act cool with the visiting HS student. “Oh HS was sooooo easy” etc. I wouldn’t judge the URMs of an entire school by it.
Smartalic (post #37) to be fair, the year you selected was a strange outlier year. Middlebury is almost always in the top 10 and recently usually in the top 5. But your point remains and I agree with you for the most part. Rankings at this level are similar to ranking super models - they’re all beautiful. It just comes down to taste or preference.
@urbanslaughter Your analogy is spot on and very humorous. If we are to argue that a top 5 school far surpasses a top 10 school, then we really are arguing foolishly.
@OHMomof2 It wasn’t exactly like that. My son told me that when many of them said “I don’t know how I got in” they were being genuine. It distresses me when forced diversity occurs in that manner. I’d expect Wesleyan to be a bit more intellectual, but dare I say some of the students he met were brash, disrespectful, and trashy. As a URM, I’d hate these stereotypes to be perpetuated any further.
Anyways sorry for the digressions but let’s return to the topic at hand!
I know test score is not the everything but can’t ignore for admission process here is the Test Scores Ranking from Forbes article.http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/08/04/top-100-sat-scores-ranking-which-colleges-have-the-brightest-kids/
Wait, So, you seriously think Obama (a male URM from an underrepresented state, btw) was rejected by Swarthmore, over thirty years ago, because they didn’t like his essay? LOL. Or, perhaps because he didn’t take enough AP classes? Maybe, he and his single-parent mother should have made a greater effort to visit the campus and thereby show interest. Reasonable people will draw their own conclusions.
Also (I hate over generalizing but here goes) I feel that the average student at Swat is intellectual, extremely high-achieving in their secondary school pursuits, and not as entitled as say a Williams or Amherst student. Carleton students strike me as more quirky and secretly high-achieving as I’ve met few Carls who brag about their accomplishments: in fact, they’re all equally accomplished to such a high degree that there’s no need to outshine other students and as a result many Carls are humble despite being stars in secondary school. When my family visited Pomona, we found students a little rude and very liberal, but we only visited for a day so the sample size is surely not representative. Bowdoin seemed to be predominantly upper class, prep-school students with shades of arrogance, and very white, with diversity lacking compared to Swat but about the same as Carleton. Bowdoin students did seem like a mix of Carleton and Swarthmore in terms of outright intellectuality and academic pride.
@bambi0611 From an older post:
“In terms of standardized testing-achievement, the top would include (excluding Harvey Mudd - which would be highest - due to @simba9’s reasons) Pomona, Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams, Bowdoin, Carleton, Wellesley, and Haverford, in that order. Of course, the difference between the highest on this list (Pomona - 1460) and lowest (Haverford - 1400) is not even that significant - really at all.”
Also @bambi0611 the higher SAT schools like CalTech, MIT, and science schools maybe due to the prime focus of their students on the sciences, in that they are “smarter” in a different way than students at Williams and Amherst who are more arts, humanities, and social science oriented. Also many of the students at Ivies have such high scores due to attending expensive thousand(s) dollar SAT prep classes. Also note the cultural bias towards upper class students when taking the SAT (there was an article on this a few years back, I’ll see if I can find it later). I’m also surprised with Tufts’ scores considering it’s not nearly as highly ranked as it’d like to think it was.
Haha just realized that my argument about wealthier students doing better was from the article @bambi0611 posted.
@shavree287 wrote:
Oh for goodness sake.
Everyone who gets into Wesleyan says, “I don’t know how I got in”. It’s the most common ice-breaker among frosh there is. White people say it, brown people say it, black people say it. They were saying when I was a freshman over forty years ago.
And, you know what? I hope first-years continue to be absolutely rocked out of their socks, getting into Wesleyan.
In summary, most have posited that the Ivies of the LACs are:
Amherst
Bowdoin
Carleton
Haverford
Middlebury
Pomona
Swarthmore
Williams
Maybe Davidson, Claremont McKenna? No one’s brought this up but what about Vassar? Among my D and S’ teachers Vassar is the most well known and really impressed the staff when my children told them they had been accepted, although they weren’t keen on Vassar’s ultra-liberal stance that snuffed out my more moderate-leaning children’s beliefs. However, most LACs, save for maybe Hamilton (few others, not sure to be honest), are pretty liberal.
Also, for current students, alums, and parents of students at these LACs, if you could briefly summarize the schools strengths and weaknesses (yes even Williams and Amherst have them) that’d be great.
A model we could perhaps follow:
College X
-Stregnths: Diversity, great financial aid, caring professors at the top of their field, top notch students
-Weaknesses: Poor endowment per capita, larger class sizes, pretentious students, competitive