<p>I’m not TheDad. But in the same year that his D. entered Smith, so did mine. Mine was both recruited and accepted at Williams (which happens to also be my alma mater). She chose Smith over Williams in a heartbeat. It really wasn’t a hard decision. In the things she wanted to study, there is really no question that Smith is superior. In fact, (just for example), the total language offerings in Italian at Williams wouldn’t even qualify a Williams student to apply, let alone be accepted, to the the Smith study abroad program. Williams has nothing even remotely resembling the Smith STRIDE program (which ended up writing my d’s ticket to graduate school); nothing like the Kahn Fellowship program. It may differ in different areas, but in those that interested my d., Williams is clearly inferior.</p>
<p>Secondly, the drinking (50% of Williams students, according to the College itself, binge drank in the past two weeks, and almost 30% are heavy drinkers - either near daily, or three binges in the past two weeks), combined with the athletic emphasis of much of the campus, left her wondering how she’d fit. I;m sure she could have “made do”; after all, there are non-drinkers, non-athletes at Williams, but why should she have to?</p>
<p>In very recent years, Williams has indeed gotten more economically diverse, but it is still a far cry from Smith. And, at the time when she visited three times (with two overnights), my d. said she could feel it, and it made a difference to her.</p>
<p>Finally, and this my own bias as an alum - to my way of thinking, women at Williams are still very much treated as an “appendage” of the College. It’s been almost 40 years since women were first accepted, but the social life of the college revolves around male drinking and male athletics (football and basketball), and I’ve always had a sense that it bleeds into the academic life of the college as well. (I took classes from the very first female professor at Williams, and this was in 1969!) At Smith, it’s all women - all the time. Smith is NOT a liberal arts college that happens to be all women. It is a women’s college that teaches the liberal arts. They spend time and money looking at the trajectory of women’s lives - how their careers work, how money for women works, how to break into male gigs like engineering, what happens to older women trying to get their educations “late”. It is not Williams or Amherst only all-women. </p>
<p>Williams is a very, very, very, very fine college. But - and I’ll only speak for my d. - when it came to choosing, even up, it wasn’t even close.</p>