<p>I know that, but you can’t get in just based on recommendations. Is there anything they look at as an alternative?</p>
<p>New College has very in-depth comments instead of grades and Novo Collegians do very well in grad school placement.</p>
<p>just dug this out of the bottom of my inbox:</p>
<p>Dear Pierre,
Usually if you need to transfer out of New College the school you are transferring to will give you credit for courses that are similar to ones they teach but won’t calculate a GPA from you New College work. You GPA would be based only on classes you take at the new institution. We do have a satisfactory/unsatisfactory system so you probably would only get credit for those courses you completed satisfactorily. I hope this helps.
-Fisher</p>
<p>Yeah, they have great placement in graduate school. On their website, you can see what the (small) group of alumni have done – many are in academia.</p>
<p>The Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Fed is a New College graduate, he did his undergraduate study of Economics at NCF, and then he received his PhD at Berkeley.</p>
<p>Thanks Pierre. Another school which doesn’t have grades is Hampshire College. I think I can see it as a plus and not as much stress.</p>
<p>My cousin in NY had never heard of Auburn until a few years ago, so I’ll say that.</p>
<p>WHY NOT? - UGA for Free >>> Auburn for $$$</p>
<p>USC and BARD</p>
<p>I love the USC campus and it’s an amazing school, but I’ve never even been to L.A. I just thought it would be a taste of something different and come to find out I was accepted. If they had given me more financial aid I might be going there instead of NYU :eek: </p>
<p>Bard on the other hand I had the oppurtunity to visit. I knew nothing about it, other than that it was a selective LAC. I loved the campus and the students. It’s a great liberal arts college with a bright opinionated student body, which I liked. I liked the seclusion of Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson and it felt like a good fit for me. They actually offered me a great package too, 25K in schoarships but between NYU and Bard I just couldn’t turn down NYC. I’ve lived rural all my life and it’s time for a change.</p>
<p>Isn’t Bard, and especially USC pretty well known. I thought the point of this thread was to talk about the schools that are not that well known, but very good. USC is pretty much known nationally.</p>
<p>wow I was actually gonna say Bard too, and for the same reasons. even though people from my high school go to Bard fairly often and it’s pretty well regarded, I hadn’t heard of it until late in my junior year when I decided to visit, and I’d never heard anyone talk about it and rarely have since. I later accepted EA under the immediate decision plan. I liked the people I met there more than people I met at any other college, including the one I decided to go to. I was also surprised to discover the secluded, embedded in the woods campus actually appealed to me, while I originally thought that would immediately disqualify it.</p>
<p>The lesser known schools that almost got me were…</p>
<p>Beloit-This school has an incredible feel to it. It’s almost like any Quaker affiliated school will let you do what you feel like as long as you are responsible, etc. Plus they have very good academics.</p>
<p>Ursinus-How is this school not talked about more? I visited it as sort of a time killer before visiting Swarthmore. Well the campus was awesome(small) and the people were great. If they had offered me more money, I would have attended.</p>
<p>TCNJ-Full ride and good academics. But I hated the campus and it was a major suit case college.</p>
<p>The college that got me… Rutgers-New Brunswick</p>
<p>Alot of this “I’ve never heard of” is regional. I’d never heard of Auburn or met an Auburn grad until we moved to the Southeast, but Bard was always on the radar screen, knew many grads from there in NYC.</p>
<p>Bard is very well known in the North and USC is more well known around the country and internationally. I wouldn’t call either lesser-known schools.</p>
<p>For the record, by USC I meant the University of South Carolina.</p>
<p>I know you were, but we talking to nastynate who said the one in LA.</p>
<p>As crazy as this sounds…Wells and Mary Baldwin.</p>
<p>I was looking almost exclusively at women’s colleges and was using them as safeties (academics and financial), but I absolutely loved both. My visit to Wells really made me change every idea I had in mind about it. The classes were SO tiny (literally 3-8 students in them) and the discussions they were having were incredible. Based on their stats, I admittedly didn’t expect to find a huge level of rigor there, but the professors were clearly pushing the students in the upper-level classes really hard. And even little things like the classrooms being stocked with bookshelves holding the classics in each field so you could refer to them in class, or every student regardless of class year having their own nook (not just carrel) in the library…I adored it. It was so much more, well, academic than I’d expected.</p>
<p>And Mary Baldwin has this absolutely amazing focus on leadership development and all sorts of really fascinating programs and minors that you just don’t find at most liberal arts colleges. They have an entire Department of Global Poverty and Development, cooperative programs with Washington & Lee, majors that require you to do actual paid work as part of your studies and thereby gain amazing experience, and so forth. I found them to be incredibly inventive and focused on catering to changing student needs.</p>
<p>So, they were definitely safeties, but I still loved them and would’ve been happy at either. :)</p>
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<p>And I think a lot of us would be quick to inform him that he ought to be fired if he thinks Bowdoin and Mudd are “fall-back schools.” Good grief!</p>
<p>D’Youville College in Buffalo NY. It’s small (around 3000) and Catholic. The nursing program seemed really good, but there isn’t really a campus (well, there is, but it’s super urban which I don’t really like)…But because of the nursing program, and the scholarship they gave me, I almost decided to go there, but I chose Le Moyne College in Syracuse instead.</p>
<p>Wells has gone co-ed. Those tiny classes may have been a function of declining enrollments.</p>
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<p>Ben Bernanke graduated from Harvard College in 1975.
[Ben</a> Bernanke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke]Ben”>Ben Bernanke - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>But here is a list of prominent NCF alumni:
[List</a> of New College of Florida alumni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_College_of_Florida_alumni]List”>List of New College of Florida alumni - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>I’m aware of that; I applied after they’d transitioned. 
And no, the tiny classes are because the college has a student body of about 650 and actively works to keep classes that small. Even though they’re increasing the size of the student body, they’re still capping their upper-levels.</p>
<p>And honestly, even at Mount Holyoke, with 2,200 students plus all of the 5Cs students, my largest upper-level class has had 11 students; I’ve had some with five. So it’s not that unusual.</p>
<p>Some of you, such as rockerguyasj, ZakZody, and MHC2011, seem to have the idea I was after. My intention was to identify colleges that many people wouldn’t know about, and perhaps even you had as an afterthought, but for whatever reason, it impressed you enough that you feel you’d have been happy to attend and were torn to some degree when you ended up making your final choice.</p>
<p>There are TONS of great schools out there which could use a plug. This is your opportunity to pimp some place which doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Note that I’m NOT looking for where you DID choose, but rather a lesser-known school that was surprisingly more attractive to you than you expected.</p>