Thanks for encouraging a visit. I completely agree.
I would like to put this issue of size in some perspective because I too described Olin as tiny. Olin has about the same number of engineering students on campus as Dartmouth. More than Brown.
The campus is literally a 70 acre corner of the Babson campus. Combined with Babson, it’s a 440 acre campus. This is important because the 2 colleges share facilities, there is cross registration, and there are almost 3000 college students engaging and going to class on this property. Olin is like a small engineering school on a single university campus - like Dartmouth, Brown, and a number of others.
Babson/Olin is about the same size as Wesleyan. But . . . It has something that Wesleyan doesn’t have . . . Another college of 2500 students 2 miles down the road on the other side of town with which they have cross registration . . . With a shuttle that gets you there in minutes. It’s a bike ride away. Combined, the Babson-Olin-Wellesley consortium (BOW) has slightly more students than the combined undergraduate enrollments of the Claremont Colleges.
Yes, small isn’t for everyone. But big isn’t for everyone either. And Lisa specifically stated that her daughter would prefer a small private engineering college. Which is why I posted about Olin. And also added other small to medium size colleges in the area. Like Tufts which has only about 600 engineering students on campus. That’s tiny too. The interest in a smaller college is why I left out bigger universities with engineering in the Boston area - like BU and Northeastern.
As I said in my previous post, Olin is tiny but not isolated. It’s part of a larger campus with about 3000 total students and part of a larger consortium with about 5500 students all in the same town. (I know that Olin is technically in Needham.) And Olin has easy access to another 3500 students through a cross registration agreement with Brandeis. That’s a total of 9000 college students in their orbit. And those 9000 are but a tiny fraction of all of the tens of thousands of college students in greater Boston, aka College Town, USA. And those students find each other. Yes, tiny, but not isolated.