Match Me - LAC with Japanese, French majors and no or little Greek (SAT 1420)

It’s going to be hard to find everything you’re looking for on one campus. DePauw, for example, has all of your academic requirements but it also has a big fraternity presence.

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True, for a variety of fascinating historical reasons including the fact that somehow, during the depths of the Cold War, the U of MN maintained an exchange program with a couple of Universities in China. For some time, Minnesota was second only to Hong Kong in the number of residents who had been born in mainland China. Weird but true.

Gustavus is a quintessential upper Midwest LAC, so its music is very strong. There is a for-credit classical guitar ensemble, as well as other classical guitar opportunities. Gustavus also has a good business major and a strong alumni network. The Twin Cities are home to a number of Fortune 500 companies, and host branches of others, so the alumni network is more national than might be expected. Gustavus would be a safety for this student, and merit would be excellent.

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When immigration from China was zero from 1882-1943 and then limited to very low numbers until 1965, it is not hard to believe that such an exchange program’s students would be a very large percentage of people in the US who were born in China, since there would only otherwise be a tiny number of recent immigrants and a few elderly pre-1882 immigrants.

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Please get back to the OP!

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Thanks so much–really interesting how Earlham (super tiny) has such extensive offerings. He’s applied to all of these so we will see what happens. We’ve only visited Dickinson so far from this list, and I thought it seemed phenomenal.

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So to the OP:

One thing I sometimes like to check is how many people actually end up graduating with a certain major, on the theory people will “vote with their feet” and tend to switch to majors with good reputations that are serving kids well, and out of majors that are not.

Languages are tricky because a lot of people do them as secondary majors, minors, to fill language requirements, and so on, so primary majors alone are really not fully capturing the number of kids with some sort of concentrated interest in that department. Smaller departments also may vary a lot year to year. I can’t entirely solve all that, but this site at least combines together data for primary/secondary majors, for one year of data provided by the NCES:

If you put in Japanese Language and Literature as the major, limit it to up to 4347 undergrads, include both primary and secondary majors, the colleges with 5+:

St Olaf 11
North Central 8
Middlebury 8
Carthage 8
Macalester 7
Gustavus 7
Vassar 6
Colgate 6
Puget Sound 5
Mount Union 5
Kenyon 5
DePauw 5
Bennington 5

This is just a sampling, but that gives you an idea of what a healthy and popular department at a smaller college might be getting, and a non-exclusive list of such departments.

It is non-exclusive in part because if we did this a different year, likely some of these would be lower but others higher. Also, there is a standard set of codes NCES uses for reporting, but different colleges structure things differently.

Like Earlham, as people have mentioned, has a very good Japanese programs, but didn’t appear on this list. That is because they use the Japanese Studies code for their major, and then if you want to specifically concentrate on language you can do what they call Focus Two inside that major:

OK, but with that clue, we can go back to the source above and check Japanese Studies:

Willamette 7
Furman 6
Gettysburg 5
Earlham 5

And there we go, we “found” Earlham as expected (edit: and yes, that 5 means a lot for a relatively small college!).

Anyway, just a tool you might be interested in playing with.

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This goes back to one needs to check the schedule because many schools offer classes but not when you need them, especially if there’s not enough heft.

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The OP asked for advice with finding LACs that have a specific set of majors, not about the history of immigration, as interesting and as relevant as that topic may be.

Thank you all for your cooperation.

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@NiceUnparticularMan, what site were you referring to? It’s looks to be really useful.

Lots of great suggestions here, but I’ll throw one more. Kenyon College has a strong language program (offers both French and Japanese) and opportunity to work as a language TA:

https://www.kenyon.edu/academics/departments-and-majors/modern-languages-literatures/kenyon-language-program/

They do offer music lessons to non-majors: my daughter, who graduated this spring, took lessons in two instruments all four years, and she wasn’t a music major.

No international business major, as far as I know, but they do have a good international studies program.

Kenyon does have some Greek life but it’s not dominant at all and it’s more like clubs. My daughter wasn’t looking for Greek life in college (quite the opposite), and it wasn’t an issue at all there.

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I meant to include a link!

Here it is:

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jonboeckenstedt/viz/BachelorsDegreesAwardedin2022/Dashboard1

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Great site! Thanks much. :+1:

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