<p>sioux2u,
My daughter is a first-year Russian major at Dickinson. When she first started searching as a junior, she hadn’t even heard of Dickinson, but that summer we were in the Lehigh valley looking at a couple of other schools and I happened to see a comment here on CC about Dickinson having a strong language program. We had a free afternoon and made a quick trip to Carlisle and she liked what she saw. She had initially looked at Midd and Swarthmore but, realistically, admission would have been unlikely. She’s a bright but not brilliant student, and there are lots of kids like her out there. She is very happy with the language instruction as well as the overall freshman experience she’s had this year. I’ll admit to worrying a bit about the small size of the Russian department, but she is planning a junior year in Moscow and is confident that she will come out of it fluent. At this point, she plans to continue with advanced studies in Russian.</p>
<p>I’m glad to hear your son is planning a career as a language teacher! I’m a high school teacher, and one thought I’ll throw out there is that one should at least weigh the expected cost of the undergraduate degree against the expected income of the student, unless your situation is such that financing college is not an issue. I was responsible for my own education costs and even with good financial aid and fairly low public U tuition, I took eight years to pay off a relatively small student loan on my teacher’s salary. I have enough seniority now to earn a decent salary, but during the first years of my career, my kids could have qualified for a free school lunch if they hadn’t packed their own. I believe in the value of a good liberal arts education, but I would really hesitate to recommend that a future teacher take on a lot of debt to finance it. In my daughter’s case, we knew we would need some help, and Dickinson came in second out of her top three in terms of the financial aid award. Fortunately, it was enough that we can manage it, and in fact, we would have had to pay almost as much out of pocket for our in-state flagship.</p>