But what about all the parents out there whose attitude is: “I’m not sending you to college to have fun”? Perhaps, they should look outside of NESCAC?
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I think my Wes NESCAC’er had fun, but her academic and athletic commitments were not stress free by any means. While one of Wesleyan’s greatest cultural attributes is a clear sense on campus that you are free to be your authentic self, which IMO aligns well with “fun”, it is a mistake to not recognize that the place is crawling with Type A personalities.
I often go back to @circuitrider 's wisdom on this particular group of schools and say that they are more similar than different.
Starting with a fairly common idea of fun, they can all make a serious run at the title in the category of drinking and partying.
And I gather all the schools put on more and varied activities than any kid could ever hope to exhaust or experience.
I think the big variable is location and the type of environment to which a kid would want immediate access. For outdoor recreation, it would be hard to beat Middlebury. For urban amenities, it would be hard to beat Tufts. For my kids, a bias towards more city/town immediately around the college and against remote locations expressed itself strongly during the tours, and they take after me in that respect. I live in Seattle, and always will; but I can be on a ferry to the Olympic peninsula or driving in the Cascade mountain range within an hour on any day. For me and mine, we’d rather wake up to the coffee shop right down the block and drive to the trail head than the other way around.
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Maybe Wesleyan is the UW-Madison of the NESCAC: just a tad irreverent, a hodge-podge campus (a little bit of this, a little bit of that…), espousers of fun in its many forms, seekers of truth, and founders of high ideals.
Work hard, play hard.
Madtown and Middletown, UW and WU
ETA: This is not to say that the above description doesn’t apply to other schools. It just seems that the vibes are quite similar between Wes and Wisc.
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UW Madison - the school that is like 850 on the Unversity’s of the World report, with a horrible yield, and no one recruits there and blah blah blah. Where Michigan grads find their minimum wage employees?
That Wisconsin? 
Sorry - that was for frederic engelhard
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Not that one. Maybe that person is thinking of UW-Milwaukee. I’m talking about the one that’s top-50ish in ARWU and Times global rankings, has like 30 Nobels and Pulitzers (each), discovered Vitamins A and B, spends over $1 billion annually on research, and was an original member of the AAU in 1900.
Flip it. Most likely to become an I-banker = Williams.
I dunno. Have you heard about the Middlebury Mafia? 
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Based on student satisfaction surveys, semi-dubious category rankings in places like Princeton Review and USNWR, and a single summer visit, I’d assume the general answer is Bowdoin.
While Bowdoin probably produces more investment bankers than half the NESCAC, I imagine that Bowdoin grads go into the industry full of idealistic ambitions of capitalizing underdeveloped communities for the common good before their inevitable slide into cocaine, prostitutes, and ruthless capitalism. But unlike, say, Wharton’s production of readymade Gordon Gekko clones, Bowdoin’s investment bankers at least start their careers well intentioned.
Caveat: My knowledge of investment banking is based exclusively on the works of Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.
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This thread is fun - and a Rorschach blot! I am quite certain that there are students at each of these wonderful campuses who find the QoL to be outstanding - and conversely, who would be distinctly less content elsewhere. The townies, the skiers, the lab rats, the foodies, the keggers, the D&D-ers, the bibliophiles, the grinders, the gamers - there’s a place for all of them!
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Very doubtful. Well intentioned idealists rarely if ever make it there in the first place. The recruiting machine that is IB can smell a bad fit like a shark smells blood in the water. And the profession self-selects. You have to really want to be in IB given the demand for those spots. Even with elite schools save for maybe some top 1%-er quant kids, IB never comes begging.
This also brings up a stereotype about kids at these LACs that I think is a bit overblown, particularly at places like Wesleyan, Bowdoin and Bates. There is a percentage of students who are not idealists or want to make the world a better place on most if not all of these campuses, and they’re not unicorns.
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I agree. I’d say Middlebury and Williams for investment banking. Amherst would be behind those two if I had to guess. You can get there from others, but those two schools have worn a path.
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