Huge inference in a comparison of an apple and a monkey. My goodness, “Yale” is a name with which even the most unsophisticated person I know is generally familiar. “Middlebury” is a name that escapes many educated, urban, professional people. It’s not even close from a branding standpoint. Different galaxies.
I think it may well be plausible. With exponentially increasing access to information for the general public who spend more time on the internet than ever before, with more rankings and related commentary being thrown around the web, with the real branding strides that the NESCAC has made in the last handful of years, particularly among the club sports demographic(1), with all of that and more I can see how Midd would scoop up another 4 to 6 thousand qualified applications, especially if they did anything to make it easier to apply.
There are a lot, and I mean A LOT, of people out there who think universities are what you attend when going to college, and everything else for those people is hopelessly obscure. The LAC is a creature of the informed, not of the people who pull their knowledge of higher ed from watching Gilmore Girls. Going from zero to some level of increased recognition is different than going from famous to famous. Yale didn’t get more well known over a short time span, but it is plausible that Middlebury did.
It is the rare bird with a substandard GPA and test score who is going to say, “what the hell? let’s throw in an application to a small private college in the middle of nowhere in a middle of nowhere state 3,000 miles away from where I live.” Those people apply to Berkeley, to UCLA, to University of Texas, Michigan, some of the Ivies they’ve heard of, Vanderbilt, Duke … again, household names. Small private colleges appeal to intellectual kids almost exclusively.
(1) At my Ds’ well known and well regarded premier soccer club based in Redmond Washington, a club full of kids of Microsoft, Amazon and other tech company professionals, the recruiting arm didn’t focus on LACs at all back when my oldest started. For those kids who weren’t headed for D1 play, the next level of focus was D2 and if you weren’t good enough to get traction there they pretty much encouraged you to get over playing college soccer and move on with your life. By the time my youngest was out, they were fully engaged with the NESCAC as a brand as well as plugged into sending kids to the PNW and California LACs. They had plenty of kids who were D1 capable players (like my youngest) choosing small college play for the academics, which brings the NESCAC right into focus. That’s just one club in one sport. That was a marked change that happened over a relatively short period of time.
PS: see my post above regarding a USA Today ranking of college sports traditions that includes the Little Three rivalry amongst such titans as Texas A&M’s 12th Man, Ohio State’s band dotting the i, and more.
