I don’t know, @Chrchill - the “downward trending” items appear to be Harvard’s endowment and that brand:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/9/23/hmc-returns-2016/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/fashion/harvard-scandal-alumni-embarrassment-shame.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/10/30/stanford-vs-harvard/
I will leave the football team out of this 
@Chrchill great list, couldn’t agree more.
This is very funny and very off for the following reasons:
Most Vassar alums/students I’ve met…including a younger relative tend to not be nearly as strident politically or could even be apolitical in comparison to their Oberlin or Wesleyan counterparts. This holds even with the many friends/acquaintances who are in Oberlin-Vassar LTRs.
Laid back is the last adjective I’d use to describe Oberlin’s campus culture and its students.
Find the laid back part more ironic as Oberlin’s campus culture’s loud strident progressive political activism is one of the key reasons why town-gown relations were so bad when I attended.
All in good fun. 
@nostalgicwisdom - I get why you personified the women’s colleges as females, but why are all the coed schools male (except Vassar, obviously a nod to its former single-sex designation)?
Well, there’s Mudd as a female, though her name be Harvey.
That’s forward thinking indeed!
Very interesting observations re LAC. Tks.
oberlin - the students are so far to the left they’ve circled to the right.
I’ll try some of the LACs:
Williams - Tutorials, middle of nowhere/bucolic, jock/nerd/preppy balance
Amherst - Open curriculum, one of the 5 Colleges, sports
Swat - Intellectual and difficult, (mostly) very liberal, Quaker Consortium
Pomona - California setting, most prestigious Claremont
Middlebury - Bucolic, great study abroad program, party rep
Bowdoin - Staid & proud, great food, nice location
Haverford - Honor code, garden-like environment, Quaker Consortium
Wellesley - Gorgeous, stately, connected
Carleton - Rigorous, rural but close to a big city
Wesleyan - Quite liberal, very artsy, diverse strengths
Hamilton - Split campus, good mix, great writing
W&L - Huge greek life, more conservative/moderate than most
CMC - Leadership, business/law/politics seekers
My impression of many of the LACs (visited most of them with an LAC focused Daughter who goes to one of them now)
Williams: isolated and happy to be isolated, tutorials, almost a mirror of Amherst but a little more sciencey
Amherst: open curriculum, economic diversity, almost a mirror of Williams but a little more English/History
Swarthmore: intense, intellectual, very liberal, a bit neurotic
Pomona: best in the West, Claremont Consortium is like one big university with Pomona as top dog
Middlebury: outdoorsy, preppy, foreign languages, incredible athletic complex
Bowdoin: great food and dorms, beautiful setting by the ocean, also preppy
Carleton: strong in sciences, friendly, unfortunately often forgotten up in frozen Minnesota
Wesleyan: very liberal and activist, creative, larger enrollment than other LACs
Haverford: really quite small, Quaker, close-knit
Hamilton: focus on writing, cold weather, red brick colonial feel
W&L: southern and conservative, business students, greek life dominates
Davidson: southern but less conservative, honor code, Div. I sports
Claremont McKenna: money/career focused, no frats but still a frat-like culture
Colgate: beautiful campus, cold and isolated, frats and beer
Oberlin: arts and music, liberal
She didn’t consider women’s colleges, but my impression of
Wellesley: the queen of women’s colleges, does everything as well as the boys do, stunning campus
Smith: feminist and activist, great college town
I didn’t think Bowdoin was on the radar for kids at Tufts. We were looking at midsize research universities in urban(ish) areas.
Thumbnail for Tufts - internationally oriented students who aren’t interested in waiting until they graduate to change the world.
Pomona is definitely a girl whose name means Apple. Gwyenth P would be proud. But I have to take exception re Swarthmore being more intellectual. Pomona has a very large STEM population of students and a solid alliane with Caltech. Brainy couldn’t be brainier.
Nice, @preppedparent. I sign on to that.
Pomona is brainy as hell. So are Swarthmore, Amherst and Williams. When I said “intellectual” what I meant was a school where people are more nerdy/eggheady. Swarthmore is more like a small version of the University of Chicago or Yale, while Pomona is more like, I dunno, a small version of Stanford (if that makes sense).
I was not suggesting that Swat has smarter students, just that it has a different atmosphere.
I wrote that a few years back, and not super seriously :P. I’d definitely revise some things now, like the ages and gender. Pomona and Swarthmore have always struck me as more feminine than A/W/B/M. Harvey Mudd being a girl was because that school is bridging gender differences in STEM more than just about any other school in the country.
Swarthmore and Pomona were both in my top 3 LACs along with Bowdoin, and I visited Discoswat and just graduated from Pomona. They’re so similar on paper to each other that it’s a little disconcerting, so I can’t imagine them as anything but twins. They both have student bodies of around 1600 students. They both have slightly more females than males and around 45-50% students of color/55% students on financial aid. They’re not particularly known for their athletics programs unlike their peers. Their endowments per student is a hair difference. They both have female black presidents. They both were co-ed from the start. They were both founded with religious roots- Quakers and Congregationalists. They both have more STEM students than most LACs. They both produce more PhDs than many of their peers. Their average starting salary is the same. Their average SAT, ACT, and high school rank of enrolled students are close to each other. They’re both the crown schools of a consortium of liberal art colleges. They’re both suburban and located within proximity to a major city. They both are home to very activist and liberal student bodies. A surprise to me- their average student GPA are almost the same (3.56 vs 3.59), so I don’t really understand the whole grade deflation reputation Swarthmore has. Both have green and beautiful campuses, though Swarthmore has an arboretum and Pomona’s facilities/dorms/dining seem more up-to-date and better overall.
That said, their atmospheres felt very distinct when I visited. Swarthmore just felt a lot more serious and stuffy to me, and the students came across as weirder/quirkier/more intellectual. Pomona students felt “cooler”, happier, more down-to-earth, approachable, and all around nicer, and I attribute that to the primarily to the SoCal vibe. I would not say Pomona is less rigorous or that their students are less intellectual as a whole, but when an attitude is explicit vs implicit, it does create a difference between them. Hence the “they’re twins living on opposite coasts who’re more similar than not, though Pomona tries to hides its love of intellectualism under a laid-back Californian attitude”.
Maybe others who visited the two can chime in? The above is just my perception of them.
Any input/vibe for University of Richmond?
University of Richmond - The slightly less scary brother of Washington & Lee.
@circuitrider Why is Richmond scary?
My impression from knowing several Swat alums including some clients is that the academic atmosphere there is much more intensive in terms of heavy workload and high academic rigor compared with their academic peers.
In that respect, they seem similar to schools with similar reputations such as MIT, Caltech, CMU(Engineering/CS), Reed, UChicago, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Harvey Mudd, the FSAs*, etc.
He felt the academics at the school he finished at were more rigorous/challenging, but the FSA students took a much higher courseload and had far less discretionary time due to mandated scheduled PT, military drills/training classes/programs, etc.
Well done. Vassar and Wes were the top two for my daughter, and I grew up very near to Oberlin. While obviously toungue in cheek, that is both funny and a bit true.
I spent a lot of time at most of the Ivys with my son a few years ago, so here is my super accurate and truthful read on the Ivys.
Harvard. The first born. Believes it sets the standard in all things, and looks at its younger siblings (Y and P) with some relatively good natured disdain. Feels less good natured disdain for its “cousins” in the rest of the Ivy. Thinks of Cornellians as the weird step kid.
Yale. The middle child. Caught between the entitled older sibling and the over achieving baby of the family. Does lots of things very well, but is a bit overshadowed on one hand by the older sib (grad schools) and the younger (undergrad).
Princeton. Orange. The youngest of the “big three”, and as the color suggests always trying to draw attention and prove that it is just a bit better than its older sibs. Gets annoyed when the big kids don’t take it seriously.
Columbia. The city school. Although not one of the big three, it is too cosmopolitan to care. No, really. Just don’t confuse it with Barnard or God help us, NYU.
Penn. Still upset that Penn State’s name is close to their own. Really wants Princeton to hate them. Did you know Wharton is part of UPenn?
Dartmouth. The crazy cousin who lives in the woods and drinks too much when the family gets together on holidays. Wants to be the Thoreau of the Ivy League.
Brown. Who are you to judge me?
Cornell. We are too part of the Ivy league!