markowpolo, I’ve hoped that a current student would show up to answer your questions, but they don’t plug into CC very often. Here is a link to an older thread that addresses some of your questions: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/whitman-college/1480265-current-sophomore-if-anyone-has-any-questions-id-love-to-answer-them.html#latest
I must admit that your question about diversity followed by the characterization, “just a bunch of rich entitled white kids”, made me pause. Yes, Whitman has mostly white students and has students from affluent families, as many other liberal arts colleges do, and there are historical reasons for that. The liberal arts educational model is pretty specific, here is a good description I found:
"What makes a liberal arts college is the philosophy of education. That’s all. A liberal arts college believes that the purpose of education is to make you a well educated and well rounded citizen. To that end, they tend to require a common core of general education courses of all students.
Liberal arts colleges tend to offer bachelor’s degrees and maybe a few master’s (usually in education). They don’t offer as many graduate degrees as do the research universities. Because that’s not their purpose - their purpose is to pass on knowledge. They tend to be much smaller than the regional master’s or research universities. Classes are smaller and are almost always taught by a professor and not a graduate assistant."
This means that liberal arts colleges are expensive to operate because they can’t save money by paying graduate students to teach the undergraduates, and they have to maintain high quality programs with the tuition dollars of a small number of students and a relatively small pool of alumni donors. This pushes up the tuition bill, often to levels that shut out those with lower incomes, and in this country there is still a tendency for the affluent to be white. Many liberal arts schools, including Whitman, have seen the value of bringing more racial and socioeconomic diversity to their campuses and have set about trying to do so. Whitman has, in fact, worked pretty hard to accomplish it. They launched a fund raising campaign that has gone on for several years, one of the objectives is to fund more low income students and students of color, so now is probably a very good time to apply for need based financial aid. We could have never afforded to send our son there without the generous merit aid he received.
I think Whitman suffers in this regard because of it’s location. Lower income students not only have to consider tuition costs, but travel costs as well. While Whitman is in a great location, it’s not near a transportation hub, so a trip there can involve multiple legs to the journey, adding to the cost of attendance. Low cost methods can be found (like taking buses or hitching rides with classmates who drive and live near hubs), but these ways often aren’t evident at first.
The word in your description that keeps bothering me is “entitled”. I can’t think of any of my son’s friends who would fit that description, maybe he just didn’t hang around with people who felt that way. The Whitties I know are quick to help others out, are concerned with the state of the planet and the human race, and are genuinely nice.