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<p>It’s not that they hide it, it’s that they don’t go out of their way to explain something that would be very easy to explain. A simple bullet list of the five schools and how they fit into the overall Claremont structure would be so simple. It would help each college position itself. Without that explanation of specialization, an unknowledgeable potential customer approaches the group of schools thinking the only thing differentiating the five schools is their acceptance rates. </p>
<p>BTW, I found the stats. The five Claremont colleges average 6000 cross registrations a year. On a per college basis, that’s slightly less that the 2600 between Bryn Mawr and Haverford – which have divvied up quite a few departments exclusively at one school or the other.</p>
<p>Swarthmore students don’t cross register very much. The stats I found were 119 Bryn Mawr registrations at Swat and 33 Swathmore cross registrations at Bryn Mawr in a recent year. One of the reasons that Swarthmore’s numbers are so low is that, unlike Bryn Mawr and Haverford, Swarthmore only lets Tri-Co students register on a space-available basis after Swarthmore students have had first crack at Swarthmore’s courses during pre-registration.</p>
<p>When I say that Pomona could stand on its own, I mean with no particular hardship if the rest of the consortium vanished from the face of the earth. They would have the same departments, same courses, and an obscene endowment to support them. CMC, Scripps, and Pitzer would be scrambling initially, because if the consortium and the Joint Science department ceased to exist, they wouldn’t have any science courses! They obviously would address that, but there would be a period of transition and a serious expense involved.</p>