Swarthmore's fortes

interesteddad
Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:58:17 +0000

From a parent of a very confused (how am I ever going to decide) 18 year old who has both A (early write) and S (we’re hoping he’ll get in soon)



I’m lousy at Amherst/Swarthmore comparisons. For a number of reasons, I’m just not as familiar with Amherst. When I visited as a high schooler in the early 1970s, it was preppy beyond belief. In an era of hiking boots, flannel shirts, blue jeans, and long hair, I was put off by the groups of Amherst men walking around in the middle of the afternoon in coats and ties. Plus, there were no girls at the time, which didn’t strike me as terribly appealing. The school still draws heavily from the New England prep schools; however, it has undergone a significant transformation with an emphasis on diversity of all types. So, my old perceptions are dated.

My daughter never looked at Amherst for several reasons. Two hours away, it was just too darn close to home. About half of her senior class (mostly the wrong half academically) was headed to UMass, so the town of Amherst didn’t strike her as much in the way of a new horizon. Plus, it was love at first sight at Swarthmore and she had double-legacy status at Williams, so there wasn’t much strategic admissions purpose to add Amherst to the mix. Remember, she was up against the tsunami of applications at New England colleges from fellow Massachusetts high schoolers. Getting into any of these elite schools from Massachusetts is a daunting challenge.

The things I do know about Amherst. It has a higher percentage of athletic recruits than Swarthmore (mostly because even the smallest NESCAC schools aggressively support both football and men’s hockey – the two sports that require the most compromise in admissions). The numbers are impossibly difficult when trying to support both of these two large mens sports with only 750 to 800 male students at a college – the football team alone accounts for nearly 10% of the entire male student body. But, it is not as heavily athletic focused as Williams, which not only has all of the same teams, but also supports full JV programs in many sports. Swarthmore has never had hockey and they finally pulled the plug on football six years ago, citing the irreconcilable demands on admissions slots.

Amherst definitely has more drinking than Swarthmore – at or above the national binge drinking rates compared to Swarthmore being signficantly below. I really think this may, in part, be a vestige of an all-male culture – an example of how Swarthmore’s coed history shapes its campus culture in subtle ways. Both have a small fraternity presence, although Amherst officially denies that their’s exists.

Swarthmore “expands” its campus with easy access to Philadelphia and NYC without a car. Amherst expands its campus with the 5-College area, which is a plus in many ways – although I’m not sure that the town being dominated by ZooMass is both a positive and a negative.

Swarthmore wears its commitment to social justice on its sleeve more than Amherst; however, recent Amherst Presidents have been vocally pushing the college in that direction – basically the idea that colleges should instill a component of engaged responsible citizenship above and beyond simple booklearning.

Academics, grad school admissions, and so forth are so excellent at both schools that I really don’t think there’s anything to choose from on that front. Swarthmore produces a few more PhD academic types; Amherst produces a few more MBA investment bankers – but, both produce a good number of both.

Both have very large per student endowments.

At the end of the day, I don’t see any bad choice. Both schools are excellent.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. In USNEWS, Swarthmore lists its five top cross-applicant schools (in no particular order) as:

Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst

Amherst lists its five top cross-applicant schools as:

Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Williams

Williams dumps Princeton and Brown off their list:

Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Bowdoin