Swarthmore's fortes

interesteddad
Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:16:25 +0000

Collegialmom:

The saddest day in College Confidential’s history was earlier this month when Carolyn was “run off” by people questioning her motives.

Calicollegegirl:

I would estimate that approximately half of the students at Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams are interchangeable. There is a lot of overlap. There are “intellectuals” at all three schools. “Geeks” at all three schools. “Jocks” at all three schools. “Preps” at all three schools.

The differences lie with the proportions in each student body, which in turn leads to some noticeable differences in campus cultures – relatively less “blotto-drinking” at Swarthmore, relatively more emphasis on athletics at Williams, etc. They are all excellent schools.

One of the reasons that I like Swarthmore so much is that it is very similar to what I experienced at Williams 30 years ago – similar size, similar emphasis on academics. Looking back, I felt that the Williams experience back in the day only had two signficant drawbacks. First, the student body was too homogenously white and preppy. Second, the location was so remote that it began to feel claustrophic and escaping for a night or a weekend away from the ivory tower was a pain in the butt. Those are going to be drawbacks at any small liberal arts college. However, Swarthmore’s easy proximity to civilization (i.e. a mall, Philadelphia, NY, etc.) and its “quirky” student body tend to reduce the impact of those two issues.

Today, I think Amherst and Swarthmore are more similar than Williams and Swarthmore. I don’t think that was the case 30 years ago. Swarthmore has, IMO, changed the least of the three schools over that period of time. Amherst and Williams have undergone huge changes, starting with the decisions to go coed. Amherst has gone from the most preppy of the three schools to a strong emphasis on diversity, both ethnic and socio-economic. Williams has grown significantly and, beginning in the 1980s, placed a major emphasis on athletics, which has impacted both its admissions and its campus culture, probably to the detriment of its “old-school” academics – or so some of the professors think. The changes at Swarthmore are a reflection of the times (2005 is not the 1960s or 1970s), rather than any shift in the school’s mission, style, or priorities.

There is a factionalization of the student body at both Williams and Amherst – both have dorms that are highly segregated by interest or social scene, with some tension between groups. That is not the case to the same degree at Swarthmore (due in large part to the housing policy, including the lack of freshman-only and “theme” dorms). I think it’s fair to say that, if you aren’t prepared to live on the same hall with geeks, jocks, gays, straights, teetotallers, frat boys, internationals, students of all ethnicities and accept them all on equal terms, then Swarthmore is probably the wrong college.