Swartmore vs Grinnell vs Carleton vs Vassar

College Search & Lists
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I don’t have first-hand knowledge. What I have is my own little, highly fallible resource, a Linkedin account that allows me to explore the number of employees at a company like Google with credentials from various colleges. It’s a very “nervous” platform; I can never duplicate the same results from one day to the next and sometimes not even within the same hour. But, with those caveats in mind, they show Carleton and Grinnell to be broadly comparable in that both colleges appear to have dozens of employees employed by Google, in both San Francisco and New York, the overwhelming majority of whom appear to be as engineers (I’m assuming software engineers.)

However, what emerges after about half an hour of playing around with the site (I even compared the results with a couple of NESCACs for comparison), is that Carleton while only a few hundred students larger, has twice as many alumni working as engineers at Google. Again, I do not swear by the results. Obviously, it depends on the number of graduates from each school who have Linkedin accounts. But, since you tagged me - this is the best I can come up with. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Though it was created several years ago, the chart in reply #26 can give you an ideas as to what courses to look for in a LAC CS program:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/math-computer-science-majors/1814245-computer-science-at-some-smaller-schools-including-liberal-arts-colleges-p2.html

In deciding between Carleton and Grinnell, you might want to consider the comparative breadths of their general curricula. For example, Carleton offers an extensive geology program, so if you think you might want to explore in that field, then you would have that option.

63

As suggested earlier, you can check early career salary data through U.S. News.

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/carleton-college-2340

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/grinnell-college-1868

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Thank you @circuitrider for your concern. All your research is shedding light on the positives of Carleton, I’m trying to find negatives but am unable to do this.

Thank you @merc81

Could you PLEASE tell me about the social scene at Carleton, Grinnell and Vassar. I would like a chill environment where I can socialise and balance my academics and tennis as well.

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Carleton does HAVE a social scene (as I’m sure they all do) S is currently pre-med at Carleton. He is friends with athletes (as well as international pre-med students) that have successfully balanced their sport with academics. Being an international, you will need stellar grades if you plan to attend a US medical school. The professors (effort put into teaching) at Carleton is truly top notch. S has found having ample resources & dedicated professors makes a difference in successfully tackling/understanding some of the more challenging courses.
Good luck with your decision. Do not worry about the social scene. All the LACs you mentioned will have more social activities each week than you can attend (& successfully balance sport/academics).

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@santorini thank you so much for your feedback. I’m glad that your S is doing pre med and also enjoying the same. Carleton does have good professors and ample resources. Are drinking and drugs also prevalent on campus? What about peer pressure?

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@lin123 There is drinking & drugs (marijuana/molly) on all (or at least most) college campuses. Carleton is no exception. However, I would not call it prevelant. Nobody will care if you decide to go to a party and NOT DRINK. Many call Carl’s quirky, which people often interpret as “nerdy”. I would characterize them as dedicated students (perhaps where the nerdy comes from?), comfortable in their own skin, and with a playful sense of humor. Hope that helps.

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Since OP is an international the job prospects they should focus on should be in their home country. There’s no guarantee they can work in CS in the US. If they’re interested in medicine and need financial aid I don’t know how US med schools would work out for them either.

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@santorini thank you for your feedback.

@austinmshauri I’m interested in financial aid only for undergrad. Won’t be needing it for medical school. I’m keeping CS just a back up, if I don’t get into medical school. I’m leaning in on carleton, and as soon as I make my decision I’ll be starting a new thread where hopefully you guys can help me with my major.

All of you have been really helpful, I’ll surely keep you informed with my decision.

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My daughter was accepted to both Carleton and Grinnell and chose Grinnell. Ten years ago maybe I’d have encouraged her to choose Carleton, but Grinnell is attracting very high achieving students these days and the stats are going up. When my daughter applied, ACT scores at Grinnell were actually a little higher than at Carleton. Grinnell has become very academically rigorous. We did a serious comparison of course rigor while she was trying to decide. We felt that Grinnell was at least equal to, if not slightly ahead of Carleton. Students get a lot of homework at Grinnell. It’s not busy work. It’s seriously academic and in many cases graduate level. We also thought Grinnell had better facilities. The labs are pretty amazing. Grinnell has a big endowment and the students definitely benefit. Carleton and Grinnell are both fantastic schools . You’ll do great at either.
P.S.: We visited Swarthmore too. Beautiful campus. Didn’t apply because kids looked unhappy. Great academics though. I don’t think you’ll get lesser academics at Grinnell or Carleton. They’re all top-notch schools.
P.P.S.: I don’t think Grinnell does FA for international students. You might want to check. They do merit aid though.

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Go to Grinnell! They have amazing academics and, for a school of its size, it is incredibly well connected. Most of its graduates have placement in a job or graduate school right out of college. My sister went to Grinnell and, purely through a college program, secured a job at Goldman Sachs, where she has been working and doing well for the past few years.

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@DadIDJAME that’s true Grinnell is working on it’s infrastructure. On the other hand even Carleton has come up with a new science building which will play to my favour. Grinnell’s endowment does help students plan Research.
How is the GPA stats like at Grinnell, i would really have to keep my GPA around 3.9s or 4 in order to be a competitive applicant for medical school? Are students able to do that with the academic rigrour?

Yes, Swarthmore has a beautiful campus but the students are not happy there because of it’s tough academics. That’s one reason why Swarthmore is very low on my list now.

I’ve already checked that, Grinnell is offering me aid based on my academic Portfolio.
Kindly shed some light on the GPA at Grinnell.

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@lin123 to be clear, Grinnell is not working on its infrastructure. It already has superb science facilities, in large part because its endowment was an early investor in Intel and the gains over the past decades meant it had much more money to invest in infrastructure than its peers. Other schools are catching up to it.

You face a fortunate decision, to be deciding on ED as a recruit at some of the top US small liberal arts colleges. As a parent who visited Grinnell numerous times and knows several current and recent Carleton alum – I would suggest that the biggest differences will be in team culture at each school and the impact of trimester at Carleton vs. semester at Grinnell. The education, the support, the peer group, the opportunities at Carleton and Grinnell will be comparable. A current tennis player parent has shared with you on another thread about her student’s Grinnell experience. I really don’t think you are going to get new information here which will push the decision one way or the other. As the parent of an athlete at small liberal arts college, I would suggest you make your decision based on where you get the vibe of being “at home” from the coach and teammates.

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I haven’t read all of the comments but my general impression is that Swarthmore is uber competitive. Someone upstream described it as “extra” this and “extra” that. I’ve personally met several Swatties and not one that I know ended up enjoying their experience. One is currently there, started out loving it because it’s stimulating, but then crashed and burned from the pressure. This is the same thing I’ve heard over and over – needlessly competitive spirit among the students. Also the consortium thing with Swat is overplayed. While you CAN go to Haverford and BMC because of bus schedules, Swat is much more isolated. BMC and Haverford easily can go from campus to campus. And the train to Philly is easy from there. Swatties report feeling much more isolated–there’s no little town outside of Swat. It’s more like being in the country.

Vassar is not competitive among the students. It’s got a high level of students and academics and has a more relaxed atmosphere. It’s super easy to get into NYC from there on the MetroNorth commuter train – a day trip to and from the City is easy. Poughkeepsie, while not the most astonishing city on the planet, is still a city with real opportunities – music venues off campus, internship opportunities that have led to several jobs of graduates that I personally know. NYC obviously offers great opportunity too.

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“And the train to Philly is easy from there. Swatties report feeling much more isolated–there’s no little town outside of Swat. It’s more like being in the country.”

SEPTA station on the edge of Swat’s campus.
Plenty of happy Swatties. :slight_smile:

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Here to counter everything @Dustyfeathers likes to say about Swat. Two of my own children, many of their friends and classmates, the children of other friends, and my own classmates and I would argue against every single point except that it is stimulating and yes, intense at times.
Whether or not it feels even the slightest bit competitive (let alone “needlessly competitive,” which I’ve never heard) depends on the major(s). Most are truly cooperative.
Unless you live in a major city, there is no sense in which being at Swat is like “being in the country,” in the way that a school like Kenyon or Oberlin or (we can go on and on) could feel. The train station to Philly is literally at the edge of campus. It runs to other small boros/villages with livelier restaurant scenes, like Media, as well as into Philly.
Can speak to plenty of students, distant and recent past, successfully participating in the full consortium, both academically and - wrt the Trico - socially.
If you’re not feeling Swat, OP, that is absolutely fine. I agree with @Midwestmomofboys (and many other posters), all of the schools you’re weighing offer terrific opportunities! But it’s not actually true that “the students are unhappy” at Swat because of the tough academics.
And PS, Vassar is lovable in dozens of ways but to say that it’s easy to get to NYC from Vassar is a little misleading. The train trip is easy, but you still have to get from school over to the train station, and it’s not really walkable.

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Sorry I missed this thread while on vacation.

I have a virtual niece (child of our best friends; I’ve known her since before she was born; the families had at least one meal per week together while our children were growing up) who was a 2014 CS graduate from Carleton (actually, a double major in Linguistics and Computer Science). Carleton was by far the weakest college on her final list in CS. She chose it over others (including Carnegie-Mellon SCS and the University of Chicago) because she liked the feeling on campus and because she thought it would give her more opportunities (vs. CMU and vs. engineering-school programs elsewhere) to double-major.

Things worked out perfectly for her. She got exactly the job she hoped she would coming out of college. Carleton in fact did not have the faculty to meet her needs fully, but what it did was to fund her to do summer research with CS faculty at a major university elsewhere. She continued to work with them remotely when she returned to Carleton, and they helped her enormously in taking the next step in her career.

She is not a hard partier by any stretch of the imagination, but she enjoyed the social life at Carleton. She’s shy, more than a little nerdy, and not flirty at all; none of that prevented her from making good friends and feeling satisfied with her life there.

In my community, liberal arts colleges are very popular and well respected. Carleton, Swarthmore, and Vassar are all basically seen as peers here. Swarthmore is the snootiest of them, and the most high-pressure, but Carleton is also seen as a very high-quality academic environment, and Vassar, too. Oberlin is also very popular, and well-respected, but somewhat less intense than the other three (not necessarily a bad thing). I probably know more people, ages 30-65, who went to Oberlin than people who went to Swarthmore, notwithstanding that Swarthmore is a 20-minute commuter train ride away, and Oberlin is about 600 miles away. People are aware of Grinnell, but I don’t know anyone who has gone there.

My sister-in-law was a visiting professor at Swarthmore a few years ago. Her home institution is a large public university, and she found Swarthmore very staid and boring, with mainly wealthy, privileged students. It’s true that Swarthmore students don’t actually take much advantage of the consortium for classes, but it would definitely be possible to take the train in to Penn periodically to work at a lab or hospital there. I think it’s significantly more awkward to get anywhere interesting on a regular basis from Carleton (Minneapolis-St. Paul), Oberlin (Cleveland), or Vassar (NYC), but weekend day-trips are doable. Grinnell . . . there’s no place easy to get to from there.

Fundamentally, though, there’s no academic/reputational difference among the schools that would be worth spending a lot more money for, or going with a coach you like less.

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Socially, Carlton may be the most friendly and you still have Minneapolis close to enjoy a city, and also easy to fly in and out of Minneapolis as an international student. Vassar is remote, on the Hudson River, way north, so weather is actually more cloudy than cold Minnesota, of weather could help push you one way or another. Carlton shines for teaching and friendliness of the midwestern type of student. The quarter/trimester calendar means you only take three classes at a time at Carlton.

Philadelphia is still one of the highest crime cities in the USA, much more dangerous compared to Minneapolis/St Paul, although certainly Swarthmore is very very safe.

Swarthmore’s motto used to be “Where fun comes to die”. Also, one time a friend of mine was on the Swarthmore campus and asked where to buy an ice cream cone. The answer was “We don’;t have time for ice cream”. Also, about 1/3 of Swarthmore undergrads choose a masters like thesis project and do a lot of one on one time with a professor, while 2/3’s of Swarthmore students just take classes as at most universities. I find Swarthmore too intense. Its a Quaker school, originally and its also very negative about religion, atheism reins at Swarthmore, moreso than at Cartlon College or your other choices, if that matters at all to you.

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I wonder if there is some prize for the school with the most ridiculous exaggerations and misconceptions attached. It’s likely Swat would win.
Swarthmore’s motto has never been “where fun comes to die.” (That’s Chicago, and even they’re joking.) :smiley:
And there’s always ice cream in the dining hall.
Atheism reigns? I don’t even know what would cause somebody to say that. There’s a very active Newman community, a Muslim Students Association, a vibrant Chabad and a Kehilah, a Sangha (Buddist), a Quaker Society, a Christian Fellowship, and a Progressive Christian group. Plus a Gospel Choir, though that’s more about talent than faith. And I’ve probably left somebody out.
Again, if you don’t like Swarthmore, that’s perfectly fine. But why the need to bash it with false and misleading info?

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Several posts here prove that no one can truly help OP make this decision. People are posting without knowledge.

“Philadelphia is still one of the highest crime cities in the USA, much more dangerous compared to Minneapolis/St Paul, although certainly Swarthmore is very very safe.”

Students at Swat have zero need to visit the bad bits of Philly so I think this comparison is a stretch.