We can’t find many selective LACs in the south and south-west (good weather areas) to compare to, since most of the selective ones are in the north-east. Very few selective schools in the south and SW that are private to start with.
But since they got reclassified as national LAC, seems their selectivity is increasing very fast year-after-year. They went from acceptance rate of 34% to 31% to 28% in 3 years. Their ACT range improved by 1 point from last year to this one. They are 38th in the nation (across all schools) when measured by endowment-per-student. So they have the money to buy the metrics.
How far do you see these advances will go till it saturates and stabilizes?
Is a degree from this school considered an appreciating asset?
What other private schools in the south and CA do you compare this school to, for a CS undergrad?
Do you find their planned move to SAA conference from SCAC to be positive or negative, for non-football sports?
If you would like to view an example of a site that places Trinity in a fully national context, it ranks 69th overall and 76th by selectivity in this WalletHub analysis:
My D23 is at Trinity. The school did send out an email about Niche ranking them highly for LACs and Small Colleges. Around #20 I believe. But I have little idea about rankings and selectivity. I do think Trinity has a lot to offer.
Academics are excellent. My daughter has found her classes very difficult but interesting and her professors have been extremely accessible.
Trinity is a beautiful campus in a beautiful part of San Antonio, which is a fun city for college kids. Affordable to live off campus your senior year and lots of cool stuff to do.
Trinity also has a great endowment, especially for a lesser known school. 1.6 billion. That measures up against many of the nation’s top LACs.
It’s not a perfect place, housing is nice enough but they’re really disorganized, every year there are a lot of complaints. The food is notoriously terrible, even for my eat-anything kid.
Trinity is most often seen as academic peers with Rhodes in Memphis, except Trinity has engineering and a separate small business school. Rhodes has a business major. Neither of them is particularly well known outside of Texas and the South, but they are both highly respected in those parts. Other academic prestige peers in the North would be Skidmore, Trinity CT, Macalester and Denison. In the West, the closest peer would be Colorado College. Trinity U is vastly majority Texas students though and that is ultimately definitional for it.
Other top 60 LACs in the South with Div III sports would be Rhodes, Sewanee and Washington and Lee. Davidson and Furman are Division I. In my view USNR’s LAC rankings get it quite right on prestige and the top 50 LACs are of great academic quality but the second 25 have more of a regional name than a national name, even if categorized as national LACs.
I wouldn’t call Trinity’s selectivity rise meteoric compared to say Tulane, Northeastern or Denison. Its entry point in the rankings placed Trinity U around Rhodes and Sewanee and not too far from Rollins, which seemed right. The engineering program will help a lot going forward with rankings that give strong weight to salaries out of school, but most of the schools with truly meteoric rises/drops in acceptance rates have achieved it by greatly growing international or cross regional applications (especially from the Northeast and California). Trinity’s appeal beyond Texas, being way down in San Antonio, will be a challenge to attract applicants from outside Texas, and I don’t see it drawing the Northeastern and other cross regional crowds of applicants that TCU and SMU have been getting en masse.
We live near Trinity and I’m not sure the hype is quite what the school is making itself out to be, ie it’s good marketing. Most people around here still haven’t heard of it. I do think it provides an amazing education, though, and has invested a lot in business and engineering to stay competitive in the liberal arts market.
Another peer school that loves it athletes with great academics is Centre College. It’s in Danville, KY. The coach we talked to at TU seemed most interested (concerned) about what Centre was offering my son. Moreso than other colleges we mentioned he was looking at.
Generally speaking I think the practical role of the name of your undergrad college, to the extent it matters at all, tends to fade very rapidly in a professional career. So even if in a generation your college is likely to trend upward (or downward), by then it will probably not matter to you.
But I think what Trinity has established already is “enough” to make it competitive if you are looking for a smaller college experience in Texas/Southwest.
At the beginning of S19’s college search, we also looked for schools in warmer-weather area with strong D3 sports (of course, he ended up at Denison in chilly Ohio, but that’s the way it goes, things change as you go along) In any event, he looked very carefully at Trinity and it was on the list almost until the end. I have relatives in San Antonio, and I knew about Trinity because one of my smartest colleagues, a leading Silicon Valley lawyer, was a graduate. Trinity has Early Action, which was another plus, and his EA acceptance came with a very generous merit award. Our impression of Trinity was that it was a school on the move, using its endowment creatively and working to break into the top ranks of LACs. I don’t mean that as a bad thing - we felt the same kind of energy at Denison, and I think that energy ultimately carried over into my son’s very positive experience at that school. Trinity has a beautiful campus in a quiet, pretty part of San Antonio, close to the city but not right in the middle of it, and the sports facilities are excellent. I have often recommended on CC that people take a look at the school, but I think maybe some people write Trinity off just because it’s in Texas and there’s sometimes a “not Texas,” “not the South” vibe on CC. But Texas is a big place, and San Antonio is a neat city - I thought it would be a lot of fun to go to school there. I wouldn’t think the conference change would be a negative in any way. The schools in the SAA conference look like a good mix of LACs that are relatively similar in profile to Trinity and relatively close geographically. A lot of the schools in the SCAC seem to be substantially smaller than Trinity. In terms of other good weather LACs, @gablesdad has named many of those we considered. If you would consider California, you could also look at Occidental and the Claremont colleges.
We have family friends whose child attended. The family found it to be a very supportive atmosphere. Kid loved it. Kid is now employed in big tech in the PNW.
In my experience, Trinity is like many liberal arts colleges popular on CC, such as Bowdoin, Bates, etc. The vast majority of Americans have never heard of them and don’t necessarily think, “Ooh, that’s such a difficult college to get into!” (Unless a school is a known-entity in college athletics or is frequently name-dropped in the media like Harvard, MIT, etc, most Americans don’t seem to know much about colleges outside of their area.) But for people who need to know (i.e. grad schools and many HR departments), they know that Trinity is a good college with strong students.
2 additional thoughts for the OP. D23 is a cheerleader and the sports culture is more robust than it was at my LAC. The football team is good as are many of the other teams.
Speaking of my college, two of my professors from my LAC have current students at Trinity. It’s been fun to reconnect with them.
OP here. WoW.
You guys/gals are very knowledgeable.
We are already in talks with many of the names mentioned above. But @gablesdad, thanks for the “Rhodes College” hint. How did we miss this school. Seems to be very similar in many aspects, with awesome architecture and good weather fun city location. Will definitely reach out to them.
Trinity is slowly building a name in CA. I don’t think our family is that unique or has unique needs. Tons of dual-income households that don’t qualify for much need-based aid, with kids having top test-scores (with all UCs refusing to even consider test scores), knowing that they are going to grad school anyway, so can take more risk on their undergrad prestige if given enough merit aid, or got a spot on the sports team. Many families want the smaller private christian environment for the kids, where they would have less to adapt to, or worry about.
There are also a stronger current of parents contemplating leaving CA to some other southern state, and hoping the kids will be their anchor. Those kids/families care about the warm weather. So I believe my family represents a sample from a much bigger trend, not a unique scenario. CA kids do appreciate diversity (racial, regional) in the school, but it is not top of their priorities, since they had enough diversity already in HighSchool.
The rise in their selectivity might not have been that fast, but given the niche they cater to, I can see a lot of runway for them to keep rising. I would say there is a rising demand for selective LACs in the south in general, and that the options there are very limited relative to the established cold-weather suppliers in the north-east.
I think we should consider/evaluate the full list of SAA conference, since they all seem to be more similar than different.
Be sure to visit Rhodes, it is a fabulous school but the area is high in crime.
Trinity is definitely not a Christian school. It seems welcoming to Christian students though, and very apolitical which is something that was important to my daughter.
We are from the PNW and while Trinity is definitely a Texas school still, they are making inroads here as well. My daughter has many friends from California, the New Orleans area and Colorado as well.
Of course. Some pass up U Chicago, Columbia, USC for “high” crime rates as well. People can define high crime and safety in different ways. Attending school in an urban setting isn’t for everyone, and that’s ok. One has to cull the list somehow.
I think you are right the financial wealth is no small thing either. At the end of the day, money can buy things students care about (including lowering costs of attendance strategically), so it is no coincidence a lot of the most valued schools are also among the wealthiest.
Now to be sure, even if this works for a while, eventually your institution will get to the point the remaining institutions above are mostly quite wealthy too. So it gets harder and harder to progress in relative terms this way. And financial wealth is not everything (although it is hard to compete at the highest levels without at least a lot of it).
But for sure I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some upside left.