Does anyone have personal experience with the Maple League undergraduate universities in Canada? I am particularly interested in Mount Allison in New Brunswick and Acadia in Nova Scotia. We are looking for merit aid in the US but with current tuition rates, even generous merit scholarships would leave us with $50,000+ costs. The total cost for international students at these Canadian small colleges is about $35,000/year. They seem excellent but I would love to know about the experience for American students. How are the winters? Is it difficult to find employment in the US afterwards? What is the housing like?
We live in the northeast of the US, which means that these schools are relatively close by. My younger daughter applied to all four of these schools, and was accepted at all four (with merit aid). We have also visited all of them, most of them at least twice. She also got her bachelor’s degree at one of the “Maple League” schools (Acadia, Bishop’s, Mount Allison, and St Francis Xavier). I have not said which one to attempt to preserve the “confidential” part of this web site’s name.
We liked all of them. The hardest part in the application process was deciding which one to attend.
I think that she got a great education. She got opportunities for research, including some research during the school year and some research over the summer. After graduating she took a bit of time to travel (using money she had saved from paid research) and then returned to the US and started looking for a job. She had three offers (in biotech) in five weeks back down here in the US. At least to me what she has been doing since sounds quite similar to some of the research that she did while she was getting her bachelor’s degree.
We have an unusual situation in that my daughters and I have dual citizenship. With this we ended up paying somewhat less for all four years than we would have paid for one single year at the very good selective LACs down here in New England. As you pointed out these schools are also reasonably priced for international students.
More recently she applied to a few PhD programs down here in the US, and was accepted to a very good program that she feels (and I agree) is a very good fit for her. She was also asked to come back for a third interview at another PhD program but decided to instead attend the one program that had already accepted her. Depending upon which ranking you look at she will be working towards her PhD at a “top 20” program that has a single digit acceptance rate. Of course for a PhD program fit is more important than ranking, but generally we think that the “apply to graduate programs in the US” part of this also went well.
Compared to universities and colleges in the US, there appear to be fewer general education requirements in Canada. This means that our daughter probably took more classes in her major and in closely related fields than she would have taken if she had got her bachelor’s degree in the US. I think that this plus her research experience has prepared her very well for graduate work, but her PhD program has not quite started yet so I suppose that we will see later this year.
In terms of winters, Bishop’s probably has the coldest winters of the four Maple League schools. It is probably about the same as either Montreal or Burlington Vermont (eg, UVM). Winters in Nova Scotia are somewhat moderated by the ocean and basically the fact that Nova Scotia is almost a huge island. This will put winters at Acadia and St Francis Xavier pretty similar to perhaps Lowell Massachusetts or Portsmouth New Hampshire. Mount Allison is also pretty close to the water, and probably has winters somewhere in the middle. For us this really was not a change at all compared to what we are already used to. However, university students generally spend more time outside (such as walking to classes) compared to high school students, so I think that she did need a good pair of winter boots.
My daughter lived on campus for two years and off campus for two years. Both seemed to be comfortable and reasonably priced.
After watching my daughter study in Canada for four years at one of these four very good small universities, I would agree.
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Thank you! So helpful to have your thoughts on this
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