<p>haha. I’ll be brutally honest and totally subjective here. The guys at Bowdoin and Middlebury (especially Bowdoin) are unusually healthy looking, rugged, and attractive. The girls (I’m as PC as anyone but you seem really to want to know) on average have that kind of field-hockeyish old-money horsey look. There was also a phenomenon referred to, terribly, as “Bowdoin butt.” I’m not going to spell that one out for you. I was a skinny twerp who looked about 12 years old when I started at Bowdoin; once when I went to the librarian’s desk, he leaned over and said, “Hello, are you from one of our local schools?” At Wesleyan the women definitely had the upper hand in terms of attractiveness–lots of stunning, exotic, and stylish NYC-looking types. The guys were a much more mixed bag. You’d be very hard pressed to find a nebbish at Bowdoin, while at Wesleyan there was kind of a surfeit of scrawny, unathletic, idiosyncratic looking boys (like myself). The jocks at Wesleyan segregate themselves much more than at Bowdoin, where because the small student body has to field a full complement of teams, the students tend to more often be athletic than not. Strangely the athletes at Bowdoin were much kinder than those at Wesleyan (esp. the helmet sports), who to be honest were often quite boorish (throwing weights around in Freeman, etc.).I was at Wesleyan at the transition between hippies and hipsters, and by gritty I mean unkempt, not outdoorsy. Somehow at Bowdoin the students manage to be both rugged and polished. Okay, to finally address your question…the kids at Bowdoin arrived looking quite shiny and prep schoolish (much as they do at Middlebury and Williams) and those at Wesleyan look more self-consciously “other,” wearing keffieyehs etc. The faculty does nothing to fashion the students in any particular direction, except perhaps in the identity-political majors/courses. I know precious little about other LACs. I think Wesleyan wants more of the shiny kids–for one thing they can pay full freight. I remember being driven to my Wesleyan interview by a lax player friend from Bowdoin. Barbara-Jan Wilson, then dean of admissions, gave my friend the serious up and down and launched into an almost seductive you’ll-love-it-here speech before he could tell her that he was just there with me. Speaking to what seems your larger question, I think much of the sameness one observes at the various LACs results from self-selection, not some process of moulding by the administration or faculty. Sorry for what amounted to a silly bunch of digressions. I don’t know that this is a topic one can or should take seriously. </p>