I’ve been pinged (twice!), so I’ll offer some thoughts about linguistics and anthropology. But first, I want to pull out a line from the original post in this thread to highlight an important truth:
Nothing crazy??!
Please, @Skoten, please know this one thing above all other things: College Confidential is not reflective of any sort of normal reality anywhere. Your description of your child’s stats and activities, even such a brief list, is absolutely amazing. Don’t let all the humblebrags (and sometimes just brags) on CC lead you to think that what’s presented as ordinary here on CC is anything even close to normal.
Now, funneling a bit wider, another item:
Your daughter would experience this at any state flagship (or near-flagship) that is not effectively open admissions, and would experience it at several of those, too. If you have a large enough population of people (as is the case at most state flagships), there will be people there who are “smarter” than your daughter.
Notice the scare-quotes, though, because defining who’s smarter than who is difficult. I’m a professor of linguistics in an English department, and some of our English majors have legitimate trouble with basic algebra—but can write circles around even some professionals. On the other hand, we have engineering majors who can’t write a coherent paragraph to save their lives—but their skills at mathematical modeling and analysis are off the charts. So who’s smarter than who? Because any degree of thought will lead you to realize that it’s a silly thing to try to measure.
So. Your daughter’s interested in linguistics (and anthropology, and maybe even literature), so I have more to say about possibilities for her than for your son. (Though I will point out that linguistics majors average among the very highest LSAT scores, so we do have that going for us.)
With that set of interests, it’s probably worth looking more at programs in anthropology and (secondarily) English. However, you do need to be careful with both of them: For anthropology, you’ll want to look at faculty research interests and make sure that there’s at least (and preferably more than) one member of the faculty—and a full member of the faculty, not an adjunct faculty member—who works in anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology (it’s possible to force a distinction between those, but for an undergrad it doesn’t matter) or language and culture (which just means linguistic anthropology). For English, you’ll want to make sure that there’s a linguistics major offered by the department, or a clearly-defined linguistics track within the English major.
This is because (1) linguistic anthropology is one of the four core subfields of North American anthropology, but it’s also the smallest and the least widely taught, and (2) while gaining a basic understanding of things like the historical development of the language is covered in many if not most English majors, the ability to actually focus on the language as the language is much less usual.
This means that the filters for these interests are going to be fairly intensive, and not automatable. You can, however, take the advice everybody else here has been giving you about what colleges to consider—and I will add that most state flagships and near-flagships do tend to be really good options for these interests—and then, once you have a mediumlist or at least a manageable longlist, you and your daughter can look at curricula and faculty research interests in their individual anthropology and English departments to see what appeals to you.
And, sometimes, their linguistics departments, but there are vanishingly few if any linguistics departments in North America with majors that let you do anything literature-related, and only a handful—Arizona, Texas Austin, a couple of the UCs, NC State, maybe Washington, and I’m sure I’m missing a couple—make a language and culture focus available for undergrads. (Lots of good programs in sociolinguistics out there, but that’s subtly but materially different.)
- I laugh too