^At 850 students, it may not have made the population cut. It isn’t a member of COFHE either, although Pomona is:
http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/
@circuitrider our S19 is applying to a few universities but mostly LACs. I do think both can appear on kids’ lists for different reasons. I have a friend whose daughter went to Midd but transferred to Vandy after sophomore year. A student can be attracted to both options.
^I can see Vandy. It is a very lovely campus. But, PENN?
@circuitrider agreed. And S19 is applying to Williams and Vandy. 
The other universities being considered are William and Mary and Tufts.
@circuitrider my kid’s list included LACs and Us (public and private, 1800 students up to 20K). For various reasons she liked them all. Some were safeties, some had a major she liked, most ere in vibrant cities (but not the one she finally chose). One was a women’s college.
…and she rejected quite a few LACs and Us also, that we’d visited or she researched.
This is why I think the distinction between LAC and U is kind of arbitrary. Size is one consideration, undergrad focus is another, but neither are the end-all, all things considered.
There is definitely overlap with candidates applying to both top universities and top liberal arts colleges. Size is not the main desired trait for everybody, though it is for some. And even those who prefer one size to another may have other factors that are important to them in a college that lead them to apply to colleges of varying sizes.
Son definitely preferred LAC’s overall, but had he not been accepted to Williams ED, the 20 colleges to which he would have applied would have included 6 colleges from the US News national university list, 13 colleges from the US News national liberal arts college list, and 1 mid-sized school from a US News regional list. And he had visited two additional national universities that did not make his final list.
It also seems, from admitted student group chats, posters’ comments on this site in threads and in PMs, web sites that compare which percentage of cross-admits went to which of two schools, etc., that the applicants who are accepted to Williams regular decision and turn it down are most often headed to Harvard, Princeton or Yale. It is less common to hear of someone picking somewhere else, whether large or small, above Williams, although it does happen. Maybe the students picking H, Y or P decide they prefer a larger college, but they may decide based on various other factors… and one of the biggest factors may be picking the most prestigious college to which they are accepted.
This is typical:
There was a thread here in one of the last couple of years about a kid who loved Bowdoin agonizing about a choice between Bowdoin, his or her stated “dream college,” and Princeton. The student ultimately chose Princeton.
Yeah, I think it does. Others may differ, of course.
@TheGreyKing wrote:
I’ve been saying this since post #17:
Williams College average net price for those first year students receiving grants or scholarships = $18,167.
A quick check of a very limited number of schools on Parchment shows that these 9 schools (there are more) beat out Williams College for cross admits: (i.e. cross admits preferred these universities over Williams College .)
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Univ. of Chicago–$31,068
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Columbia–$22,973
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Univ. of Pennsylvania–$22,944
4)Duke–$19,950
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Yale–$18,319
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Princeton–$17,732
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Stanford–$16,695
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Harvard–$16,205
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UCLA–$14,236
While Williams College lower average net cost of $18,167 wins out over:
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Dartmouth College–$21,177
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Cornell University–$30,014
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Northwestern University–$29,326
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Washington Univ. St. Louis–$28,824
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Brown (although almost a tie among cross admits)–$25,264
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Univ. of Michigan (although almost a tie among cross admits)–$16,107
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USC–$32,932
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NYU–$35,147
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Amherst College–$19,055
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UC–Berkeley–$17,160
The Parchment site that I used for the cross admit battles does not show how many students were cross admits.
“Yield” = accepted students who actually enroll.
(Post #12 above shows yield for several schools–including Williams College–excluding ED admits.)
Highest overall yield (including ED, EA & RD admits = ALL ADMITS) among the most elite national universities is listed here:
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Stanford–82.1%
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Harvard–80.5%
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MIT–73.5%
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Yale–69%
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Princeton–68.3%
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Univ. of Pennsylvania–67.8%
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Univ. of Chicago–63.7%
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Notre Dame–56%
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Brown–55.8%
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Northwestern University–53%
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Cornell–52.3%
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Dartmouth College–51.2%
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Duke–50.2%
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Georgetown–48%
Columbia University is the only Ivy League school not on this US News list. Typically, Columbia’s yield is about 63%.
For selected elite LACs:
Pomona College–53.7%
Barnard College–51.1%
Williams College–46.4%
Amherst College–37%
" reputationally equivalent". Happily you won’t be attending its reputation.
@Publisher - It isn’t a matter of how many cross-admits Williams loses to one individual school, if there are only two cross-admits between them. It’s a matter of which schools the bulk of the cross-admits are with. Thus, if Williams has a total of 100 cross-admits with (let’s say) 9 universities but, 50 of them are with HYP - that is more significant than the two that may have been lost to Columbia or Penn.
TBH, whenever someone mentions, Parchment or Niche, I’m always reminded of that Lyndon Johnson admonition to some hapless political neophyte running for office, “Son, first thing you do is buy yourself a poll.”
While anecdotal evidence is interesting, it ultimately means very little without data from the schools in question. The self-reported decisions on Parchment are the same in this regard, as @circuitrider noted above. Unfortunately for those of us interested in admissions data, colleges tend to keep cross-admit data close to their chests.
Yes, exactly. For example, some students are turned off by the small gay dating pools at many LACs (compounded by rural locations) or are interested in studying subjects that aren’t offered at most LACs.
In any case, I think it’s very clear that Williams has a reputation on par with or better than virtually every other college in the US. I don’t think anyone would say OP could go wrong with applying ED there, if (s)he is still paying attention to this thread.