Williams vs. Emory vs. Cornell

monydad
Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:39:07 +0000

You have before you a small school, a mid-size undergrad school, and a larger undergrad school. Located in a small community, a large community which is a college town, and a major city. Clearly each setting has its pros and cons. Which do you like more?

Williams will obviously offer much smaller classes and a much more intimate environment , Cornell offers an amazing array of courses, with tremendous diversity of courses and students. Cornell’s course catalog is over 700 pages long. I imagine Emory is somewhere in the middle.

A NY Times article indicated Williams students did best of the three, on a percentage basis, in very top prof. school placement. However its results were highly misleading as they pertained to Cornell Arts & sciences grads, since it used as denominator all the students in the seven disparate colleges of the entire university, not Arts & Sciences college students specifically. Only 30% of Cornell students are enrolled in its Arts & Sciences college, and taken together the students there have substantially more diverse interests, goals, and abilities than a relatively homogeneous LAC has.

Williams is one of those places that claims something like 100% med school admissions, however their grading is not easy, evidently, and an alum once posted here that many there fell by the wayside before it got to that point. (before complaints from the faithful, evidently, led him to modify the post, years after the fact, to remove reference to the college specifically). I personally don’t believe attending a particular one of these schools will magically transform you into med school success, I think that depends largely on you. But you are free to believe otherwise.

They also supposedly have good percentage success at Wall Street placement. However, again, they have a more homogeneous student body with an atypically high proportion interested in Wall street placement in the first place. They have a lot of economics majors for its size, IIRC. I was on Wall street for a dozen years, in my department we had people from Cornell, and none from Williams. But that’s just what I saw.

Personally I think if you fit at Williams well, based on its prevailing campus culture, and seem satisifed with its course selection and location, it could be a great choice. If you don’t fit well it could be more of a risk, and there have been some posts on CC to this effect. My D1 attended a larger LAC and found that she did not fit well with its prevailing campus culture, and became disatisfied with its location and small size. These issues of fit are considerations that can be more important at a small school, because there are fewer places to turn.

But if you fit, you could love it there.

Of course many also love it at Cornell, and I imagine Emory too. And the people who are good enough attain great destinations following any of these schools (well certainly Cornell, I presume Emory too). You don’t have a bad choice here.