Big Dance 2022 - Let's Go!

[Another Mom]

Morocco played with so much heart, which is the #1 thing I love, and look for.

[Saint of Old]

Morocco played with so much heart, which is the #1 thing I love, and look for.

For those who need a team to support....Morocco was the first Country to formally recognize the USA in 1777... Time we recognize these Amazing ballers.

[Kuiper]

Smart, savvy folks who aren't dominated by prestige, elitism, and what the neighbors will think are good at finding the hidden gems...like a CWRU or a Rochester or Stevens or WPI, or at the LAC level a Denison, a Whitman, a Centre, a Rhodes, etc...You might give up some sunny days and 40 to 50 degrees in temperature and 15-20 ranking spots in USNWR, but the academics are just as good in most cases (and maybe sometimes better), athletic opportunities might be a bit more attractive, and you might get some very helpful merit money.  Even for those of us who realize rankings shouldn't be so focal and overwhelming in our minds, it's very difficult at least for people within a particular demographic to truly break free from the false idol of rankings.  We learn about and live them as though they have some hard reality...and the impact of that is huge and leads to categorizing schools in ways we basically accept as real that aren't real....like "so and so is a top 5 school" or "top 10 school" or a "that one's OK, it's still top 40 or 50."  And the industry knows how powerful the mythology is because some of them are laser-focused on improving their ranking...and why not when doing so yields very clear results, more applicants, lower admissions rates, more money, better facilities, and whatever else goes along with substantial reputation boosts (see Colby, Richmond, Denison, etc).  We assign different meanings to a school that's ranked #5 versus one that's #25 even though your kid's chances of as good an outcome and in many cases even better outcomes (med school, law school, careers) may be significantly better at the one ranked #25 or even #75.  This stuff gets so ingrained we often don't even realize what we're doing.  Someone could tell me his kid is seriously looking at Gustavus Adolphus, and my kneejerk response might be something like "Oh wow, that's nice.  St Peter, MN, right? Is she considering Grinnell out that way as well?"  The frames and filters we "wear" everyday are so much more dominant than we think they are.

But be careful.  Your kid may actually listen and ultimately disappoint you.  I loved Rochester and "discovered" it in our family.  In my mind (and I suspect this is often the case with CWRU) I considered UR to be the almost perfect high-end safety school for my daughter...and good enough for my ego if that's how things played out.  Nevertheless, when she had all of your choices in front of her after all the acceptances, wait lists, and rejections came in, I could not help wanting her to pick Macalester, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, or NYU.  It was all ego, ego, ego.  I knew UR was every bit as good as any of the others and in hindsight she and we never had any regrets (jokes about paywalls aside), but I still imagined lukewarm social responses when others would hear about her choice...like, with a slightly puzzled look "Oh, Rochester, nice school" and then watching that couple move on to the parents jabbering about Dartmouth. 

Back to CWRU....I think you are correct @Kuiper that the medical excellence now synonymous with Cleveland because of Cleveland Clinic and also to some degree Case Medical has a positive contagion effect on CWRU in general.  Cleveland in terms of medicine is considered absolutely on a level with Boston, San Fran, Baltimore, NYC, Rochester, MN, Toronto, etc....but all things being equal, how often is a kid who holds acceptances from U Michigan, UVA, CMU, Wash U, Emory, and CWRU gonna choose CWRU?  Not often unless the money difference is extreme and a critical factor.

I had been meaning to respond to this for awhile.  I'm not really sure this is the thread for it anyway, but I didn't want it to fall away completely unnoticed.  I agree with much of it.  There are some prestige driven professions where undergrad school rankings matter, but not as many as people think and college is becoming what high school used to be for most job seekers.  A job seeker's grad school is now on the top of most resumes.

The interesting thing is how regional reputation/rankings is even for so-called national schools.  My assumption is that for people in certain areas of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, the difference between the various NESCAC schools + other small LACs in the area is really meaningful to them.  By contrast, in LA, I think there are a lot of highly-educated people who, if they have even heard of all of the NESCAC schools, would kind of view all but a couple of them as completely interchangeable and would probably confuse them with Bennington, for instance.  That's not to say LA folks aren't prestige focused, but for a variety of reasons (distance, weather, strong state school options nearby), liberal arts colleges aren't as widely chosen, percentage-wise. Moreover, when they do leave SoCal for an LAC, they are widely-dispersed in their destination.  That means that most people don't know enough kids who have even considered the Maine schools, let alone gone there, for instance, to have established a pecking order in their minds.  It's kind of freeing in a way.

[jknezek]

The interesting thing is how regional reputation/rankings is even for so-called national schools.  My assumption is that for people in certain areas of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, the difference between the various NESCAC schools + other small LACs in the area is really meaningful to them.  By contrast, in LA, I think there are a lot of highly-educated people who, if they have even heard of all of the NESCAC schools, would kind of view all but a couple of them as completely interchangeable and would probably confuse them with Bennington, for instance.  That's not to say LA folks aren't prestige focused, but for a variety of reasons (distance, weather, strong state school options nearby), liberal arts colleges aren't as widely chosen, percentage-wise. Moreover, when they do leave SoCal for an LAC, they are widely-dispersed in their destination.  That means that most people don't know enough kids who have even considered the Maine schools, let alone gone there, for instance, to have established a pecking order in their minds.  It's kind of freeing in a way.

I agree. There is a huge provincialism about all of these schools. While the NESCACs, at least most of them, are well known nationally, when you travel around to different areas they aren't put on a pedestal the same way they often are in the Northeast. I grew up in NJ, and I certainly knew most of the NESCACs. I never heard of Washington and Lee until I opened the big book of colleges we all used in the 90s. No one from my public NJ h.s. had ever applied to Washington and Lee. As someone ranked fairly highly in my class, my teachers, guidance counselors, etc., were shocked I was going to a school they had never heard of. They kept thinking I was going to Washington University, or Washington College, or Mary Washington, or George Washington.

When I graduated and moved back to NJ and then Manhattan for work, W&L was still pretty unknown in most circles. There was no real boost for it, like there was for Amherst or other NESCACs. However, as soon as I started making connections in my industry, and found some companies headquartered in the south, I was in a lot more demand. W&L carried a whole different reputation with companies in Georgia, TN, FL, NC, AL, etc. As I moved to one of those companies, and eventually sat on some hiring boards, it became obvious that W&L grads were preferred. Amherst, Grinnell, Tufts, etc.... nowhere near the same cache they held in the Northeast.

So yeah, "National Liberal Arts School" is correct, but if you want that recognition boost, think about where you want to be after college as well. I don't think W&L is going to play any better in Oregon than it did in NYC. But I don't think the C-M-S names are going to play as well in GA as they will in California. Amherst probably plays well nationally, but not as well as it does in NYC and Boston, let alone a school like Hamilton or Trinity (CT). All are great schools, but how well they play after graduation is very much still a matter of location, or maybe an alumni in a key position or two.