Rank the NESCAC schools

Trinity College has a saying, and it's "Thank God for Conn College." If there is one school that is clear cut last of the colleges in the Nescac, it is Conn College. They were the last ones to join, and they are last academically.

I worked in admissions for one of the NESCAC schools a couple of years back. Since students tend to apply to so many of the same schools within the conference (with Tufts as a clear outlier), we were able to piece together a hierarchy of student preference based on relative yield which may not answer the precise question asked by this thread but is a reasonable proxy.

1. Williams/Amherst by a wide margin.

3. Middlebury: gained ground on the top two recently and achieved separation with Bowdoin.

4. Bowdoin

5. Tufts: doesn't overlap as neatly with other NESCACs and harder to place as a result. Outside NESCAC, Tufts applicants are more likely to apply to BC/BU/Cornell than Swarthmore/Pomona/Dartmouth as is the case for other NESCACs.

6. Wesleyan

7. Bates: still a big gap to Wesleyan but narrowing thanks to aggressive national marketing and SAT-optional admissions.

8. Colby: losing ground on Bates recently.

9. Hamilton: underrated. Does well on USN&WR which is raising profile nationally.

10. Trinity

11. Conn: not a bad school at all but someone has to be last

I went to a NESCAC school (not one of the consensus top 3) and everyone realizes that with the occasional exception of Tufts because it's bigger, these rankings only matter in the North East, right?

Go to California and nobody knows the difference between Bowdoin and Bates, or how good they are relative to any school. Nobody has heard of Hamilton or Conn or Colby, and people would generally guess Trinity is an evangelical school in Texas. Middlebury sounds like it's a prep school. They are all good liberal arts schools. None of them really impresses anyone who lives outside of New England or didn't go to a NESCAC school.

west coast wrote:

I went to a NESCAC school (not one of the consensus top 3) and everyone realizes that with the occasional exception of Tufts because it's bigger, these rankings only matter in the North East, right?

Go to California and nobody knows the difference between Bowdoin and Bates, or how good they are relative to any school. Nobody has heard of Hamilton or Conn or Colby, and people would generally guess Trinity is an evangelical school in Texas. Middlebury sounds like it's a prep school. They are all good liberal arts schools. None of them really impresses anyone who lives outside of New England or didn't go to a NESCAC school.

I think you're overestimating the name recognition of NESCAC schools even in New England. I went to one and when I told people in NE where I went, the follow-up question was usually "is that a four year school?" In California as in New England, the people who've heard of NESCAC schools are limited to those who are in the business of knowing about schools.