Wed 5 Oct 2005
After reading this article in the Washington Post on Tuesday, I was struck by the absence of Williams. It reminded me that despite the U.S. News rankings, even here in DC, I often receive blank stares when I inform people I went to Williams. One can only wonder how many times in a row Williams would have to rank first to receive more publicity.
Somewhere, then, there is a disconnect: among certain groups of people in DC, most people have heard of Williams. Yet in the population at large, Williams doesn’t even seem to have the name recognition of Amherst, Wellesley, or Middlebury. Although it’s frustrating (especially so when I meet people from Massachusetts who have never heard of it) to have to explain to people that Williams is a great school, over the past two years I’ve started to think that perhaps our anonymity isn’t purely coincidental.
Consider the oft-maligned rankings: if during the past three years prospective ephs applied in higher numbers or were of higher caliber, those students and their families would know about Williams. But few else would. The combination of high selectivity and relative anonymity might be the perfect ingredients to keep our student body excited to be ephs, because most students I knew didn’t come to Williams *because* it was a college called Williams. They came for the academics, sports and environment. A student who goes to Amherst or Wellesley, by contrast, might be more likely to attend simply because the two are *known* as good schools.
If we assume that the lack of general knowledge about Williams is a *good* thing on the micro level of college admissions, then wouldn’t the college actively try to keep the status quo in place? Obviously, at site like EphBlog and others, mentions of Williams in the main stream press do not go unnoticed. But for the most part, the purple bubble receives only passing glances in most discussions on the web. I find it hard to believe that an institution with as many famous alumni and influence would manage to be so low-profile without some effort on the part of the college itself.
October 5th, 2005 at 11:20 am
I personally like the low profile. Those who have heard of the school are impressed that I went there; those who haven’t heard of it don’t hold it against me.
Early in my career I worked in the Manufacturing division of a Fortune 500; anyone who had a degree beyond high school was looked upon with great suspicion. There was a fellow who had graduated from Harvard who was called “the college kid.” In fact, very few people even knew his name, just his nickname. I said I went to Williams, got blank looks, and wasn’t harrassed.
October 5th, 2005 at 11:58 am
I hate the low profile….. In fact, as much as I enjoyed my experience at Williams, had I known that it had such poor name recognition, I would not have attended. I would venture to say that among the top 20 LACS, Williams is in the bottom 5 (or perhaps the bottom… period) of name recognition. It is unbelievable how much more name recognition Bowdoin, Middlebury, Vassar, Colgate etc. have than Williams. Even among academics and professionals, Williams seems to lag behind these schools in name recognition.
My suggestion would be that the admissions office send more information to more people- even those that would not be accepted to Williams. Jimmy X (who receives Williams info but would be an unlikely candidate for admission) tells Smartypants Y how he thinks Williams might be the perfect fit for Smartypants Y, and then smartypants applies. Unless Williams can bolster its name recognition, I predict that it will be increasingly difficult for the school to attract top students.
I really think that the admissions office can do so much more to expand the applicant pool and to improve Williams’ name recognition.
October 5th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
I agree. If you go Ivy, you are branded for life. In most of America you’ll have to hide your affilliation. The assumptions that will be made about you — perhaps they should note that in the facebooks sometime. My brother went to Harvard and can’t say a single word about it in polite company, or people think he’s stuck up, rich, liberal, and out of touch.
How much nicer to be able to say “oh, I went to this little school in the ass crack of Mass. called Williams College…” I usually get a faint smile of moderated pity. But I have no doubt I can apply competetively to any grad school in the country.
October 5th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
..I agree with Guy Creese ‘75, that is, and like the low profile.
October 5th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
In case this wasn’t clear in my post, I actually enjoy the somewhat low profile as well, although I think it’s better for the future of Williams, than say, conversation over cocktails. But I still think the college has an active role in keeping our profile low. And that’s what I’d like to hear more about.
October 5th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
What does “profile” or “branding” have to do with education?
October 5th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
I always took it for granted that the “low profile” of Williams was one of its greatest assets.
Admissions standards at Williams are comparable to those at Ivy League schools. But Williams unquestionably has a much lower national profile. Why, then, do some students choose Williams over the Ivies?
Because these students care more about their undergraduate education and experience than they care about impressing the greatest possible number of other people. In other words, Williams tends to attract people who are both (1) of high academic caliber, and (2) not snobby about it. These are Good Qualities.
Smart students who place a high value on name-dropping will tend to gravitate towards other, higher-profile schools. But Williams may be a better place without them.
I chose Williams over Yale and Cornell, knowing full well that I was sacrificing name recognition, and never regretted it.
October 5th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
I think the premise here is wrong. I don’t believe that Williams has a “lower profile” than the other top LACs. I suspect that it may seem like that because we are viewing it from the perspective of the blank stares we have gotten, not realizing the Amherst grads and Pomona grads who get the same blank stares.
If anything, I think Williams may have slightly more name-brand recognition, thanks to Sports Illustrated and the athletic powerhouse thing.
I, too, appreciate the low-key aspect. It gives you the freedom to play it either way. People who know know. But, you aren’t forced to be labeled when it doesn’t suit the setting.
October 5th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
If one uses Williams as a stepping stone to grad school, then Williams’ lack of name recognition by the public makes no difference. One is measured professionally by one’s grad school. So long as the admissions offices of grad schools continue to give Williams the weight that they do, then every thing is copacetic. If some person gives one a blank stare at a cocktail party, who gives a shit? Come to think of it - who gives a shit about cocktail parties?
October 5th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Profile and “branding” have almost nothing to do with education, while at Williams. However, both prior to entry and post graduation, a school’s profile makes a huge difference in the admissions process, job market, higher education and in alumni giving.
I have to disagree with hwc: although I’m sure other NESCAC members might recognize Williams as a school full of athletes, the general public certainly doesn’t view a Div III school as an “athletic powerhouse” regardless of individual eph’s abilities. And although I’m sure Amherst grads get plenty of blank stares, the reason I cited this WaPo article was that it mentioned Amherst and Pomona but not Williams.
October 5th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
I agree fully with hwc: if you talk to alumni of other liberal arts colleges, you will get the exact same comments about name recognition concerns that have been raised here about Williams.
If Williams had a higher profile, maybe it wouldn’t be so commonly confused with William and Mary. But if you think other liberal arts colleges are immune from such indignities, then just ask Amherst grads if their school is ever confused with UMass-Amherst. Or ask Pomona grads if their school is ever confused with Cal Poly-Pomona.
October 5th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Frank,
What makes you think that admissions officers at grad schools have heard of Williams? I’m sure there are some who haven’t. In fact, I’ve met some who haven’t. What sort of “weight” do you think that they give Williams?
My main concern is that Williams’ poor name recognition prohibits them from reaching students who would really benefit from Williams and contribute to Williams. Parents are generally the ones footing the bill, and they (not necessarily the students) may have a difficult time justifying 40 grand per year for a college that few have heard of.
Again, I think the admissions office should be very very very proactive in reaching broader audiences now! They should send prospecti to guidance counselors at all US high schools. (There are about 20,000 high schools in the US). This would be an excellent first step at helping to improve the Williams name.
October 5th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Probably all of this relates to how often you hear the name of any given school on TV. Nationally televised sports teams? You’re in. Nobel Laureates? Check. Strong political affiliations and/or politico-religious ties? Check. The NY Times and print media in general are already isolated to a minority.
October 5th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Or Swarthmore grads who get the ubiquitous, “Isn’t that a girls school in upstate New York?” as evidenced by April Fool’s spoofs in the school paper in back to back years:
Each LAC has its own particular “Williams & Mary”.
To be honest, I think that’s one of the reasons these schools are full of generally pleasant folk. Not universally, of course…but for the most part, the students choosing a college for its brand-name appeal (a rather superficial reason), go elsewhere. A lower occurence of pretentious status-seekers on campus is probably a net plus to the educational climate.
As for this week’s Jay Matthews column in the Post…he mentions Williams a ton over the course of many articles. I suspect that he tries to spread it around a bit. In this particular case, the article was about Reed, so he may have been looking to mention higher ranked schools that share some appeal to potential Reed applicants, which I doubt Williams does.
Sidenote: Reed’s public outcry over supplying ranking info is a big disingenous. They publsh their Common Data Set filing (which is what USNEWS uses for their data) on their school website.
The Pres. of Stanford took USNEWS to task in a public letter for the way the “predicted grad rate” unreasonably killed Caltech in the ratings. USNEWS now manually adjusts Caltech’s predicted grad rate. However, they don’t adjust it for Harvey Mudd, which now gets murdered in the rankings for exactly the same reason.
The Stanford Pres’ point was, “Would Caltech really be a better school if they made the courses easy so that everyone could graduate?” As it stands, schools get a double-whammy: a low grad rate gets you whacked the first time, then you get whacked again because ultra-high SAT scores predict a higher grad rate in the USNEWS formula, thus deducting additional points for “underperforming”. This serves as an incentive to water-down the academic performance standards and offer a sure-fire slacker gut-track to a diploma.
October 5th, 2005 at 4:43 pm
MickeyD:
I’m not convinced that mass marketing or attracting a less self-selected applicant pool is necessarily in the best interest of LACs.
In the grand scheme of college retailing, the LACs are the boutique stores, not the Best Buy/Home Depot big box retailers. For sound economic reasons, the well-endowed LACs are not looking to expand enrollments. So attracting more applicants, just for sake of having more applicants, probably makes the admissions process more, not less, difficult. Successful admission work at an LAC means identifying a student that is not only qualified, but who is also a good “fit” for the school’s culture. That’s how you maintain the sense of community that is one of the key feature/benefits of an LAC. I’m actually inclined to think that even more product differentiation should be the goal of top LACs, not mass marketing that tends to dull product differentiation.
October 5th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
WRONG!!!!!WRONG!!!!WRONG!!!!!!!
More product differentiation means less diversity!! I am referring to diversity in every imagineable way. It would be terrible for a school to ensure that all students fit into the mold/culture of the school. To me, this means that you are looking for one (and only one) type of student. Ideally the school would look for academically talented students. Beyond that, a school should attract as many different types of students as possible.
October 5th, 2005 at 7:48 pm
>>What makes you think that admissions officers at grad schools have heard of Williams? I’m sure there are some who haven’t. In fact, I’ve met some who haven’t. What sort of “weight” do you think that they give Williams?
**********
In 2003, the Wall Street Journal surveyed the nation’s highest-ranked medical, law, and business schools, to find out which undergraduate programs were most likely to place their graduates into top professional schools. The top 5 “feeder” schools, as ranked by the WSJ, were #1 Harvard; #2 Yale; #3 Princeton; #4 Stanford; #5 Williams. So it seems like Williams fares pretty well as far as professional school admissions officers are concerned.
http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/college/feederschools.htm;
http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf
October 5th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Among my students at Berkeley, most knew Williams well, and a good deal had applied and visited.
Given that these were people who chose to go to a public “flagship” university, what disturbed me was their near-universal negative impressions of Williams. I wound up developing a standard apology for anyone when the question of my undergrad school came up.
In some sense, the above was a result of the Cal-Stanford rivalry, and how issues of class etc play out in that dipole. Cal students viewed Williams as a small Stanford, and were resentful and hostile towards Stanford.
In more important ways, I do not think it was just that. Even in business circles, the impression was that Williams was highly conservative, backwards, East Coast in a slow sort of way– not a place that you would choose over Stanford or Pomona. (I’m suggesting Williams should pay attention to regional perceptions).
To harp on another current issue, many students whom I talked to pointed out that issues of relationships, sex and morals at Williams seemed to them “weird.” Other than pointing this out, what I’m saying here is that some large portion of California kids can spend two days at Williams, see how people conduct their relationships, and decide that they cannot possibly imagine living four years in such an environment.
To conclude such an unnuanced analysis, I’ll leave you with some of Elliot Aronson’s towards the end of the semester he spent at Williams– he told his class that he spent the first few months in Williamstown walking around trying to figure out what was missing.
Eventually, he realized there were no couples. Then he went back to telling us about the importance of role models for behavior in our life cycles.
I leave to the reader to guess the year.
October 5th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
Mickey:
I don’t think the kind of diversity you are talking about is a particular strength of LACs. Just the opposite. To me, the large state universities are the schools for that kind of diversity: students from every background, smart kids/dumb kids, farm kids/city kids, doctor’s kids/auto mechanics’s kids, rockers/preps/goths/jocks/science nerds/religous kids and so on and so forth. Notwithstanding the somewhat forced ethnic diversity, elite LACs draw students from a pretty narrow slice.
When I say product differentiation, I mean a simple, easily understood description that screams: you should go here; you should go there.
Of the three top LACs, Williams has product differentiation, Swarthmore has product differentiation, Amherst not so much. It’s a given that all three schools are small, with excellent academics, high professional school placement, and nearly identical SATs. Beyond that, Williams has a unique characteristic — it is the dominant Div III powerhouse. If you are national calibre athlete with strong academics, Williams is the Div III school for you. Swarthmore has a unique identity: extreme academic focus with a social activism slant. If you want to spend four years in seminars, get a Ph.D. in Economics, and make a career of anti-famine policy issues in Africa, Swarthmore is the place for you. Doesn’t mean that the two schools don’t have a lot of overlap among their students, but they each have clear identities.
In 35 years, I’ve never heard anyone enunciate a clear identity for Amherst. It has some of the characteristics of both Williams and Swarthmore, but if you ask what is truly unique about it, you get the 5-college spiel and that’s about it. By trying to be all things to all people, they end up without any way of expressing a uniqueness.
Does it matter? Not right now. The demographic blip means plenty of applications for everybody. But, ten years down the road, when there are fewer appliants and competion from merit-aid bidding wars is even more intense, I think that a clear identity will be a college’s best friend. A natural base. Something to be embraced from a marketing standpoint.
October 5th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Don’t know when the no couple thing appeared. There were certainly couples at Williams in the early 70s — steady boyfriends/girlfriends that lasted over years. It’s not that everyone was hitched up, but rather that having a “steady” was certainly a normal thing to do if you were that committed — it was definitely not an oddity.
October 5th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
It is my firm belief that many midwesterners reject the west coast, the east coast, the south and their cultures, including their higher educations, on the basis that they are flaky, effete and backward, respectively. Does that mean that duplicitously Williams should have separately a West Coast Strategy, an East Coast Strategy, a Midwestern Strategy and a Southern Strategy ?
October 5th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Not to be rude, but anyone who spent a “few months” trying to “figure out what was missing” at Williams only to discover a lack of “couples” probably needed to be in a relationship to begin with. And if they were, they probably needed less free time.
If that’s the perception some people come away with, they are welcome to it. And if west-coast students at Berkely have a chip on their shoulder about Williams, I care just as little. (Since they, unlike Williams, have a very well-known national profile that is so stereotypical it cannot possibly measure up to the truth.)
Yes, Williams reflects certain East Coast traits, namely a strong work ethic and a focus on results. But conservative? I remember my parents, good southerners that they are, being slightly agog at the unisex bathrooms and the co-ed suites available. And they’re no David Kane by any stretch of the imagination…
And though I still stand by my earlier statement that most people who’ve never heard of Williams certainly don’t know about its sporting focus, I agree with hwc that when you line it up to any LAC, Williams certainly comes across as the most athletic Div III school in its class. I could easily see someone attending Berkeley being turned off by the focus on sports at Williams. I cannot really see them being turned off by the “conservative” mores of the campus or by the lack of “couples”.
October 6th, 2005 at 3:41 am
Reed: With respect to those numerous persons who believe that college athletics first and foremost means football, NESCAC football and consequently NESCAC athletics is regarded as, at best, second rate in Division III and, at worst, a glorified high school quality product.
October 6th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Interesting about that WSJ poll. I visited Duke Law this summer, and did a walk-in interview with an associate in their admissions office. He gave me a puzzled look, and said, “That’s the one near Boston, right?” and I was pretty much ready to scream.
I love the low profile for cocktail parties, but that experience was pretty spooky.
October 6th, 2005 at 11:51 am
In my opinion, if an adcom at Duke law has not heard of Williams, that is a HUGE problem that the school needs to deal with. Presumably most adcoms at top law schools have heard of Williams, but ALL adcoms at top law schools should have heard of Williams.
October 6th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
As a consequence of the foregoing it is clear that by definition Duke is not a top law school. Go somewhere else! The midwestern prejudgnent that the South is backward proves to be well founded.
October 6th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Prejudgment - that is.
October 6th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
“In my opinion, if an adcom at Duke law has not heard of Williams, that is a HUGE problem that the school needs to deal with. Presumably most adcoms at top law schools have heard of Williams, but ALL adcoms at top law schools should have heard of Williams”
Denial, denial… Maybe the probelm is not in THEM, but in US?
October 6th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
As an Eph, I’m obviously pleased that Williams ranked so highly in the recent WSJ rankings of “feeder schools”. But I also wonder if Williams benefited from a bit of regional bias in the study.
The WSJ selected 15 top professional schools for their survey. Of these, 11 were in the northeast (4 in MA, 2 in CT, 2 in NY, 1 each in NH/PA/MD). You have to suspect that the Williams “brand” is strongest in states like these.
The WSJ study only included 1 professional school from the West, and none from the South. So it may not say much about the name recognition of Williams in these areas.
October 6th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
By the way, I am aware of one other numerical ranking of Williams related to professional school admissions.
The admissions officers at many professional schools do not take applicant GPAs at face value; instead, they “weight” the GPAs, based on the perceived rigor of the undergraduate programs. The weighting factors are normally secret.
But in 1997, the UC Berkeley law school, Boalt Hall, was involved in a lawsuit over this practice. Because of the lawsuit, their secret “GPA rankings” became public, and were published in the 07/16/97 Los Angeles Times (and probably other papers as well).
The highest ranking GPAs, according to the Boalt Hall admissions dept., were (1) Swarthmore; (2) Williams; (3) Duke; (4 tie) Colgate and Carleton; (6) Johns Hopkins; (7 tie) Chicago, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan; (10) Harvard; (11 tie) Cornell, Middlebury, and Princeton.
Old data, but interesting.
October 6th, 2005 at 6:20 pm
In response to an earlier post about denial- I think the problem IS us, not them. In other words, if adcoms at top law schools have not heard of Williams, it is WILLIAMS’ responsibility to make sure that adcoms at top law schools HAVE heard of Williams. Such poor name recognition COULD have a negative impact on grads
October 6th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
I agree that if adcoms at top grad/pre-professional schools haven’t heard of Williams, it’s Williams’ problem, not theirs (although it certainly speaks to their ability to do their job well, or their lack thereof). However, I don’t believe that this is a serious problem–look at Williams’ placement in grad/pre-professional schools…it’s exactly what you’d expect (right up there with HYPS). Maybe Williams is being handicapped by a lack of name recognition and should instead be far suprassing HYPS…but I doubt it.
Personally, I think the Admissions office does a good job but could be doing a much better job. There are thousands of applicants nationally that should be applying to Williams (ie: they’re qualified and it’s a good fit), but aren’t. If Williams was attracting a surplus of applicants, I would agree with the early poster in saying that we don’t need to increase selectivity. However, while in some areas (upper-class white male non-legacy, non-athletes) Williams attracts far more qualified applicants than they have spaces for, in many other areas Williams does not. In fact, until Williams can build its class as it desires w/out compromising (albeit ever-so-slightly) for certain groups of applicants, then Williams should be actively working to build a stronger applicant pool.
Now, maybe this will never happen. Maybe Williams would ideally like 6 ballet-dancing bassoonists every year and there are only an average of 5 applying to colleges nationally yearly…but I doubt this. While Williams is very well known in certain high schools in the country, in the vast majority of high schools it is unheard of.
This is really a separate topic that should be discussed in a separate thread, but I think that the Williams’ Admissions strategy is something worth thinking about and working on. Last year, the Purple Key Association worked closely w/ Admissions to pioneer some new programs that are a start to this (I can go into more detail in a different thread), but there are many more things that can be done.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Does anyone actually get the sense that the admissions office cares about attracting more applicants? Through my interactions with them, I always got the sense that they were a tad “work averse.” After all, more applications means more work for them. Heaven forbid we starting cutting into the manicure time of certain Williams adcoms.
Maybe its time to infuse the admissions office with some new energy and some folks who actually have a strong vision of a better Williams?
October 7th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Mikey: Why don’t you resign from your job and take the position?
October 7th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
HAHAHAHA….I would love to. I think that I could do a really fabulous job of selling Williams to a broader audience…
I don’t think the staff there would want to work with someone who is trying to dismantle the status quo. I doubt they would hire me.. or even give me an interview
October 7th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
The Williams admissions office is run by seasoned professionals with sophisticated enrollment management techniques. They get the class they want.
Morty is one of the country’s leading experts on enrollment management, especially as it relates to long-term revenue maximization and the branding/targeting required to achieve it. I am quite certain that the nature of the desired class is a matter of institutional priority established at the top levels of the administration.
As outlined in Morty’s research papers, the holy grail for a liberal arts college is to successfully attract a large base of high-stat customers willing and able to pay full sticker price. I can’t think of another top LAC in the northeast that does a better job of this. W&L and Davidson do a better job of it for now, but by not taking the steps to increase their diversity, they leave themselves vulnerable down the road (diversity is an increasingly important selling feature to wealthy students).
Give the people who run Williams more credit. The admissions process doesn’t happen by accident.
October 7th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
How can a proposition be given credit when its writer only identifies himself with a screen name?
October 7th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
The Williams admissions office is run by seasoned professionals with sophisticated enrollment management techniques. They get the class they want.
As long as we’re making straight humour, I was not aware that there were professional schools or other organizations offering certification in enrollment management.
Sure, admissions (and financial aid) get the economic profile they want. This is not that hard, as there are about ten applicants for every spot.
Do they get the diversity or intellectual profile they want? Do they have set goals in this area? I can say that I don’t know a single faculty member who seems satisfied with the overall composition of the student body, and many of them blame an opaque and distant admissions procedure.
I won’t begin on the current fixation on “quantifiable” selection criteria. Certainly everyone in admissions works very hard and are expert in what they do. But are they doing what needs to be done?
As someone who also used to sit in the Purple Key office, I’ll second the motion that admissions needs to develop a much more variegated strategy.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
If I were a bettor, I would bet that, by and large, the admissions office approaches admissions as it is told.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
As someone who sat in the Purple Key office last year, I can say that Admissions is constantly looking for ways to improve and strengthen their strategy.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:31 pm
The highest ranking GPAs, according to the Boalt Hall admissions dept., were (1) Swarthmore; (2) Williams;
I wonder if Charles Toomajian is aware of this?
During the first wave of “grade inflation” concern (that was ‘91), Francis Oakley visited the CEP and told us to do something about that inflation.
What exactly we could do was another question, but that’s not the tale.
Charles would come into the CEP each week with a new report on the rise of Williams GPAs over the years, and a new story of the “gentleman’s B” at Williams.
One week he told us how many students with 3.1 averages would come to his office and ask if there was not some way to mark their transcripts with comparitive statistics, showing how hard Williams courses were and what it took to acheive those grades?
Well, at least he can now reply that Boalt weighs their work more highly that if they were at Harvard. Unfortunately I very much doubt it is warranted.
That week Charles had also brought us the sort of statistics the students wanted. He ended the story above with the message that he wasn’t very sure any student would want them displayed on a transcript. The average grade at the College at the time was well above 3.3.
Later he showed us how Williams shaped up in comparison to Harvard and Yale and Amherst etc, which was not a pretty picture at the time. Williams has since pushed GPAs down quite a bit, last I looked, but the bottom line is that a Williams student at Harvard would have a lower GPA.
At an instution such as Berkeley, where “C=average” is a very active ideology, I’m fairly sure most Williams students would have a much lower average. Is this fair?
I know how hard some people work at Williams, but I also know how hard many people don’t work. It would thus be very interesting to find out if the folks at Boalt etc pull Williams’ grade statistics when they make such weightings, or they have other criteria (or both).
Or perhaps, indeed, they are taking very careful note of the financial ability-to-pay-and-potentially-donate of Williams students, versus Harvard and others.
In any case, don’t let them talk to Charles.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
Noah,
Thanks for that addition. I knew Phil Smith somewhat well too, and what you say was true of Williams in the fall of ‘88. Good to have some Purple Keyers here!
My concerns are something like that 1) Williams is not doing enough; 2) indeed there is much more to be done; 3) Admissions is overburdened and unable to get much perspective on its tasks; 4) as a small institution, Williams cannot marshall the same resources as a university; 5) finally, Williams remains bound by its parochial existence.
To expand that a little, my longer reply to some of above was going to include that Western Kentucky University has a separate strategy and relationship with each of Kentucky’s 120 counties and with interest groups in each; it also has a separate relationship with East Memphis and Nashville, and with Bangalore and Ghent, Beijing and Shenzen for that matter. When you’re a big insitution, you simply have the numbers to do that.
This thus seems to me one of the many places where Williams would be better off co-operating and pooling resources with other institutions. Hate to put it this way, but the boys and girls in admissions and alum relations over at Brandeis simply have a much better idea of what’s going on in the world than the boys and girls sitting in Bascom. Because the people at Brandeis are much more and better connected to the rest of the world– the Boston Globe reports on their problems, people at Harvard and around the world read that article and respond, and they then read the responses and adjust.
And it needs to be said that the people at Brandeis simply have a very different series of priorities and perspectives that the people in Bascom, and as far as I’m concern, they’re getting things right. I love Williams and I respect Phil Smith and Charles Toomajian and so many other people I worked with at Williams immensely, but the people at Brandeis are getting things right that Williams is not. Period.
To take that a little further, and to touch geopolitics a little, Alex Caskey ‘68 married a Brazilian woman, and his daughter chose Williams, but his son chose Brandeis. Both children have very complex things to say about both institutions, but I believe I can fairly represent both as feeling that Brandeis was a much better place for a bi-national, bi-cultural student.
As Rondelle Trinidad pointed out on WSO, you can’t even study Portugeuse at Williams, and Critical Languages is not equipped to solve that problem. And again, Brazil is a major power in shaping South and Central American politics, and critical to the stability of the United States and the world.
That Williams students are not learning Portuguese is thus not an acceptable state of things. (For anyone wishing to begin studying Portuguese, it’s fifth or so on my current list of languages to learn this year, and I’d be glad to share Pimsleur materials and help).
Of course, ephBlog and online forums are another way to share resources and perspectives, and get all these sorts of thing done.
Moving on, why view Williams and Brandeis as separate and competing institutions? (Note that I chose Brandeis for many reasons, but because there are many long personal relationships between the institutions). So why couldn’t Williams and Brandeis and say, g-d forbid, even Amherst share resources, perspectives and even personnel?
It would go a long way to solving the deficiencies of all three institutions.
More on geopolitics coming in other threads.
October 7th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
This is a very very interesting dialogue. Frank… to be frank, I don’t want to disclose my identity.
That said, i suspect you are correct in assuming that the admissions officers do as they are told. HOWEVER, would it kill them to be a bit more proactive?
One of the main tasks of the adcoms is that they should represent Williams positively. I have personally witnessed an adcom giving attitude to a prospective student. And this incident involving Adcom X was not an isolated one.
One idea to the “brand name” issue might be to add a few extra admissions staff members to the team. I can’t imagine that the expense associated with these additions would be too much of a burden. Instead of limiting travel to autumn, the college could send these new admissions team members to schools year-round.
I have tried to voice my opinions directly to the admissions office. They have passed me off as a malcontent long-ago, and probably dismiss anything I have to say with a polite smile and a roll of the eyes when my back is turned.
Are any ephblog readers skilled diplomats who feel like working with the Williams admissions office?
I really want to make a difference… but gosh dang it, they are some tough cookies over there in Bascom.
P.S. Noah, specifically what sort of proactive measures has the admissions office been taking?
October 7th, 2005 at 11:47 pm
Ken,
Williams and Brandies are two very different institutions serving very different constituents. A school the size of Williams cannot provide the offerings of a much larger institution or the cosmopolitan feel of a Boston school. That said, partnerships between colleges and pooling of resources is a great idea.
With which schools would Williams share resources? Another idea might be Williams to expand its enrollment and course offerings. Could Williams become a 4000 student campus sans the graduate students? Such a transition would take decades, but would it be feasible and preferable to the current situation?
October 8th, 2005 at 12:54 am
MikeyD223,
I believe Frank was responding to HWC, not you.
Your points have a validity, however, they also seem to me to reflect outdated thinking. Why do Williams and Brandeis serve different constituencies?
To bring up a point I was about to write about at length, if ten million Americans die in attacks tomorrow, would the above differentiation have mattered?
From a leadership perspective, I am interested in the goal, not the obstacles.
In the era of the internet, I do not believe that Williams cannot provide the education of a major university. Surely you can learn Portugeuse at Williams, and I can show you how, without ever coming to Billsville. Why can’t Critical Languages realize this? Or what does it take to get the person sitting in Weston the solutions they need?
Surely it takes a strategic partnership with whatever institutions hold that solution!
Conversely, in the long term, I believe Williams will not survive if it doesn’t learn to become an institution appropriate to the needs of our new century. It’s also about time to realize that the humanities are in crisis and decline everywhere, and institutions such as Williams need to re-tool to defend the relevance of the liberal arts.
As a sidenote, Williams gradually (and without plan) grew to 2,000 by adding 20-40 students a year over two decades, absorbing available housing, and creating an operating cash bubble each year. Offhand, and as a Deep Springs College alum as well, my gut is that Williams is already too big. So much for my praise of Brandeis. Regardless, indeed we should be thinking about whether a transition to 4,000 would make sense. All options need to be on the table; we need to envision and choose our future.
As to your question about “with whom?”, my response is that Williams’ leadership should be running to establish 20-50 such multi-lateral relationships, looking for economic advantages at every turn. And from our brief interactions I do not believe Morty would disagree with such an entrepreneurial vision of Williams; you should hear what he says about Williams when he’s in front of a crowd of entrepreneurs in San Francisco.
A $1 billion endowment, however, can make you very lazy.
As for diplomacy… well, first look for my next post on my Mexico City trip. Keep in mind that there is a weird dynamic between Williams students and staff; generally the students are several levels of economic status, and often several levels of intellect, above the staff, and this and some students’ behavior (even though you may be very respectful) creates many negative dynamics. Any admissions officer who feels necessary to give “attitude” to a prospective obviously has a problem, and I’m sorry to hear an example of how Williams does not benefit from students’ perspectives. And finally, ultimately, these are Board-level issues, and they will wind up there.
Oh, and I should say that Phil Smith was a master of conveying Williams concisely and positively and very very personally. If anyone in admissions sending out the messages you say they are, we are tarnishing that legacy, and I hate to think of its impact on loyalty to Williams.
Back to Mandarin.
October 8th, 2005 at 1:55 am
Frank wagers: “If I were a bettor, I would bet that, by and large, the admissions office approaches admissions as it is told.”
Exactly. If they were told to get more geeks, they’d get more geeks. That might mean cutting back on the number of hockey teams from New England prep schools they admit, but it is something that admissions staff could accomplish in reasonably short order (years, not decades), if so instructed.
Ken:
I don’t disagree with your priorities. Personally, the priorities given to the admissions office probably aren’t those that I would choose. However, I understand the reason for those priorities. The current student profile is a very lucrative profile indeed. 58% of Williams students last year paid full-fare ($40,000+ a pop) which is a significantly higher percentage than 52% at Swarthmore, 51% at Brandeis, 50% at Harvard, 39% at MIT.
Going “geek” is expensive. It is tantamount to a decision to increase your tuition discounting (financial aid) and reduce your net tuition revenues.
It also impacts the ethnicity of the student body. All of those schools have much higher Jewish enrollment than Williams. All but Brandeis have nearly double the Asian-American enrollment (3 times higher at MIT).
It’s a zero sum game. Increase those categories and guess what category decreases? The category with most full-price customers. The traditional NE prep, Newton, Westchester County, Short Hills suburban customer base. As far as I can tell, Williams is THE liberal arts college of choice for this market. Great academics for those who are interested, but a faculty that is expected to let you slide if there is a captain’s practice. Reputation for a good party scene. Lots of athletics. That’s a fantastic brand position. The historically low acceptance rate shows that it’s working.
Morty knows exactly what he is doing and, to be honest, it’s a great formula. He knows he can’t push it too far. He knows that academic standards and a credible degree of diversity are important elite college selling features to his customer base. So he’s cut back a bit on the low-stat athletic recruiting, increased the diversity a tad (Questbridge), and taken advantage of the demographic bulge to bump the SATs up.
The faculty can moan all they want, but their moaning should be directed at the people setting the policy, not the people executing it (very well indeed) in the admissions office.
October 8th, 2005 at 2:44 am
Ken:
Williams rapid growth from 1400 to 2000 students actually put it behind its direct competitors financially in the 1980s. The reason is that “per student endowment” is the driving factor in LAC economics. I don’t mean to imply at all that Williams was ever anything but a wealthy college. But, this 1994 Williams Economics Department report comparing financial performance of four LACs (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley) details the impact of the larger enrollment:
http://www.williams.edu/wpehe/DPs/DP-28.pdf
In the last decade, Williams’ enrollment has been held flat (intentionally, I’m sure) which has now put the college on extremely sound financial footing as the endowment growth has caught up with the enrollment levels. Williams has edged past Amherst in per student endowment and has edged closer to Swarthmore ($738k vs $599k in June ‘04). Williams’ per student spending (not including financial aid) was within $1000 of Swarthmore’s in 2003-04 took a had somewhat more conservative endowment spending.
This may explain, in part, why Morty has now told the admissions office to increase diversity (which is costly in terms of reduced net tuition revenue). He now feels the college can afford it and it’s important from a marketing standpoint (and from an educational standpoint, but we’re talkin’ economics here). With higher per student endowments resulting from tighter reins on enrollment growth, both Amherst and Swarthmore were able to push diversity harder earlier. However, Williams has made big gains in the last few years.
The first time I read the Economics department study listed above, I realized that Williams’ emphasis on full-price customers was probably not something that the admissions office just stumbled into. It would have been a logical priority established by the top-levels of the administration.
October 8th, 2005 at 5:51 am
All this sounds familiarly like the strategic deliberations of a big manufacturing company. Should Williams devote more or fewer, or relatively more or fewer, resources to Manufacturing, Marketing or Research and Development? Should Williams serve a niche market or markets (and if so, which ones?) or produce for Everyman or both? And on and on. If Mark Hopkins were alive, he might fall off his log!
October 8th, 2005 at 6:38 am
I was head of Purple Key last year and Admissions encouraged me to lead and pioneer PK projects in addition to the standard PK responsibilities (responsible for all of the non-recruited prefrosh completing overnights at Williams).
In late winter, Admissions and PK organized a discussion forum with students to talk about Williams’ admissions strategy and areas where it could improve. This forum generated many ideas that Admissions is following up on. The idea was that eventually PK might be in charge of these projects, but until they’re on more solid ground that Admissions would handle the organization. We did a phone-banking in which students called all early-write admits. Next year we hope to expand that phone-banking to all RD admits (we almost managed to do it last year). Last year was also the first year of Williams hosting an online discussion forum for admitted prefrosh. It was hosted by Blackboard and moderated by students and admissions. There were also several live chats between prospective and current students. The “ask a first year” section of the website was updated with new students for the first time in years, and the entire PK system underwent a complete structural overhaul (it’s much more efficient now and will allow PK to do more specific host-matching down the road and focus on some of these other projects). Additionally, we began (although I’m not sure if it quite got off its feet last year) the Admissions Ambasador Program–it’s a program that takes advantage of the excitement for Williams current students have. Interested students pick up a packet of info about Williams and go through a very brief training session at Williams. They are then able to go back to their high schools and give the guidance counselors, teachers, and prospective students specifically tailored information about Williams. Last year we laid a lot of the framework down for this program and I hope to see it up and running next year. This is personally one of my favorite new things that’s going on in Admissions–I’m sure there are tons of high schools across the country who have sent 1-2 people to Williams over the past couple of years without Williams garnering any sort of reputation at that high school. My guidance counselor had never heard of Williams, and while my high school was certainly nothing to speak of, there are certainly people who come out of it every year or two who would be a perfect match for Williams (but never consider it because it’s not on anyone in my area’s radar).
These are all projects (many of them my own) initiated, suggested, and often led by students. However, Admissions offered their full support and encouragement at every turn, and in many cases, did the vast majority of the work for each project.
Admissions has a fair number of new and young staff, so if you haven’t been in recently (I’m talking mostly to MikeyD here), you shouldn’t blame the current Admissions dpt for the failings of the past dpt–I think it’s probably a very different looking office than it was even as recently as 5 years ago.
October 8th, 2005 at 8:11 am
Noah,
Bravo! As a former Secretary of Purple Key, I’m glad to see Purple Key is alive and well — and frankly doing more than it did in my day in the early 70s. At that time, we put out the What’s What and gave college tours; overnights were few and far between.
I think what a lot of commentators don’t realize is the sheer grind of Admissions work from about October through April, between being on the road and reading applications. I think that level of work sometimes makes people just keep doing what they do, rather than look around for novel ways to accomplish the objectives. It’s nice to hear there’s some rethinking.
On a more general note, the tone of this discussion has been a lot about what Admissions should do or the Administration should do. Well, even students and alumni can spread the word and the goodwill. I attended Williams from downstate Illinois, at Champaign-Urbana. I was a rah-rah Williams type even as a student, so on one Christmas vacation I got out the Alumni Directory and called all the local Williams alums and invited them over for drinks and to see slides of the Williams campus.
There weren’t that many in C-U, and about 8 turned up with their wives, but they came and had a grand time. At first, a lot of them thought this was some Alumni Fund plot to raise money, but after I assured them that I was just a current student who thought they might like to see slides of the campus and what it was like, they came warily and then enjoyed themselves. A lot of them hadn’t been back in a long time, so they saw the new construction, asked about coeducation, and told stories about what it was like in their day. Admittedly, such a get together didn’t increase awareness of Williams, but it did offer a shot of goodwill to a set of alumni who were not local to the college.
October 8th, 2005 at 7:59 pm
Ah, Purple Key! And decisions.
I applied to Williams solely because it hosted a Telluride Summer Program, and because it did, Williams was well spoken of during the summer of ‘87 in Ithaca. At the time, the only other institutions in my sights were urban, and largely Ivy. You can hardly ask more of a farm boy whose guidance counselor… well, sent two very bright kids to Harvard the year before, but was more accustomed to the differences between Western, Berea and Vandy.
Note that we reached Ethan Zuckerman and Maura Tierney, among others, through Telluride as well.
I did not put Williams on my list of institutions to visit– perhaps out of oversight, perhaps because it is not-so-close to a major airport. But I did get a steady series of letters from Purple Key, telling me little stories of the campus and connecting me with a few departments.
Mid-April, and a personal note came from Phil Smith, inviting me to come to prospective weekend at Williams’ expense. With no advance, I booked a Monday return to get Williams a $240 ticket instead of a $900 ticket.
Thursday afternoon, and that wonderful van trip over the hills from Albany, with Amy Pokras and other New Yorkers chattering about the scenery.
Friday morning, 10am, Phil had set up a meeting with Amy Butler from Purple Key, to tell me her story of Williams. Friday afternoon, around 4, Amy sent Jon Howard to collect me and my suitcase from Sage D and escort me to Williams D.
Saturday afternoon, and I would help Cindy McPherson recover her first anthro paper, on circular time among the Navajo, from a failing floppy disk, in one of those wonderful rooms with gabled dormers at the top of Williams.
Sunday morning, it had snowed during the night, and the tulips on the President’s lawn poped up through a layer of crisp white.
Sunday evening, Cindy and Cara Schlesinger dragged me to Greylock, carefully sitting me at one of the big round tables in Greylock, carefully making sure my view of them was north and out towards the mountains, a perfect frame. Then they told me all the things they didn’t like about Williams, thereby, convincing me to go to Williams.
I was already converted, and had already sent in my card, but Cindy took the time to write me during the decision period. Letters from Amy and Jon joined Cindy’s over the summer; Amy would shortly convince me to be a part of Purple Key. Williams had certainly “differentiated” itself– and sent a very strong message to a boy who had grown up learning his English from farmers’ tales and a lady who had once courted with Robert Penn Warren.
My next post would well begin with the reflection that Mark Hopkins’ Williams was oft criticized for being a school for country bumpkins. Well and good; it still is a school for country bumpkins, if that means it has an emphasis on the personal, the direct, and the practical, the conversation on two ends of a log.
Harvard? Yale? Fifteen of my Telluride cohort went to Harvard, including Noah Feldman, who recently had twenty pages or so in the Times about religion in America. Several more went to Yale. Many, like Noah, were going to pay full rate. None had applied to Williams. Were it not for my constant haunting of Dunster and Elliot and my friends’ classes at Harvard, I doubt they would have thought much about Williams. It took me much of freshman year to convince them that my choice was not entirely idiotic.
I am still in the middle of responding to Noah’s peice. However I am quite sure that, had his Harvard education had a little more of Williams’ character, I would not need to be pointing out to him how religion in America is practiced, not thought. If we only could have gotten him out of that little provincal town, Cambridge!, and over to Williamstown!
Character. I hope some of you just caught my oblique reference to the fact that I believe Williams’ particular character to be of crucial importance to solving the dilemmas of the Middle East and the world. And with all respect to the fact that Noah is as dear to me as the other names above.
Character. May, 2002. I answered the phone at Vanessa Caskey ’00’s in Brooklyn, and passed her the line with her father on the other end. After their short conversation, Vanessa turned to me, sharing that her father had begun their conversation by mentioning that he was sure this young man, whom he had never heard before, was from Williams.
What an institution and tradition we have, that someone who went to Williams twenty years before, can recognize the character of another, by voice and demeanor, in fifteen seconds of conversation!
October 9th, 2005 at 8:02 am
A related note: The other day (in Arlington, VA) I was walking down the Street wearing eph-gear and someone asked me if I went to Williams. I smiled and said yes, and he said, “That’s in Amherst, isn’t it?”
Obviously I was a little put off, and tried to explain to the (older) gentleman that no, it wasn’t.
I too am a fan of the low profile because it makes stories like these that much more amusing. We all went to the number one college in the country, and yet I find myself saying “Oh, it is just a small school in the middle of nowhere” a couple of times a week.
The real vindication is when those people come back and say, “you didn’t tell me Williams was #1!”
October 9th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Grey: It is important that only one particular person know who you are.