Quote from: HSCTiger74 on October 27, 2025, 06:29:55 PMQuote from: hazzben on October 27, 2025, 02:41:53 PMQuote from: Pat Coleman on October 27, 2025, 02:32:58 PMQuote from: hazzben on October 27, 2025, 01:18:27 PM... if JHU, Carnegie Mellon, Wash U, et al can put very competitive teams on the field at both the conference and national level, there's no reason Carleton can't get there.
All three of those schools are much, much larger than Carleton. The NESCAC schools are probably a better comparison -- we just don't have the picture on how they stack up nationally as of right now.
It's funny, I literally deleted a comment about NESCAC comparison. Totally agree we can't tell how they compare. But to push back, "size of school" is something we say all the time doesn't matter for the WIAC. I suppose if you're academically "elite" you can lower your dial a bit more if you have a larger student body, compared to an enrollment of 2k. But then you'd have to prove to me JHU and Wash U are really lowering the bar, as opposed to just being better at marketing themselves to good HS talent that meets the standard.
This is an important point. Even when I was in high school many, many years ago I had heard of Washington University (Johns Hopkins was only five miles away, so obviously ...) but I had never heard of Carleton until I joined these boards. It really helps to be a national brand.
There's a big difference between the large research universities that are D3 (MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wash U, Carnegie Mellon, U Chicago, etc.) and the liberal arts colleges (Carleton, NESCAC, Pomona, Grinnell, etc.) in terms of brand recognition. Carleton should be able to use academics as a recruiting advantage, but I'm not sure the ceiling is as high as what Johns Hopkins has shown.
 
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