Tim,
College selection is such an individual match decision - so I have learned after just having my youngest of a bunch graduate last month (from Grove City). Major questions about the prospective student make such a huge difference.
- Is the student a top performing student with a real academic / career focus?
- Is the student desirous of a nurturing Christian family atmosphere that is not necessarily academically tops?
- Does the student even want to go to a four year liberal arts school, or is it more the parents desire?
- If the student already has some career focus, do any of the schools being considered even address that focus? The size of the student body can make, or break, the kinds of academic opportunities available regardless of other qualities. Even the personality of the student make the difference in prospering or languishing at any given school.
- Be careful not to depend on 'dated' info about a school, a mistake I made with one of ours
- has the student spent a life time in Christian Schools and/or home school and does that make for considering a change, or not.
- Don't even think of encouraging a student to go to a school that they haven't personally visited and stayed on campus over night in the dorms.
My wife and I met at Covenant back in the early '70's. Got married the day after graduation - Dr. Dr. Henry Krabbendam doing the honors (believe he is long gone from the school and probably still working on projects in Uganda).
When our biological children were still young, we brought a long time family friend teenager into our family - who, of course, was ready for college long before our oldest biological child. While we thought we were pretty good a making educational decisions for our kids, we made a faulty assumption that Covenant would be for our adopted daughter what it was for us, just 16 years earlier - wrong. I'm sure that part of it was that that we had changed as much as Covenant had. Without casting any aspersions on what Covenant is like now, our adopted daughters' reaction during her 1st semester (this was '89) was that the school as a whole was not a nurturing environment - she was very upset about the social and spiritual maturity of the students in particular. (She also had Dr. K for some classes - one of the brights spots). We were shocked and, grasping at straws, I remembered another Christian College near by - Bryan College in Dayton, TN. It did not have the academic reputation Covenant did (nor particularly Reformed), but it students, I thought, had a better reputation in the areas she was concerned about. We visited during a visitation weekend and ran into piles of PCA parents with upcoming freshman, who had gotten the same comparative impression. She decided to transfer to Bryan, and it was like a hand in a glove.
* The lessons - 1) Bryan was a great place (into the early '90's anyway) for someone wanting a solid but not necessarily top academic education that offers a more mature nurturing Christian environment. 2) Don't rely on dated info.
Our oldest biological child was a top-of-the class focused student since K-4. We knew what we/she wanted - an unrivaled academic reputation (especially in biology for her) in a serious, conservative and hopefully reformed school, that was economically as close to a State school cost as we could get. Grove City won that hands down. She graduated with both a BA and a BS (class of '01), went on to med school, and now both she and our son-in-law help staff a vibrant Christian ministry at the medical university, sponsored by a large Baptist church with a thoroughly Reformed Baptist pastor.
* The lesson - for my money, for most academic disciplines, for the high achieving focused student wanting a Christian (with Reformed tilt), AND economical college education, Grove City is very hard to beat.
Our two boys both had career/vocational desires/bents that were not going to be addressed by a Christian College at all. The older loved aviation from the time he could look up, and went to a great (but very expensive) university that was all aviation. He works in that field now, and is very happy with his job and employer. He and our daughter-in-law are part of a PCA church in GA. Our younger son had a cop/sleuth bent since he was old enough to sneak up on his siblings. Went to our State Univ for a degree in Criminal Justice, got hired into one of those 3 letter gov't agencies in the DC/MD area that you can't talk about when you work there, got his Masters a related field, and is just finishing joining a large OPC church in MD - never knew the OPC HAD a large church until I visited his
.
* Lesson - for many good Christian offspring, going to a 4 year Christian liberal arts school simply is not the correct target.
Youngest daughter graduated last month from Grove City, aiming at Law school, after a year teaching ESL in China starting next month.
Lesson - same as daughter # 2 - for my money, for most academic disciplines, for the high achieving focused student wanting a Christian (with Reformed tilt), AND economical college education, Grove City is very hard to beat.
Tim, I hope that helps - ask lots of questions of the prospective student.
I'd rather they go to BJU my alma mater. 
