Chipmoney

Im going with Vandy here...

It's a national arboretum and has over 300 species of trees there

par72

Duke, West Point, Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouuth. LAC's-Bowdoin, Holy Cross, Williams, Davidson.

ledzep

Columbia hands down.

I was there again just yesterday, and it's just magnificent.

jack

UNC-Chapel Hill-- absolutely beautiful, and doesn't look like it was constructed like every other campus; lots of big old trees and lovely old buildings, slightly rolling campus-- my favorite.

Duke-- parts of it (ie, Sarah P Duke Gardens, the Chapel and road leading to it)

Agree about Columbia; after you've toured a lot and all schools start to look alike, Columbia really stands out as well-- very impressive.

Agnes Scott College, in a very Southern way, but really a lovely campus

veryscary

Wellesley is stunning.

veryscary

Yale's buildings might be nice but New Haven is a dump.

posterX

^Not really. Downtown New Haven has become one of the best college towns in the United States. It is on par with Ann Arbor, Madison and Charlottesville; totally packed with theaters, museums, stores, cafes, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, as there are 50,000 students in the area. Because Yale is the only Ivy League school located in the center of a real downtown with numerous 24/7 stores, city hall, etc. (and that's only because it is so old), you could argue that there is more to do within a few blocks of the Yale campus than within a few blocks of all the other Ivies combined. On the whole it is a large and very diverse city, very much like New York, with wildly rich areas as well as poorer areas packed with recent immigrants (but also amazing, $1.00 tacos better than anything I've ever tried in Mexico or the border states). There are also unbelievably high-quality parks and ocean beaches just a 10-15 minute bus trip, walk or bicycle ride from the downtown.

Having traveled extensively, I would argue that Wellesley, Yale and Princeton are the 3 most beautiful campuses in the U.S. Incidentally, they were also among the most expensive to construct. People just don't build buildings or ornament them to the extent that they did when those three campuses were constructed.

weldon

As on a similar string going on elsewhere right now, I would nominate Clinton Community College as extremely beautiful

SexyLikeAScorpio

Princeton and Cornell are gorgeous. I also loved Columbia, but it was just kind of small to me.

rence

So basically, every single top 50 college is gorgeous.

yournamehere

i heart PRINCETON!!!
well i'm a little biased cuz i used to live there. haha.
but seriously, that campus is small but amazing.
would absolutely love to go there...*dreams*

thethoughtprocess

Columbia would be nicer if you couldn't see the entire campus from one place...gets kind of depressing that its so nice but surrounded by traffic.

Cre8tive1

Hats off to Stanford with no contest. No campus has created such a paradise and their is no campus enterance greter than driving of palm drive to the Oval and facing the main quad. And I'd say their engineering, bio, and arts facilities are the best I've seen outside of Cambridge. To top it off, no other canpus has a full fledge mall with a Nordstrom on campus.

Posterx, I would agree that New Haven is a dump, Yale is notorious for neglecting it's surrounding community. Go outside of the campus no more than two blocks in any direction and it a very run down low-income neighborhood and empty buildings. Yale made a symbolic move of buying all the land around the perimeter of the campus and just letting the grass grow to solidfy the barrier. It's a sad thing, second wealthiest non-profit in the world and that's what they give back to the community. Harvard's not even that stingy.

zspot9

I would have to say that I, for one, despise Stanford, as far as aesthetic appeal. It looks like a bland Mexican village for the most part. And the palm trees are obnoxious. I live in Florida, and we don't even use them like that here. It's just so boring and monochromatic.

posterX

Personally I find Stanford's campus incredibly boring, homogenous and shopping-mall fake. I know several Stanford alumni who wish they went to school in a place that was more "real" and had more 24/7 life to it. Cre8tive, it sounds like you're talking about New Haven 15+ years ago. A small house four blocks from Yale sold for $1.5 million last year. There are thousands of luxury apartments and condos, extending for many blocks around the campus, and now dozens of new restaurants as well (unfortunately, most of which, at up to $80 per person for dinner, beyond all but the wealthiest students' budgets), plus a nightlife scene so active that streets have to be shut down to accommodate the crowds. The only overgrown grassy sections anywhere near Yale are where a large factory building was just demolished and being turned into an enormous new public park, and already ringed by brand-new expensive homes, the other being the old "Route 34" highway near the main hospital and Pfizer Corporation advanced clinical research center that was removed and is being converted into a new $500,000,000, 15-story international cancer treatment center that will be larger and more advanced than Sloan-Kettering when it opens next year. In reality, Yale gives much more back to its community than Harvard does. It even has a homebuyer program that pays for any employee there to buy a home within a 4-mile radius, which is one reason why the city has improved so much.

While of course there are mile after mile of enormous, $2M+ mansions, because after all, New Haven is the third-wealthiest urban area in the United States after San Francisco and Silicon Valley - (see Student's mom robbed and beaten up while sitting on Locust Walk ), obviously there are a few low-income areas nearby packed with immigrants, just like any other real city. NYC is another place where a huge proportion of the population is foreign-born, but you find the same kinds of demographics in parts of Cambridge near Harvard, or any other urban place. If you want total suburban isolation, you might want to look at places like Stanford or Hofstra.