hmom5

If you mean reslly top schools: Penn, Dartmouth, Stanford, Duke.

MissPickwickian

If you want to party at a smaller school, try Rhodes College in Tennessee. Although Rhodes is not well-known, one can still get an excellent liberal arts education there. Parties abound because of the robust Greek life.

WaitingDad

Check out Bucknell, Colgate and Lehigh.

barrons

Wisconsin has a small Greek element and they still party just fine. After today's game I might need to party a little myself. JFC.

brewerfan99

If you want to party, you can find those people anywhere. My cousin says he's even been to good UChicago parties.

mom2collegekids

Alabama has a pretty strong Greek system, and therefore, there are some serious partying going on.

I think most kids do some partying of some level while at college...I know I did. Maybe the smaller Christian colleges have less partying,??? I don't know.

arbiter213

Michigan .

And brewerfan, your cousin is a liar.

On second thought, he's a UChicago student. He probably honestly thought they were good...


And some might say NU, but that's definitely up for debate. The Greek scene is certainly plenty strong.

sax

Only 25% of students at Penn State are in frats and sororities. It is still a huge party school.

hawkette

You might find something in this thread:

Ranking the Social Life of the USNWR Top 20

Here is a summary of the rankings as voted by posters in that thread:

1 Vanderbilt
2 Stanford
3 U Penn
4 Duke
5 Notre Dame
6 Dartmouth
7 Northwestern
8 Rice
9 Brown
10 Cornell
11 Princeton
12 Wash U
13 Yale
14 Emory
15 Columbia
16 Harvard
17 MIT
18 Johns Hopkins
19 U Chicago
20 Caltech

Outside of the Top 20, but still considering schools with very strong Top 50 rankings, IMO strongest reputations for great social life go to

PUBLICS-U Wisconsin, U Virginia, U North Carolina, U Texas, U Illinois, Penn State, U Florida

PRIVATES-Wake Forest, USC, Boston College, Lehigh, and Tulane.


Social life at LACs is generally on a much smaller scale than any of these schools (Lehigh would be closest). That's not meant to imply that one can't greatly enjoy themselves on LAC campuses, but the comparison of the LAC social scenes with the major publics and privates listed above would be like comparing Orvieto to Rome. Both nice places, but different levels of social vibrancy.

dwhite

^^No surprise there! I was blown-away by the social opportunities at Vanderbilt. Sometimes I wonder how those kids get any work done with access to so much on campus, next to campus (Hillsboro village) and downtown Nashville. What a fun place to spend 4 years!

ds143

its easier to define non-party schools than party schools-any HUGE school will have some sort of party element

ChoklitRain

This is true for top 10ish schools, but for someone looking at slightly less selective schools, I think Vanderbilt, Michigan, UVA, USC, and Boston College fit the bill as well.

Shrinkrap

"UCSB, UCSD, UC Irvine, Pepperdine, USC, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA"


Pepperdine is a "party" school?

Bowlesman

berkeley is a wannabe party school. we party so hard, the professors even heard about it and then scheduled midterms the week following homecoming and halloween.
and these are big, common classes, like physics, multivar, chem... *sigh

RileyJohn

Cornell (10 char)