Longing for a college with strong academics and good school spirit and/or sports. Similar to Northwestern but ideally less selective than 9%.
Willing to entertain any suggestions!
A number of state flagships would fit the bill (ex. U Michigan, UVA, UCLA to name but a few).
What do you want to study?
Ga Tech ? ~15% OOS acceptance. Top 5 Public University. ACC Sports
I primarily want to study English but am considering other fields in the humanities
@ellewoods , not knowing financial or location restraints, here are a few shots in the dark. I assume that your choice of NW as a sample indicates you might not want a 30K enrollment size, so I’ve included only a couple of those.
Villanova - 29%
U of Georgia - 54% but I’m not sure what the OOS rate is.
Syracuse - 47%
U of Miami - 36%
Univ of Southern California - 17%
Wake Forest - 28%
Univ of Texas at Austin - 36% but I’m not sure what OOS rate is
Boston College - 32%
Have you looked at your own home-state public universities? Chances are that the English departments are decent, and as you get into upper-level courses, the work will become more demanding.
U of Iowa
Baylor, TCU, and SMU…if you can afford them. The admit rates are in the 30% to 40% range. Baylor and TCU are both in the Big 12.
Others:
UNC
UF
UGA
University of Wisconsin - Madison would certainly be a strong school with great school spirit, but it’s a large school and OOS acceptance can be tough. Still probably easier than Northwestern.
UNC OOS is a really tough admit, more like 15% - 20%.
U of Iowa has one of the strongest creative writing programs in the country.
Three words: Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Rutgers, UIUC, and Ohio State are also all excellent choices.
I’ll second TCU, we sure do have lots of Purple Pride and love all the Horned Frog Athletics! Football is huge, but volleyball has been really fun this year with all matches being sellouts. Looking forward to the start of basketball season!
Wisconsin, Duke, Miami, Syracuse, etc. All good schools with a lot of school spirit! Obviously, their acceptance rates vary but they are all about top 50 schools
Actually Duke #9 is the only Top 50 in this group. According to Forbes (which ranks by all the colleges) UW is #81, Miami #90, Syracuse #156.
For this question, forbes is the not the best list to use. Since the OP was asking about schools similar to NW.
If spirit is a synonym for major D1 sports (as the above discussion suggests) then the USNWR national university list is more relevant.
Using that list, schools in the top 50 with major D1 sports would be Stanford, NW, Duke, ND, Vandy, UCLA, Cal, USC, maybe Gtown (big for hoops not football), UMich, Wake, UVA, GTech, UNC, UF, BC, maybe Nova (hoops not football), UT, UGA. All top 50, all Power 5/6 sports.
But Power 5/6 sports + USNWR national top 50 isn’t the only way to define “spirit” obviously. You could certainly add schools like Tulane, Syracuse, Miami, UW, Wiscy, TCU, SMU, Iowa.