<p>Goldenboy:</p>
<p>School spirit, as you’re talking about it, is very hard to identify. Unless you’re comparing size of fan bases, it’s really hard to determine school spirit/alum loyalty. Does Duke have considerably more school spirit than Stanford, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, etc? </p>
<p>Of the links you provide, it seems as if they are pretty subjective and arbitrary methods used to determine “school spirit.” I don’t know if Duke alums give back at a much higher rate than alums from other schools because of this loyalty or spirit.</p>
<p>I guess your argument just makes me shrug. This is very hard to quantify, and if you really want school spirit, it seems as if there are other viable top schools that offer that atmosphere (Stanford, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, some of the ivies like Dartmouth and Princeton have great support for their athletic teams). </p>
<p>The only point really where the idea of school spirit really proved to be a tipping point for me was at the big college football games in the fall. Football is the biggest sport in the country for a reason, and there are just orders of magnitude of difference between the big basketball games on small/mid-sized campuses and the big football games at major schools.</p>
<p>On a related note, while Duke might have a “ferocious” core of students who boil up the UNC-Duke rivalry, as UNC just has so many more students, the rivalry feels very different on UNC’s campus. I was at UNC once when they were about to play Duke, and the sheer numbers of people involved just makes for a different atmosphere.</p>
<p>Again, for school spirit, I think numbers matter a lot. If you’re bent on school spirit, going to a big 10 school seems like a great way to go. Otherwise, I’m not sure if the difference between Duke (#1 on your “ranking” of school spirit) and Stanford (#6 on the very same ranking) would be that different.</p>