There may also be the phenomenon that “conservative Christian” students looking for a conservative religious school may prefer one of their own denomination, rather than of some other denomination. E.g. if you have a conservative Southern Baptist, a conservative LDS, and a conservative Catholic student, each one may find only one of Baylor, BYU, and CUA desirable, and not the same one for each (and may prefer a secular school over a conservative religious school of a different denomination). This may limit the concentration of high-academic-stat students at a conservative religious school, since those students will be divided by denomination.
What an ironic statement that is! Rush Limbaugh provided something that was “less doctrinaire”? Less doctrinaire than what? North Korean state media?
It’s fair to critique a liberal bias in the mainstream media, and I’ll accept that Roger Ailes provided some sort of conservative equivalent. But Rush Limbaugh? He has never been anything but a propagandist for right-wing political correctness, He’s as relentlessly doctrinaire as anyone in America. His flat out bias is orders of magnitude every day beyond anything that ever made it onto a non-Fox network news broadcast. He got rich off of it, sure, but wealth isn’t the same as quality, unless we are talking about entertainment value.
This assumes the political leaning of a school is important to applicants. That may be true for some students. For many others, perceived benefits in employment and grad/professional school outcomes could trump everything else.
@jhs, of course Rush Limbaugh is doctrainaire. The point was that he was different from the dominant media of the time. The more salient point was that the network media wasn’t widely thought of as down the line liberal by the majority of the population (as it clearly is now) because there was nothing really to compare it to. It’s just what it was. I assume you get the analogy.
@pragmaticmom, I understand what you are saying, but for well over half the population Harvard is free of charge. Yale and Princeton too. All of the Ivys are in fact very likely to be the least costly choice for colleges for large majorities within the United States. So I don’t think your economic argument works quite the way you are intending it too. In fact, one could argue the converse, and that people apply to the Ivies because it makes economic sense even if some percentage of them don’t particularly care for their brand of politics.
Again, except for a very few examples (Brown, Vassar, Wesleyan, Berkley, Evergreen, USMA, USNA, Liberty, etc) I doubt this really effects very many people at all.
Harvard’s net price calculator indicates that a maximum-financial-aid US student sees a net price of $4,600.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator
While the difference between $4,600 and “free of charge” is probably trivial to the forum posters here who complain about not getting any financial aid because their incomes are too high, it is not trivial to most of those who would actually get maximum financial aid at Harvard.
^ was just going to say that. None of the Ivies are “free of charge”. $4600 is a very HIGH expectation for a student’s summer work + work study, IMO. Doable, a great opportunity, but not free.
Also,
Well over half get ANY financial aid. That could mean paying $69K instead of $70k or whatever they get now.
No, it means that for families with AGI under @65k, which is above the median family income for a family of four, Princeton and I believe Harvard and Yale cover tuition, room and board.
And yes @ucbalumnus, there is a comprehensive cost that covers things other than tuition room and board. Given what I have seen from Princeton’s financial aid office, I would bet a billion dollars those costs can be waived as well for students with true need. Find me another set of schools with better aid.
@Ohiodad51 , as JHS point outs, Ailes and Limbaugh are/were in fact doctrinaire far beyond anything seen in the mains stream media.
The observation I would make, though, is that liberals I know do not and never did view the MSM as “liberal.” They view[ed] it as commercial. And I would agree.
@Consolation, essentially every reputable survey done in the last decade and more finds that the majority of people in the US believe the media are liberal. It is what it is.
Did not say that other schools were better, just that they are not “free of charge” (as you claimed) even for maximum-financial-aid students.
Yes it means that but “over half” are not getting that. “Over half” get some amount of financial aid, from tuition/R&B down to $1 less than full price.
Nearly half get zero financial aid.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Let’s move on from the Cost of Attendance discussion please; it’s not relevant to the original post.
No one has mentioned this, but it speaks to the questions that the OP has posed. There is an organization called Christian Union that according to its website
It has facilities/programming at all the Ivies plus Stanford (but no other universities), with a separate program at Harvard Law. From what I’ve seen (only from the outside) of the facility and heard about the programming at one of the campuses, it is an extremely well-funded organization.
@ucbalumnus, that is absolutely right, particularly among fundamentalists. We recently moved to rural Maine, and when I was looking for a church, I was shocked by all the tribalism. There are a lot of fundamentalist churches of all different stripes here, and they each think they’re the only ones with the truth. It makes perfect sense that people that invested in a particular belief system would only consider a school that upheld it.
My S attends an Ivy, is an URM studying stem and is a Bible believing, born again Christian who aligns with social and economic conservative views. I personally don’t like the term evangelical because of the way the word is used today…it’s lost its true meaning…just my opinion.
When my S went through the process of narrowing down his choices, never did he think that he had to limit colleges based on faith. He knew what he was going into choosing an Ivy and he chose it for the opportunity to study at a top notch university and be surrounded with uber smart kids that would challenge him academically. Surprisingly, he feels that even though it is a liberal leaning school, the liberals on campus aren’t ‘in your face’ and there haven’t been any riots or violent protests on campus. I counseled him before he left for college that his actions and behavior will be a reflection of his faith so he needed to use discernment and live wisely. So far it’s worked well for him. His only complaint would be that if he wanted to join a conservative club or go to an event featuring a conservative speaker, he would feel ostracized by his friends if they knew he went. A lot of his friends are Christians but progressives. A few aren’t believers but also aren’t progressives.
“They are, by nature, iconoclasts. They want to question and sometimes to disrupt the status quo.”
I think the lack of knowledge of the “other side” leads both sides into stereotyping the other. Most profs at so-called liberal schools are not incendiary, nor iconoclasts. Rather, they’re scholars in their own interest areas, more concerned with the pursuit, analysis, and defense of knowledge. (C’mon, they spend years developing their scholarly creds.) That’s an organic pursuit, not faith based (though, of course, we all have principles we accept as true.)
For many, there is no one ultimate source of authority, not in the way the Bible speaks to Christians or other works to other faiths.
@lookingforward I concur about lack of knowledge of the other side. One aspect is exhibited in this thread where fundamentalist and evangelical are used synonymously when they are not. Posters pointed this out and we were directed to avoid defining each but fundamentalist continues to be used in a thread that is supposed to be about evangelicals.
Just as you point out that lack of knowledge of the other side leads to stereotypes, it also leads to lumping large groups together who would never self affiliate with the beliefs or labels of the other. I am an Evangelical. I am categorically not a fundamentalist. Both agree on some key theological points but also key theological distinctions. Evangelical is a much broader term and a much bigger umbrella of Christians.
I think the thread has run it’s course and will just go in circles from here.