Definitely Roosevelt University or Columbia College in Chicago. With the Wabash Street El on one side and Michigan Ave/Grant Park on the other. IIT and UIC would also qualify, in my mind.
Duquesne
Umm, SJ2727. If not for the Tenderloin being so close to the most crowded part of the city, nobody would be talking about how gritty SF is. Once you get out of that area, SF is pretty much like any other big city on the “grit” scale.
It’s amazing how a city that’s supposedly so gritty and crime-infested has so many people wanting to move there that it’s among the most expensive cities in the world to live in. USF and SF State are both in pretty nice areas of the city.
I love SF, I’m just realistic about the grit factor. (I’ve lived in a really high crime developing country, this is nothing to me, but it bothers locals enough that families move out of the city.) It’s really not hard to find, it finds you. Even in the “pretty nice areas”. Enough derailing the thread, if op wants gritty urban, SF is a good option.
University of Hawaii - Manoa in the middle of an urban / suburban area, but not really mixed in (but that describes many of the universities listed in this thread, like UCB, UCLA, USC, SFSU, MIT, BU, Howard, etc.). It does have significant linguistics offerings, though focusing on it as an undergraduate would be under the major interdisciplinary studies.
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/records/pdf/campus_map.pdf
http://www.catalog.hawaii.edu/courses/departments/ling.htm
http://manoa.hawaii.edu/undergrad/is/
Any CUNY college:
City College
Brooklyn College
Hunter College
Queens College
@brantly CUNYs were mentioned much earlier in the thread and with lots of detail. Thanks though.
Families move out primarily because it’s too expensive to find housing in SF, especially if you want a sizable yard for your kids to run around in. That’s been going on for decades. I’ve known lots of people who moved to the SF suburbs from SF when they got married and started having children. They never said it was because of crime or grit.
Brooklyn College is pretty self contained with a quad. I would not consider it an urban campus, at all. 3 out of 4 sides of the campus are surrounded with residential areas/ homes. The Junction on the 4th side is built up and somewhat urbanized, but the campus is removed from there unless you are commuting via that subway line. Queens College is also on its own campus, as is City College. Lehman College in the Bronx is on a 37 acre campus, so I doubt that would meet the OP’s criteria.
On the other hand, Hunter College is integrated into the upper east side, without a defined campus. Baruch College is in the 20’s on the east side, and is also integrated into the city. John Jay is also integrated into the city downtown.
Another non-CUNY option is Pace University, also located downtown.
@Dustyfeathers I received both my undergraduate and graduate degrees from CUNY (Brooklyn College and Hunter), so I am a strong believer in the excellent education one can get there, as well as its value. However, calling it the “Harvard of the Proletariat” was much truer some forty+ years ago when one needed at least a 90 average to attend any of the senior colleges. With Open Enrollment, the exclusivity of the campuses changed. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. But it is misleading to make the CUNY schools seem ultra-competitive or that they are currently the breeding ground for the highest level of scholarship. (All of CUNY’s Nobel prize winners graduated before the mid-60’s.)
However, if one has the grades, the Macaulay Honors program on the senior campuses, is competitive and offers some great opportunities for research and mentorship.
@simba9 , would you like to stop derailing this thread and take it offline? I have neighbors who moved out of the city due to crime spreading to their once safe area in the city and due to things like having to step around needles on the sidewalk when walking with their kids. They say they know others, and certainly I’ve seen a few newspaper articles saying similar. Housing costs are not the only reason, plenty pricey places in the suburbs too.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
The dark areas on this map are not jus one neighborhood. It’s across half the city. Crime index 2 - safer than 2% of US cities…
Thank you for not derailing further. There is grit in the city. Live with it. Done with this debate.
@uskoolfish – thank you for that background. It’s always welcome. I guess I wasn’t attempting to make it seem competitive. Just quality for the money depending on what you put into it. And I know profs who have moved from Ivy and Ivy-level schools to CUNY and the other direction, from CUNY to Ivy schools. As for competitive – for one you can check out the stats yourself in about 1/2 of a second online and there’s no need to attempt to fudge anything and for a second thought, competitive doesn’t always translate to the quality of education that’s best for you.
Harvard isn’t the best place for me or for my children, you know, it just isn’t. Nice enough school, but not a great fit. “Harvard” the term, however, is a substitute for “smartypants education” and I think we can all agree to that. So in this sense CUNY has been called the Harvard of the Proletariat.
@Dustyfeathers As I said, I loved the education I got at Hunter College. But it was not at all a “smartypants education” and the stats to get in at an undergraduate level are not high (SAT’s in the low 600’s on average–mid to high 80’s GPA.)
BUT, It was a wonderfully diverse group of people who were trying to better their life through education. It was people attending school full time while working full time (and often raising a family, too.)
And yes, they do have excellent professors, many of whom are adjuncts who work in NYC in the exact field you hope to get into. I have heard that CUNY offers fairly competitive salaries to their professors. I know professors who teach at both City College and NYU.
I went to Hunter for a second career in education. I was in my mid 30’s when I began their graduate program in elementary ed. The classes had high standards and I was more than happy. So, I definitely agree that a school does not have to be competitive to be good.
It does have a very low 4 year graduation rate compared to private schools in the city. A lot of factors go into that though.
This may be a bit of stretch for you but one such school that definitely fits this definition is Saint Louis University
Maybe not exactly gritty but definitely spills into the city