<p>My son visited Bucknell. The campus is absolutely beautiful, and the academics seem sound. But the other posters’ experience was similar to ours: the school is definitely small town, with all that’s good and bad about small towns, and the emphasis on frats was quite apparent. My son felt that it was too much in a bubble: life would revolve around parties and the school itself, and it was too divorced from the real world. However, for those attracted to LAC’s, that’s already been taken into account. One thing about the frats, though, is that the students join them in sophomore year, rather than as freshmen. Bucknell indicated that took some of the pressure off the frats as being the focus of student friendships. Although I take their point, and it’s a good one, I also felt that they had to do that to keep the frats’ influence down to manageable proportions. After all, you don’t pass a law to contain frats, unless the frats needed containing.</p>