Is Emory a party school?

icfireball
Sat, 06 Nov 2010 01:55:36 +0000

1081736,

Qualitatively, I can tell you that Emory is the most diverse top-20 school both ethnically religiously. Quantitatively, it has been my experience that Emory is less cliquey and self-segregated than other colleges I’ve spent time at. Don’t get me wrong-- there certainly are circles of friends and niches of students-- but I think students at Emory are very friendly and welcoming to others. This is in part due to Emory’s fairly active and open Greek system which facilitates a lot of social mixing. But I think the larger reason for this is Emory’s culture. Emory has a culture that emphasizes the importance of the community, and I think this manifests itself through Emory’s relatively relaxed and casual atmosphere.

As far as socioeconomic status goes, sure there are a lot of wealthy people at Emory (it is after all, an elite institution), however, there are also a lot of people who come from very modest backgrounds. In fact, I think that Emory is less socioeconomically homogenous than most flagship public schools. The reason for this is that elite schools like Emory and its peer institutions are able to offer great merit and need based aid to students who ordinarily could not afford the cost of attendance. Over half of Emory’s students qualify for some need-based financial aid. Comparatively, while top public schools are cheaper, they are still quite expensive, and are not able to offer anywhere near the levels of aid elite schools can. The result of this is that the few high-achivement students coming from underprivileged backgrounds are driven to attend elite institutions that can make the cost of education competitive to that of a public school. This leaves the top public universities with large pool of middle class and upper-middle class students who had the opportunities and background to succeed in high school, but relatively few lower-income students as a proportion of the student body.

What I’m trying to say is that you will find a very broad range of wealth at Emory from the very wealthy to the underprivileged. In addition, like bernie mentioned earlier, the wealthier students at Emory are snobbish and don’t flaunt their wealth.

As a personal account, I’ve had serious conversations with some of my friends about how they’re trying to make ends meet to pay for Emory. I myself am in that position.

As it relates to the party scene at Emory, people of all kinds of backgrounds party. It’s certainly not anything where only the wealthy kids are out partying frequently.