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<p>Packing the stadiums? Last year Miami averaged 41,908 per game, much less than non-BCS conference schools such as BYU, who averages over 60K/game, and lower than UTEP and Utah. The Orange Bowl’s capacity is 72,319, meaning the stadium is operating at 57.9% capacity. That’s not packing the stadiums. They can barely fill over half the arena.</p>
<p>I think that constitutes as owned. Oh, and Miami doesnt have ‘great’ athletics.</p>
<p>Simmons College</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Location. I think every person that has posted on this thread from a school in the Boston area has said it already, but Boston really does have an amazing vibe, and I love living right in the city. It just makes me sad that I’ll be leaving in two years and probably still won’t have done half the things I wanted to do. I love the area surrounding Simmons - it’s great being so close to Fenway and Harvard med, and having the MFA and Gardener museum right around the corner. </p></li>
<li><p>Faculty. I have never met more supportive or caring faculty anywhere. The small classes make it easy for the professors to get to know you, and all of the professors I’ve encountered have done everything they could to offer support and advice. I had a professor this past semester who held class at the Gardner museum one day simply because he felt that midterms and dreary weather mandated a pleasant change of scenery. Another professor bought the entire class coffee to make a lecture about the importance of the coffeehouse more interesting.</p></li>
<li><p>Academics. I think people tend to draw the wrong conclusion that less selective colleges have lower academic standards. I also think there are a lot of myths floating around about women’s colleges. Regardless, I’ve really been more than pleasantly surprised by my academic experience.</p></li>
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<p>University of Amsterdam</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The international programme. No class with more than 50 students, most with fewer than 25 (and this is a public school). Typically 75% of my classmates are from 30 different countries all over the globe. Plus, the university does not force us to take any courses outside our major if we don’t want to. We are allowed if we so choose, but most students are so interested in their major that they opt to take the interesting electives that are related to their major in some way. Also it’s an honours programme of sorts, so the other students are very motivated and we typically get the most prominent profs teaching our classes. </p></li>
<li><p>Location. It doesn’t get much better than Amsterdam and the university is right in the heart of it. A lot of Americans don’t realize that this city is made up of hundreds of canals, several of which pass beside or underneath the university campus. The cost of living is amazingly low, especially considering this is a European capital. It’s certainly way cheaper than the UK. The train station is a 10-minute bike ride away (everybody bikes), which has easy connections to Paris, Berlin and Brussels for weekend trips, or Milan, Vienna, Prague and the rest of Europe for longer trips. All these routes are really cheap, especially as a student.</p></li>
<li><p>Study abroad. You are allowed to do a semester abroad at any university in the world. There is a long list of established exchanges with universities such as Sorbonne, Warwick, NYU Stern, NYU CAS, Melbourne, Bocconi, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, Charles University in Prague, Cape Town, McGill, Toronto, and loads of others. However my interests were in a small obscure country not listed by my university. Yet it was not a problem at all. All I had to do was call up that university, pitch the foreign uni to the international director of my university, and give him the necessary contact info. They quickly signed an exchange agreement so that I could go. Now all future students at my university (and at the foreign one) will have the opportunity to benefit from that exchange agreement as well.</p></li>
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