@blourring , I get what you are asking. It drives me crazy on this site when people say, “You can find sober/non-partying/intellectual/curious valedictorians at any college.” Well, of course you can, but what is the dominant culture of the school? There may be some intellectuals at Popular U, but if the non-silent majority of students are partying 3 nights a week, the student seeking an intellectual vibe is going to be out of place there.
My daughter’s initial college list was driven by academic standards… until I butted my head in and told her she is not appreciating the fact that she is pretty much a socialist/communist/leftist and that she will not fit in into many schools on her original list. got her to look at some truly liberal colleges very carefully due to cultural fits with the expected student population.
Her mom thought i am giving too much weightage to her political leanings but I believe these things absolutely matter. As @Massmomm pointed out above, if you are an intellectual in a party school with active greek life - you will definitely feel out of place. While I agree that there are intellectuals at such schools as well, that is not the identity of the school. And if being at an intellectual college and being immersed in regular philosophical debates and banter y is to be a part of your college experience you should exclude places like a USC, most state schools, even some Ivies to be honest and most definitely most of the conservative colleges in the south.
Like it or not, the truth is by definition most intellectual colleges are hard to the left. take idealistic impractical youth, progressive thought and put them in a blender of a typical LAC with academics and… that is what you will get almost every time.
In my opinion the philosophically intellectual colleges are places like Reed, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Amherst, Oberlin & Brown. Yale, Wellesley, Barnard, Smith, Columbia etc are similar but not as intense. I really don’t know about Christian schools but I guess we can safely assume the atmosphere there will be conservative enough to stifle at least some debate. I also assume places like Mudd, MIT, Caltech will be too academically focused to let their minds wander too much on esoteric philosophical issues.
Just my 2 cents.
Mudd emphasizes having a broader view of the world than just STEM (it is in their mission statement). It is where my egghead intellectual who loves physics, literature, and art ended up – she turned down some of the places repeatedly mentioned in this thread, and finds it definitely meets her requirements.
Differences among colleges? Horribile dictu.
Slight sidetrack: Is Princeton really “notoriously anti-intellectual”? (And is it really anti-intellectual?)
@twinsmama: Though I posted that excerpt, reading it initially was the first time I’d heard that regarding Princeton. However, editing Princeton out would certainly not have been fair either.
I find it humorous that people stereotype an entire campus with 30,000+ students as a party, Greek school where only the silent minority might be intellectual. If that is only 20% of the student body, that is 6000 students. My ds is at a school which fits both those profiles, Bama, and he has a huge peer group of non-drinking, non-Greek friends who spend hours talking about issues, playing strategy games, etc. He had zero problems finding other students with similar interests.
When a freshman class is as big as another school’s student body, it is highly unlikely that a peer group does not exist.
I’m not a fan of the Greek system, but this boggles me. Are you really claiming that those in fraternities and sororities are (even largely) non-intellectual? Of, for that matter, that serious partiers are necessarily (or even largely) not intellectuals? Seems a rather overly broad brush, either way.
My D reports a lot of these conversations are driven, at her school, by having lots of high-achieving kids together, but also by having kids who are so (wait for it) diverse. Her dorm floor lounge is the spot for a lot of intense, according to her, discussions about many subjects, and they are interesting to her because so-and-so from Ecuador has one point of view while so-and-so who is British but went to Deerfield has another, and so-and-so the farm kid from Wisconsin yet another, and so on.
So perhaps geographic, racial and SES diversity combined with a lot of engaged kids fosters these sorts of discussions. If everyone came from the same place, views might not differ enough to make the conversation lively for long?
This reminds me - I had some provocative intellectual discussions with a couple people on my floor in college, who… both flunked out. They were best friends and both never went to their classes. They were both very bright, and interesting, and creative… I always enjoyed their company. They just didn’t have much of a work ethic.
Just a reminder that at least a few of our kids’ peers won’t be that great of an influence, although a good intellectual discussion might be had with them…
Lol… I remember some of the best conversations with a boy who ended up taking 7 years to graduate. Ironically, I just came across a photo credit by him in a newspaper last week – hadn’t thought of him in over 30 years.
Partiers can be intellectuals, too. That kid who parties 3 nights a week may organize his time really well and have straight As in his philosophy major. (And no, it’s not an exaggeration - I knew some kids like this in college. Work hard, play hard.) I have had non-weed-induced philosophical conversations at parties. My own college definitely had a strong social vibe but a strong social justice intellectual vibe as well.
College students, just like everyone else, are multi-faceted. You can go to a party school that is also an intellectual place. You can be a student who likes to party and also likes to have intellectual conversations. They’re not mutually exclusive. And, as the previous two posters pointed out, being able to have long conversations about serious topics doesn’t necessarily point to a person’s level of perseverance or likely success.
And as for an active Greek life - at my campus, the Greek organizations were often the ones organizing lecture series and book discussions and social justice summits. The Greek orgs also had consistently higher average GPAs than the general population - and that’s true at a lot of universities. Again: multi-faceted human beings.
Macalester fits the bill.
Of course there will be intellectual conversations on all campuses. But there’s a big difference in the climate of campuses. My kids both went to highly selective liberal arts colleges - Oberlin and Macalester. Students at these schools simply couldn’t keep up with their work if they partied 3 nights a week. (If you didn’t read the book, you can’t hide in a class with 12 students!) When we toured campuses I always asked about a typical Friday schedule. At (what I considered) more academic colleges, a student’s Friday schedule wasn’t that different from that of the other week-days, and students could be seen studying on the weekends. At others the norm is to have a limited schedule on Fridays which means staying our late on Thursday - in addition to Friday and Saturday nights. When the norm is to work hard, party hard, it may be more difficult to be a student who is focused on learning for learning’s sake. At both of my kid’s schools, students enjoyed exchanging ideas with their friends and classmates outside of class - in fact, that’s usually why kids go to schools like these…These schools are the opposite of the stereotypical pre-professional schools at which most students are very concerned about getting good grades, recommendations and internships to move into a career or graduate school. Smart, successful kids can be successful after attending any college, so it really is which type of college experience best suits the student.
Erm, my oldest is pretty good friends with a handful of Macalester students. (The school district we live in, it turns out, sends a surprising—considering the distance—number of students there.) Judging by her Facebook feed, some of them are partying at least 3 nights a week, and by all accounts still keeping up with their work quite successfully, thankyouverymuch.
You really have to be careful judging from the small slice of a school’s population you have contact with (or that someone close to you has contact with) and extrapolating that to the entire school.
You really have to be careful judging from the small slice of a school’s population you have contact with (or that someone close to you has contact with) and extrapolating that to the entire school.
I could say the same of you. It’s always dangerous to judge an entire population by a small sample. My point was that kids tend to self-select for whether they want a party school, an intellectually challenging atmosphere, or other qualities as well.
Certainly college kids everywhere party. But, schools do have different climates. Macalester isn’t known as a party school.
The question was about intellectual conversations. I’ve heard plenty of them at Macalester.
And I’ve heard plenty of them at community colleges.
But what you said supports what has pretty much been my point all along—the original question (pinpointing the colleges where one is most likely to find intellectual conversations) is really rather silly, because the only actual answer is all of them.
My kid’s HS is a feeder for Mac, and one of my kids was admitted there. The students are intelligent, thoughtful, and solid academically. But sorry… Mac isn’t an intellectual haven. Also, work hard - play hard schools, and the idea that the Greek system is somehow driving intellectual life at colleges today – sorry, but drunkem conversations about the meaning of life sren’t really what the OP Is going for, I think.
And while these conversations can be found at all colleges, why should a student who craves this environment have to sift through a ton of fellow students who honestly don’t care about it to find them? They may or may not find that group, it is hit or miss in a large pool of students who are not like minded, or even a small pool where most students just want to get their grades and get through their classes. The attitude that this isn’t a reasonable search criteria for a college may just mean that some people don’t even understand what the OP is asking.
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Those types of fun intellectual conversations are common at any good college or university. I am an alumnus of Michigan and Cornell, and found students engaging in intellectual conversations for fun even in social occasions.
My daughter is at a state school with 16,000 undergrads and has these conversations all the time. These conversations are embedded throughout her day and she does not have to search for them. They simply exist.
There is Greek life and parties, but they are way off campus and she never sees any of it. I do, however, agree with Juliet.
Many big universities offer honors programs, large numbers of clubs/organizations, theme housing, special events, etc that allow students to connect with other people with similar interests and goals. Many majors may have only a small number of students even on very large campuses.