Wow. I can’t believe the volume of responses. More people read this forum than I imagined.
To those who think I’m a pompous windbag, I would suggest that you read somebody else’s posts. I won’t be offended, and, that way, you won’t be offended either.
To those who think I had something useful to say, thanks very much for letting me know.
I do want to emphasize that most of our impressions of colleges were based on short visits. So we could have gotten the wrong idea about the cultures on some campuses. Oxy especially comes to mind in this regard. As I said, we know people who felt very comfortable at Oxy and speak very positively about their college experiences there.
Now let me turn to the controversy about “urban” liberal arts colleges.
I paraphrased a UPS admissions office staffer as saying that only three schools in the entire country are able to offer a complete liberal arts college experience along with a broad urban experience, and that the three are UPS, Mac and Oxy. Without some significant qualification, that claim probably would indeed be “absurd” or “preposterous.” But I recall that the staffer did qualify his statement in some ways. I should have noted those qualifications, since I may have made him sound like an idiot, and he wasn’t an idiot. I don’t remember his exact words, but he probably said he was referring to non-sectarian, co-educational colleges that offer full athletic and artistic programs and have campuses located in walkable urban areas in major cities. With qualifications like that, his boast was not “preposterous,” in my opinion, although reasonable people still might disagree.
Before we started actually visiting colleges, Sasha and I pretty much had reached the same conclusion, which is why we were doing a whirlwind tour of LA/Oxy, Seattle-Tacoma/UPS, and Twin Cities/Mac.
For Sasha’s college search, we did not focus on religious liberal arts colleges (Holy Cross, Trinity in San Antonio, Stern College, etc.), though there is nothing wrong with those if they are what you want. We also did not focus on what I would describe as “special focus” liberal arts colleges (U.S. Naval Academy, Rhode Island School of Design, New England Conservatory, Morehouse, etc.), though there is nothing wrong with those, either, if one of them is what you want. (One of Sasha’s good friends will probably end up at the Naval Academy.) We also decided not to visit single-sex colleges, though I’ve heard that there are lots of benefits to attending an all-women’s college, especially if you are a woman!
You can see how the list started to shrink quickly with those restrictions.
We also focused initially on very large cities: Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, etc. That meant that, initially, we weren’t looking at places like Colorado Springs, Appleton, Kalamazoo, Saratoga Springs, Hartford or Worcester.
So the list got even smaller.
We also tried to identify well rounded colleges with strong performing arts offerings, sports teams, etc. This was an admittedly vague criterion that, for Sasha, eliminated a few colleges with great reputations (notably Reed, St. Johns in Maryland and St. Johns in New Mexico). Again, there is nothing wrong with going to a super intellectual college that has few if any Division III teams, if that’s what you want!
I then did an analysis that some people might think is insane, but Sasha was interested in the results. I created a Mapquest map for each of about forty colleges, including most of the colleges Sasha and Sasha’s friends were considering and pretty much every college Sasha had ever seen in person. After making sure that each map was generated using the same scale, I clicked the button on Mapquest that puts an orange dot on the map for every restaurant in the area shown. Not shockingly, the Ann Arbor, Michigan and Cambridge, Massachusetts maps had plenty of orange dots. But there were some surprises. The infamously “Podunk” town of Oberlin, Ohio had a large number of orange dots very close to the college, though there were almost no orange dots more than two or three blocks away from campus. On the other hand, Lewis & Clark, located in one of the most celebrated cities in America, had almost no orange dots anywhere near campus. Mac and Lawrence did extremely well on my orange dot test. UPS did well too, although the orange dots revealed that UPS’s campus is several blocks from the commercial areas. Oxy’s results confused me, and after seeing the place up close, I understand why. There are a lot if places to go that are a very short drive or very long walk from campus, and they aren’t situated right next to one another.
The result of all of this was that, before our trip, we had only three obvious candidates: Oxy, Mac and UPS (which of course wasn’t actually in Seattle, but we had read some good things about Tacoma, and we were pretty sure it would feel like a walkable city). After eliminating religious colleges, special purpose colleges, single sex colleges, colleges that weren’t reputed to be “well rounded,” and colleges that weren’t in walkable neighborhoods even though they are technically located in cities, there didn’t seem to be that many urban liberal arts colleges left. And there were even fewer left when we eliminated all remaining options on the East Coast (none of which was in a major city like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore or D.C. in any event).
Since a list consisting only of Oxy, Mac and UPS was obviously too small, we added Beloit and Lawrence, mostly on the strength of their YouTube videos, descriptions in Colleges that Change Lives, and posts on College Confidential and another similar review site.
Over time, Sasha and I came to see things a little differently. For example, we concluded–crazy though it might seem–that downtown Appleton and even downtown Beloit offered more accessible urban experiences than Eagle Rock in Los Angeles. You can’t easily walk to a cheese store, record store, coffee shop or bookstore in Eagle Rock, but you can in Beloit.
Of course, a pretty good rejoinder would be that, if you live n Beloit instead of Eagle Rock, you can’t go to a Clippers game, or see an experimental play on Sunset Boulevard, or check out pop-up art galleries all over town, or eat at some of the best restaurants in the world, or hear people speaking dozens of foreign languages in the supermarket, etc. So what if you need to get in a car?!?!
That response makes a lot of sense, unless you hate driving or won’t have a car.