U-Mich v. Chapel Hill?

warblersrule
Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:02:39 +0000

^
And NC residents do not refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. i*

I was too lazy to write out a full response earlier, but I will now. UNC is very liberal; conservative speakers like Tancredo have literally been assaulted on campus, and conservative student groups have complained that not enough students show up for their events for the school to justify the costs of bringing such speakers to campus. Orange County has voted slightly more Democratic than Washtenaw in recent years, the percentages of libs/mods/cons and Dems/Repubs in NC and MI are comparable, and the chair of the Republican party in Orange County has called residents “diehard socialist liberals” who “Once they find out who the conservative is, they vote him out." Famously Jesse Helms once snarked during the debate over the creation of the NC Zoo that the government should instead simply put a fence around Chapel Hill. Each of the Triangle cities has passed a resolution in favor of same-sex marriage. Additionally, Raleigh and Charlotte, from which UNC draws heavily, have been ranked by Forbes as in the top 10 in the US for population growth and as destinations for relocating people; many, many people in both cities are from California, the Northeast, or other areas of the country.

There are certainly southerners who refer to the Civil War as the WONA, including some (very few) college students. They are typically at conservative schools or deep in the red parts of states like Arkansas or Mississippi – NC, not so much.

Incidentally, the percentage of in-state students at UNC is 80% for undergrad and 74% overall. Definitely not terribly diverse, but not “well over 90%” either. Michigan actually has about 3000 more in-state students than UNC for both undergrad and overall; UNC has a much higher percentage of in-state students because it admits very few OOS students and consequently stays noticeably smaller than Michigan. (This is also why it can promise to meet the full need of all OOS students, which Michigan doesn’t.)

I don’t think it’s been pointed out that the OP is a NC resident deferred from UNC and accepted at Michigan. While I can see picking Michigan if rejected from UNC, I think there are few fields that would justify the OOS cost if ultimately admitted. (I’m assuming the OP is not an prospective engineer, as an application to UNC in that instance would be a bit odd.)