<p>Don’t be silly. Sarah Lawrence is not a “specialty school in visual and performing arts.” It is a normal LAC with a strong humanities orientation in a great location on the NYC transportation grid. Because of that, it attracts both very strong faculty and very strong students who want to be in NYC, including people interested in visual and performing (and literary) arts, but that’s far from the whole story.</p>
<p>And NYU is a dream school for lots of the same reasons. If your idea of a great college is a college-town cloister like Dartmouth, Amherst, or Princeton, it’s not going to be so attractive. But if you want to be in New York City, it would be hard to be more exciting than NYU with its Greenwich Village non-campus. It has a premier performing arts and theater tech school, a business school that’s close enough to first-rank, an attractive build-your-own-major program, celebrity students, and (as noted above) really strong departments in many areas. All that, and four years of housing in a great part of Manhattan at way below market rates. Plus, unlike Harvard, etc., it actually accepts lots of applicants – and some people like their dreams to be somewhat attainable. Can’t blame them for that.</p>