Sunday, January 21, 2007

Worst Colleges

Via RightWingNation (see blogroll at left) I read Radar's (who?) article about the worst colleges in America. My son came in several times and asked what was so funny. Well, snippets like this, about Bennington College in Vermont, are what's so funny:

School Pride: As one Students Review poster puts it, "Unless you value an extremely isolated environment with the lamest town in the world around you, self-absorbed pretentious hippies, a very 'white' homogenous campus, and a lack of a wide range of courses in one discipline, do not come to Bennington College."

Fun Fact: The number of bird species on campus (121) is more than the number of black (10), Hispanic (18), international (19), Asian (14), and American Indian (1) students combined.

Tuition: $43,980



I guess not every leftie school in the country values "diversity". There are no Republicans there.

How about this one, about Liberty University (huh?):

Thanks to a strictly enforced schoolwide ban on alcohol, dancing, tobacco, R-rated movies, and horseplay, students at the ironically named college don't seem to enjoy much of a social life.

Fun Fact: Kudos to Falwell for naming the fervently anti-gay university's football team the Flames.


Even though the write-ups were clearly not written by someone with a right-of-center political slant, they're still enjoyable and eye-opening.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

ha! Those were good reads. But uh... I went to Liberty. It wasnt that bad!

Darren said...

Sounds kinda like BYU.

Anonymous said...

Liberty University is by far the lamest "university" I've ever heard of. Not only is it dominated by Republican students (I would not be surprised if it were 100% right-wing), but getting reprimanded and then fined for such activities as entering the bedroom of someone of the opposite sex (even off campus) and signing "unauthorized" petitions. Thankfully they've allowed jeans recently! Still no shorts, but they're getting there.
The school was founded by Jerry Falwell, who is absolutely insane. I'm sure you'd be glad to know that he told students to burn down the campus if it "ever turns liberal". Is it illogical, therefore, to associate (at least in part) those activities, attitudes, and behaviors exhibited by the school as "conservative" ideas?

Darren said...

Cameron, I'm sure you'd be right at home at UCSC.

Anonymous said...

Interesting article on the colleges.

I ran across another article there, and "Eyewitness" piece on the youth evengelical movement that was extrordinarily negative. They described practically everything with a conservative slant as "indoctrination."

I know this is off topic, but I'm not religious myself and still I was extremely put off by their digs at kids who are trying to lead decent lives (in the classical sense of decent). Yuck.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I'm fine with making fun of colleges, but ...

Bennington College has an undergrad population of only 571 students. They only provide a race breakdown for the undergrads, so ... (10+1+14+18+19)=62 foreign and/or non-white students. For Vermont, this is probably fairly multicultural (Vermont is 97% white according to this: http://www.vtliving.com/stats/). It isn't like they can do much about the birds, and I suspect that it is difficult to find many minorities that (a) want to go there (it does seem awfully isolated), and (b) can afford the $40K+ per year.

Additionally the average SAT score of incoming undergrads was about 1240, so it isn't really all that selective (UCLA freshmen have higher average SAT scored). It is quite possible that they can't find many minority students with only slightly above average SAT scores who are willing to pony up the $40K per year (heck, this is more than Stanford, Harvard, etc. I think!). Of course, the ~1240 is suspect as Bennington has gone "SAT optional" and applicants no longer need to submit SAT scores if they don't wish to do so.

So ... I think Bennington is worth making fun of, but mostly because of the $40K per year for a school with academics substantially below schools that are cheaper (Stanford, Harvard, many UC schools, etc).

-Mark Roulo