"Party School" Redefined

So I just attended Tulane’s Honors Weekend with my D18. Well-run program, enjoyed it and D came away learning what she wanted to know to help her in her pending commitment decision. But that is not the point of my thread…

One of the sessions I attended was a Parent Panel which consisted of four mothers of current 2nd to 4th year students. The only students in the room were children of the panel, present to elaborate on any parental responses. I was extremely impressed with the parents (and the students). They were articulate, knowledgeable, candid and engaged. But again, not the point of my post…

One of the parents in the audience, an alum who graduated 30 years ago, asked the panel to discuss their opinion of Tulane’s reputation as a party school. Keep in mind that this was an event only for students admitted into the Honors Program, so the nerd factor at the event was relatively high and many parents in the room nodded in curiosity around this topic as well.

The panel consensus was that, while there are plenty of fun social opportunities available to students, they felt the “partying” was fairly typical of most colleges…those that want to engage in such activities do so, but it isn’t a dominant or pressured aspect of student life at Tulane. They felt that Tulane often gets painted with this brush because of it being located in New Orleans, a reputed “Party City”. But if you have ever visited Tulane, campus is not located in or around the French Quarter…it is uptown in an affluent residential area. There are a handful of restaurants and bars within walking distance which cater to students, but Bourbon Street is miles away (minimum of 20 mins from campus if driving, longer if taking the streetcar or when traffic clogs the streets of New Orleans which is so often the case).

Of course, this begs the question of what people mean when they ask about “partying”. During the bulk of the discussion, the assumption was that partying = heavy/excessive drinking. But we reached a point toward the end of our time when one of the students, a senior, could obviously no longer hold her tongue, apologized and began to speak up with conviction and a bit of emotion in her voice. She said she had grown tired of that characterization of Tulane. She had grown tired, upon telling someone where she went to college, of being asked “Isn’t that a party school?” She said…Tulane is in New Orleans, a city that celebrates everything. There is always a festival going on celebrating something…food, music, art, culture, diversity, etc… But those festivals and events are not focused on drinking…they are focused on whatever is being celebrated. There may be drinking involved, but that is not the focus. Because there is usually an event/festival occurring in the city, the students are presented with many different ways to spend their time away from studying (not to mention the museums, concerts, historical and cultural attractions where alcohol is not involved). They are not limited to socializing focused on drinking. She mentioned friends who went to some of the “middle of nowhere” colleges where there is not much to do socially except activities that tend to be centered around drinking. That became her friends’ main way to socialize away from the books…at Greek parties or in bars. Because of location there were not many other options for “having fun”. That situation, she said, should be far more concerning to a parent than having so many enriching options for finding a healthy balance. Tulane students’ default down-time activity is not drinking for the sake of drinking. There are too many other cool and fun things to do.

She closed by saying "So if you define “partying” as “celebrating things” and embracing the unique opportunities a historically and culturally distinct city like New Orleans affords students, then yes, Tulane is a party school.

We as parents all looked around at each other and said the same thing…“That was a good answer.” I know it made a whole lot of sense to me. Since this is a fairly frequent topic in the Tulane forum, I wanted to share for anyone who may have this concern.

@pishicaca The party school question has come up on every tour of every school we have visited(maybe we are visiting too many “party” schools). The tour guides, who are almost always students, are experts at answering that question in a way that doesn’t deny partying exists, but that does put the parent’s fears to rest. I think that rather than relying on anecdotal responses from individual students or parents it is just smarter to look at the more objective metrics like what percent of students return after their freshman year and what percentage of students graduate on time. There are parties to be found on every college campus, but schools where the student culture truly is “party first and study later” tend to lag way behind in these types of metrics.

Years ago on a Dartmouth College tour the admissions rep (not a student, but a former graduate working as an AO) referred to Dartmouth as a country club. Guess that means that it was a sophisticated party school ? Or, at least, a non-urban party school.

All I want for my children are choices. I am confident that, given choices of things to do, they will generally make good decisions. What I worry about are places in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but drink beer at fraternity parties. Tulane is not one of those places.

If it was only beer…

@EDHDAD Yes, we heard the question come up on multiple campuses as well. My perspective is pretty much that every college has a reputation as a party school. Exploring and navigating those kinds of activities is part of many students’ college experience regardless of location/reputation.

I’m not sure the retention and graduation metric analysis would hold up given the institutions in our consideration set. Several schools on our list which have party-ish reps score higher on those measures than those you would not at all think “party”. I suspect there are multiple other factors in play, at least for the schools D is considering, but I can appreciate that the percentages could be telling for some schools. Still, those metrics at the confirmed work hard/play hard schools would likely be misleading.

What I particularly liked about this student’s response, anecdotal though it was, was how it was counter-intuitive and provided me another way to consider how location can potentially impact the party scene. Just my singular experience and perspective and I was sharing it as such, not necessarily to have it critiqued as less smart than another method. But this is CC, so I should have suspected as much. Cheers.

@pishicaca My favorite response to the the question “Do students here party as much as people say they do?” occurred at UCSB which is another notorious party school. The Mom that asked the question seemed very uptight and her daughter appeared very nervous as we all awaited the answer. The tour guide was a young female student and her answer was “Well…you know…nobody here is forced to party…I mean I never felt pressured to or anything…parties here are really no big deal… sometimes we get together and have like Harry Potter marathons but nothing really out of control”. The mom that asked the question smiled and said how relieved she was to hear that. I wanted to burst out and say to the Mom “Are you kidding me? You just bought that nonsense?”. In the end people are going to believe what they want to believe. I’m sorry I hijacked your thread. You should put a disclaimer on your posts that other opinions are not welcome so then we will all know.

Maybe I am uninformed, but I have never been under the impression that Tulane is a party school. Must be confusion with the city.

@Publisher It appears on a lot of top party school lists. Princeton Review picked it as #1 for 2018. As pishicaca pointed out this is not because students like to drink, it’s because they celebrate things.

I was aware of the ranking, but didn’t take it seriously. I have always thought of Tulane as a school for serious pre-med students.

That’s exactly what I’m betting $40k per year that it is.

@pishicaca - Thank you! I truly appreciate you taking the time to share the information you received in the parent session. Obviously, as we (and our students) try to navigate the upcoming decision process, getting different viewpoints on some of the “areas of concern” is very helpful. My DD is a quiet, introverted person who loves spending time with friends exploring new places, cultures, festivals, etc. If one of the definitions of partying at Tulane is “a school that celebrates everything”, then I think it might very well be a good school for her - even though she doesn’t plan to “party hard” in the traditional sense of the word.

I also wanted to point out – the “tone” of the school has changed a bit since post-Katrina as well. Before Katrina, I would say a huge majority of people who went there did go for the “party scene.” However, after the storm, there was a great surge in service-oriented applicants and students who wanted to go there to rebuild the city. I think this changed the composition of the student body significantly, and continues to do so.

My ex and I were there the year before the storm and a few years after. (*I never went to Tulane and was already done with school, but he was still a student at Freeman and in the honors program.) Even then, there were students who did a ton of hard drugs (most of these students sobered up shortly after graduation and are now super-successful), students who just smoked weed, students who just drank alcohol, and yes, even people who didn’t drink or “party” at all. There was also a small subset of non-traditional students like my ex and our roommate (which is pretty rare at well-known universities like Tulane, but I think really speaks to their inclusive campus) who were there just to get their degrees and were definitely not into the party scene.

Does Tulane’s reputation as a party school (whether it’s true or not) influence employment of grads? Do employers ever take into account that Tulane is a party school when hiring, or is it irrelevant.

@violagirl26 Tulane does very well in terms of grads finding employment and gaining acceptance into graduate programs. That being said, your choice of major and the degree to which you apply yourself to your studies as an undergraduate will always have a much bigger impact on those things than the pedigree of the school you attend. Major in something that will lead to gainful employment no matter which school you choose and you’ll be in good shape after graduation.

Back in the day, the reputation of Tulane as a party school was such that in a few surveys it would not even be ranked, one even making the quip, “we don’t rank professionals,” or something similar regarding Tulane students’ reputation. My experience at Tulane was that the social life was indeed on a whole different level from most universities, with people going out most nights and being able to stay out 24/7 if desired because of the diversity of the nightlife. We are not talking about the frat house parties and dorm parties of most colleges (though there was certainly a fair amount of that), but actual bar hopping (including the fact that frat parties went to 11-12 pm, then you went out to bars until 2-4 am). However, the nightlife was SO accessible that most students learned to manage it and avoided many of the worst binge-drinking excesses of other schools—there was no need to drink to ridiculous excess if you could go out anytime, all the time. The better students also quickly learned you could study til 10 pm, go out until 1am, then still make your 9 am class—truly “have it all” as a 19-20 year old.

I don’t know what it has been like post-Katrina, but I imagine it must have tamed somewhat and I agree that a changing student body would change the culture. But the culture of New Orleans itself exerted and likely continues to exert a strong influence—bars were everywhere and very accessible to students because natives drank quite a bit and were permissive in their attitudes to youth drinking. I doubt that this has changed ALL that much.