Are they really conservative and not friendly? Are they hard to get along with? Are they ary pressures and segregation between opposite sexes like Notre Dame? Can students make friends there easily? How can they do that without being part of the Greek life? Do we have to dress up and not wear casual clothes?
I am not a student, but what I can tell you: assume college will be mostly liberal. By and large, colleges are liberal havens.
LILDWAYNE said: Do we have to dress up and not wear casual clothes?
I would say: My son is conservative and Christian believer but he is super friendly and he has tons of friends at Vandy from every walks of life. He finished Vandy last May 2016. He joined some groups and had a lot of fun doing undergraduate thingy.
More importantly, I have my old post regarding your question above as follows:
Contrary to popular belief aka political correctness, Vandy is not Exclusively for rich people school. I for one am the example of poor people with a kid graduated from Vandy and Tulane, dual degree with Vandy and immediately has been hired after graduation and been working in Aerospace Company in Cali (with high paying job as engineer). Anyhow, who wants to dress shabby, scruffy and stinky in college? also who wants to dress up with jewelry, riding BMW, Lexus, Baby Benz, Lambo to school?. Have you checked and looked at the parking lots in Vandy? do you see all name brand cars? if not then Vandy is not for rich kids. Also, If I were a rich parent, I certainly would pay my son’s school by my own money. However, Vandy has given lots of money to any students coming from all walks of life. Kindly, compare Vandy to other schools in term of giving school funds to kids. Well, Vandy is not school for rich kids.
Vandy is conservative for college standards but not by southern or even urban standards.I’d say about 80% of the student body voted for Hillary in this election. Friends are fairly easy to make, and I’ve managed to make good friends, but you’ll end up disliking a larger amount of people than you would like although I feel this is more of a thing you will encounter a top schools. Also @Tulanefan101 considering that over 40% of the student body (number is probably closer to 50%) doesn’t qualify for financial aid at one of the most generous schools in the nation, means that around half of the student body has parental incomes greater than 250k a year. Vandy isn’t a “rich kid school” if you live in San Francisco or Manhattan, but it’s fair to say that it is if you live anywhere even slightly run down.
Alundari: My son was accepted also at JHU (johns Hopkins) but they did not give him that much much, only itty bitty money compared to Vandy and Tulane. So, if you want to compare the school money that vandy is giving, it is considered more than other schools in terms of quantity and quality. If anyone or even you do not qualify since your parents make 250k and above, that does not mean Vandy will give less to other students.
Who is “they”? You cannot define a student body like a monolith. Would you like to know about a specific group or faction on campus?
@Alundari : It was apparently about 70% that expressed interest in voting democratic, a solid majority, but I guess lower than most elite privates. My friend goes there and said that there was actually some data that suggests that Greek orgs tend to be a bit more conservative than the rest of the student body, especially fraternities. This makes some sense I suppose.
As for disliking people. You, other people, and your preferences cannot be perfectly aligned perhaps even half of the time. As you suggested, it is a college, not some socially engineered Utopia. It still reflects real life. You just need enough friends, faculty members, courses, and ECs to make you happy. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Financial aid: that is a complex one. Some schools certainly have much more students on say Pell Grants, so these schools often use more financial aid to give opps to those students pretty much at the bottom of the income latter or what is consider “middle class” by the government (basically working class house holds). The ones that people (mainly those in say what the government would consider upper middle class outside of say California and expensive Northeaster cities) view as “stingier” tend to distribute it differently. They end up depleting resources by basically paying completely full rides to flat out poorer students. Many of these places also have technically lower scoring student body(of course, as income often correlates nicely), but it works out for them as the students are ultimately still very talented in whatever else.
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