<p>Tulane is absolutely a choice. Greek is about 25%, but does not dominate the culture in the least. Fits pretty much all your other criteria, I think. Excellent merit aid, but be sure to research the school and write a strong personal statement on “Why Tulane”. They are looking at that a lot, first year they have tried it and they are looking for an answer that shows some thought, not just “oh, because it has such a great reputation”. Why would YOU fit in. Sounds like you would.</p>
<p>Rice could be a possibility as well.</p>
<p>^^^ Except there’s no Greeks at Rice. But it’s a fabulous school.</p>
<p>Many places that fit your criteria are not urban. Wesleyan would be a good choice, for example. Maybe you should do a few visits and think carefully about how important it is to be right in a city.</p>
<p>Emerson for music.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hmm…I may be biased because I go here, but not true^^.
Literally everything you said (OP) was part of my college criteria. Tufts has an urban environment, definitely a work hard/play hard atmosphere, lots of people are into drama/music, about 15% students are in frats/sororities, and everyone’s really intellectual but in a non-cutthroat way. People are competitive with themselves but not with others. Also, Tufts has a German Language & Literature major (their language programs are really good), and art history. Tufts also offers a 5-year combined degree with the SMFA (School of the Museum of Fine Arts).</p>
<p>while i’d like to recommend stanford, sounds like chicago is perfect for you.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the help (: so much helpful answers! I’m currently really looking into some LAC; but my top choices I guess are Wesleyan and Brown, just because they seem to have open curriculum… UChicago seems nice too, but it has a required core curriculum so,</p>
<p>^^ But Tufts does not offer merit aid.</p>
<p>How much merit aid do you need? Chicago has 5k and 10k merit scholarships, administered mostly (if not wholly) on the basis of ‘soft’ factors (i.e. fit). I know several people who’ve received them, so they’re not impossibly rare.</p>
<p>Most good schools don’t offer merit aid, but base aid on need (after all, isn’t everyone of merit at a good school?). Brown and Tufts come to mind. Tufts, for its part, is not boring. Princeton Review ranked it 14th for the happiest individuals this year. Brown was like number 1 on that list. Mom2college/whatever-that-name-is states Tufts as boring because of her nephew which is an anecdotal evidence and a generalization (I don’t mean to offend mom2college, but simply state that I am sorry your nephew didn’t like Tufts, but that doesn’t mean the whole school is boring or bad…(as an example, look above to the person who goes to Tufts and enjoys it). As the princeton review points out, it seems that the majority of tufts kids enjoy being there and are happy). </p>
<p>From what I hear, most people at both schools are very happy and fit your description (and the happiness ranking seems to correspond to this since they, you know, survey people and weed out anecdotal evidence). Yet Brown and Tufts aren’t urban like NYU or BU; however, both are like on the edge of cities that accessing Providence (in Brown’s case) or Boston (in Tufts case) is reallyyyyyyyy easy. It’s the same deal with schools like Harvard and MIT. Not in “Boston” but more or less are a part of it/are really easy to access the city.</p>
<p>You must not have ever been to Brown. It is right next to downtown Providence, very much in the city. Granted, Providence is a much smaller city than Boston. Nonetheless, from the largest buildings in downtown Providence you walk like a block or two and then start heading up the hill to Brown and RISD. Total we are talking maybe 10-12 blocks. It is literally a one minute car ride into downtown Providence, two at most, if one could run the stop signs.</p>
<p>I have been to Brown. You are right about Brown being about 12 blocks down the street from downtown. But most students don’t have cars. I should have used a better example, like MIT or Harvard and been more clear.</p>
<p>Providence used to be a really sketch town. It’s now improved a lot and is a good plus for Brown kids.</p>
<p>
IMO, surveys are just collections of anecdotal evidence. Someone would have to devise a way to scientifically test for happiness to avoid this.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And of course, even then we run into issues of ‘what is (objective) happiness’</p>
<p>The way people tend to quantify happiness is through utility. Yet utility is premised upon a comparative aspect. I.e., pizza gives me a utility of 10. This means nothing unless you say beans give me a utility of 4. Then you can conclude that pizza generates a higher utility (i.e. happiness) than beans. You can’t say anything about what 10 or 4 actually mean, but you can say that pizza generates more happiness than beans.</p>
<p>In the context of happiness for college survey’s, people tend to have a scale of happiness…i.e. degrees of which someone is happy. While it does get fishy when comparing a rank of 4 or 5, when taking a large student population, you can get some results. All results are comprised of errors (how do you know it wasn’t just a bad day? That the people you got were just all super happy in general? And what if they are also drawing on comparisons to their friends at other institutions?) While these errors do exist, and are always things to consider, (as with every rankings which has its flaws) there does tend to be some consistency on happiness at institutions. Brown has always reported happy students on Princeton Review. Similar findings can be found with schools like Bowdoin or Tufts.</p>
<p>By there being a consistency across time, perhaps it shows that these institutions do foster some sort of well-being, or utility/happiness, in their student populations. The aggregate of these reporting students provides better insight into the mean, or norm, of the institution then perhaps an anecdotal or outlier evidence.</p>
<p>The thing about anecdotal evidence is that it gives no indication of the mean. It could be an outlier. It skews things. For example, if I took a random person and that individual is Bill Gates, it would be wrong to assume that the entire US population is filled with billionaires.</p>