Agree with the others that your daughter has a strong list and will have many good options!
If she wants to major in Political Science, the one school on your list that didn’t make sense , at least in my mind, was Lehigh.
Has she considered William & Mary? They have about 6,000 undergrads and their government major is strong academically. (Williamsburg is about 3 hours from DC and one hour from Richmond.) Would put it in the reach category, but much less competitive than BC/Tufts. (Overall OOS acceptance rate was @ 28 % last year. Their ED1/ED2 was @ 45%.)
Lehigh has a really cool partnership with the United Nations, so she loves that. But yes, we definitely got the engineering and business matters most vibe from them.
She’s worried about the politics in the south. Pretty liberal kid. Willing to go to Elon but still wary there, too.
We know a super-liberal kid from Berkeley who has loved his time at William and Mary. It’s a school full of high-achieving kids from northern VA (so DC suburbs). Southern politics don’t seem to be a problem at this school. It’s a bit remote though–not easy to get to from the West Coast.
Ahh, didn’t realize that about Lehigh. I know your daughter prefers the east coast, but wanted to throw out there that Occidental in LA also has a partnership with the UN. Oxy has a gorgeous campus, is very progressive and seems more humanities focused when we toured there last year with my daughter. (Had she been interested in poli sci, she would have gone there in a heartbeat!)
My ultra liberal son graduated from W&M a few years ago and agree with Ally86–the vibe is definitely not “southern.” W& M leans left and also feels more like a private school despite being a pubic. Also, the social life/sports at W&M are pretty low key compared to a school like Syracuse if that matters…
Side note-my son majored in government at W&M and is now working for the federal government–NIH. (W&M seems to be well respected in the DC area.)
Syracuse definitely still alive! She won’t ED though so it’s gonna be tight. We haven’t toured Delaware or IU but submitted ea apps to both last week. I think she will get into UDel and IU. At this rate she will have all 20 common app spots full.
I’ve never visited U. of Delaware, but I am familiar with IU and I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t liked the campus (if they wanted a bigger school and didn’t mind the lack of engineering). Bloomington is a great college town, there are restaurants and shops walkable from campus, and the campus is sufficiently spread out that it doesn’t feel super crowded, even with 30k people on campus.
I mentioned it upthread, but I’m going to mention it again. Has she thought about U. of New Hampshire? With your daughter’s interest in skiing and in politics, I think this could be an interesting option to have in her back pocket. With a potential college graduation date of 2028, there will be tons of activity in New Hampshire in the fall of her senior year, and probably starting to ramp up in her junior year. If she’s formed connections with faculty and others up there already, she could certainly have some ins if she was interested in participating in a presidential campaign.
According to Niche it has an A- for Athletics and 68% of students say that varsity sports are a big part of campus life. But with about 12k undergrads, it may be a more intimate experience than IU, Michigan, etc, while still having rah-rah sports spirit.
IU is terrific and although there’s skiing at Paoli Peaks, skiing in Indiana would probably be rather underwhelming for your D.
Thank you! Yes we have an app ready to go to UNH. I think you put it on my radar before. Great thinking on the election. She’s mentioned the primaries in a couple of her apps in swing states.
UNH new honors college is impressive and I think she might qualify. Any insight? It’s an honors auto-admit without an essay so tougher to make the case.
She likes the preppy New England type and walkable campus feel so it might fit the bill! Anyone know the sports vibe? Do kids actually go watch? (We saw a Umass game on tv Saturday and the stands were empty. Kinda sad, but the team is bad right now so. Maybe all the Umass kids were too busy eating )
She doesn’t need a top 25 team but loves football and tailgating etc
I keep reminding her that football is like six Saturdays a year and there’s a trade off with large lectures etc. Need to find a sweet spot! And sounds like we may need a trip to IU once the dust settles. She was wary due to it being such a red state, but CC people have given me confidence that her people might be there
I don’t have any personal experience with UNH, so hopefully someone else can shed some light on it.
I am confident she can find her people at IU. Most colleges lean liberal anyway, and the area around IU definitely leans to the left.
Here is a map of Indiana’s results from the 2020 election, showing the size of lead for each candidate (source):
For people who want to know how red/blue the areas are for particular colleges, IU is in the deep blue county below Indianapolis, Butler and other Indianapolis colleges are in the deep blue Marion County, the light blue slightly NW of Indianapolis is Purdue, the medium blue straight north of Indianapolis is South Bend and Notre Dame. Other colleges like Rose-Hulman, DePauw, Earlham, Ball State, etc, are all in deep red counties, but there surrounding areas (like Ball State’s Muncie) may be bluer (source).
And even though Indiana looks very red, the areas with greater population density are the blue areas on the map above (source):
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