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<p>Interesting. My D has a similar negative reaction to excessively preppy environments. In response, I’ve derived a statistic I call “Preppy Quotient.” I get it by looking at the statistics reported on Princeton Review for percentage of entering freshmen from public schools; 100% minus percentage from public schools = “Preppy Quotient,” i.e., the percentage of entering freshmen from private schools (assuming that other options like homeschooling are a negligible factor). For Georgetown, Preppy Quotient = 48%, among the highest in the country.</p>
<p>Some other high Preppy Quotient schools: Davidson (52%), Columbia (51%), Penn (48%), Middlebury (48%), Bowdoin (46%), Yale (45%), Haverford (45%), Vanderbilt (43%), Princeton (42%)..</p>
<p>Some lower Preppy Quotient schools: generally the Seven Sisters or what’s left of them (Wellesley 36%, Bryn Mawr 36%, Barnard 36%, Vassar 35%, Smith 33%; Mount Holyoke at 38% is the highest of this group); Harvard (35%, lowest of the Ivies by far); Stanford (38%, an in-between score but lower than any Ivy except Harvard); most Midwestern schools (Chicago 37%, Northwestern 27%, Carleton 27%, Grinnell 26%; the outlier here is Oberlin at 40%); all state schools.</p>
<p>Generally, there’s a pretty strong correlation between Preppy Quotient and D’s gut reaction: the higher the Preppy Quotient, the greater her negative reaction to the school. No doubt others would have just the opposite reaction.</p>
<p>Another litmus test for us: Greek Scene. D thinks the whole Greek idea is absolutely silly. Princeton Review reports—accurately I hope—the percentage of students at each school enrolled in fraternities and sororities. For most LACs the reported scores are zero. I assume this means they have no fraternities or sororities, which in a way makes sense; at a small school , the entire student body can be your peer group and you don’t need to subdivide into exclusive peer groups like fraternities and sororities. But among bigger schools, there’s a sharp bifurcation. At the high end, Dartmouth reports 38% of male students are in fraternities and 38% of the female students are in sororities. Penn is not far behind, 30% m and 26% f, followed among the Ivies by Cornell, 28% m, 22% f. Duke is also high, 29% m, 42% f. Most top schools are considerably lower. Brown, at a low extreme, reports 12% m, and only 2% f.; Columbia, 15% m, 10% f. Again, I don’t want to put a value judgment on it; for some people, the lively Greek scene at Dartmouth is a highly attractive feature. For my D, it’s a complete turn-off. It’s a matter of taste and cultural style.</p>
<p>I find I can predict D’s gut reaction to a school fairly accurately, largely on the basis of Preppy Quotient and Greek Scene: If either is high, she won’t like it much. If both are high, she’ll absolutely detest it. </p>
<p>But these are matters of personal preference that don’t show up in the US News rankings, but they’re cultural and lifestyle litmus-test questions that I think go a long way toward explaining why some otherwise seemingly evenly matched schools invite such different visceral reactions. Example: Brown with its extremely low Greek Scene numbers is in D’s mind the polar opposite of Dartmouth with its extremely high Greek Scene score, even though in most respects they’re pretty comparable. Similarly, although Brown’s 40% Preppy quotient is fairly high by national standards, it’s among the lowest in the Ivy League, significantly lower than Columbia’s 51% or Penn’s 48%, for example. These two factors combined suggest why D has a very warm, positive feeling toward Brown and a generally much less positive view of the other Ivies which generally have either a big Greek Scene or a high Preppy quotient, or in some cases both.</p>