While I like the automatic scholarship and proximity to home, Utah will be a hard sell. He’s a politically engaged kid who has already eliminated several excellent engineering colleges based on their location.
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From the Oregon State website:
“Only about 10% of students from a WUE state will be offered the WUE Scholarship, but many more will receive the Provost Scholarship to reward them for their academic success and help offset the cost of non-resident tuition.”
Don’t know where your son would fall among WUE applicants, but it might be worth a try. I know of a few engineering majors who found UW’s program too intense/difficult to get into desired major and transferred to Oregon State where they are happy.
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Plenty of liberal kids at Utah - SLC has changed a lot over the years. Excellent honors college, outdoor activities galore - our college counselor referred to it as @the new Boulder” 
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My daughter went 2000 miles away to college. There was a boy she went to K with in her dorm and a girl from K in her sorority. The following year another girl from her high school also traveled 2000 miles to D’s school.
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Thank you for this information! Oregon State certainly merits a closer look and a visit.
My d has high hopes for U of Colorado as her safety. Great astronomy department and I don’t think anyone from her New England school has ever gone, lol. We will see how the visit goes…
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My ds is a sophomore xfer to UVM from UMass Amherst. He adores it. Pm me if you have any questions!
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I hope she loves it! Please come back and share your/her thoughts after your visit.
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So did my daughter and no one from her high school was in her year. There is a group of kids he’s been involved in STEM activities with since elementary school. Most of those kids plan to attend CU and the engineering department is just too small for him to separate himself. I support his decision to look elsewhere.
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This is an exceptionally sad post. Is crossing schools off the list for potential political leanings a long standing tactic, or more of a post-2016 phenomenon? I get if kids think schools are too “nerdy,” or “sporty,” or “Greek.” My sons would have never considered politics when choosing schools.
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I don’t think it’s sad to cross off a school for not having the political vibe a student wants in either direction. Why is that sad to you?? My D22 has crossed a lot of schools off for a lot of reasons. There are thousands out there and she can’t possibly consider them all.
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I think it has less to do with politics and more to do with values and identity. Politicians have co-opted social issues as a means to excite voters and kids aren’t immune to the message: if you hold these values, you are “x” and if you hold those values, you are “y” It’s terrible and creates division in schools just like in life… in school, it’s particularly worrisome because schools should be a place for exploring and debating … hard to do that when politics makes everyone angry and inflexible, and surrounded by people who think like one another.
My daughter has absolutely crossed schools and locations off her list where she feels the culture doesn’t align with her values, for better or worse. This does more or less map back to a particular political party, though she doesn’t call it that.
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It’s sad because it’s siloing. Life isn’t necessarily like that beyond the internet/social media. I work with people of all political persuasions. My neighborhood has R’s and D’s. I’m certain there are groups on ANY campus that would align with a student’s political values. I’d love to know when the earliest reference to politics as a limiting school factor was on CC.
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I’m sure it goes back further than College Confidential does. The notorious former Republican senator from North Carolina once said back in the 70s when NC was deciding where to put the state zoo to just put a fence around Chapel Hill and UNC and call that the zoo. Too liberal for him.
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Exploring and debating? Exploration is supposed to be about fact finding and debates are supposed to be based on facts. But now, there isn’t even agreement on “facts”. These days there’re numerous media outlets, websites, talk shows, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. that disseminate “alternative facts”. It’s another pandemic, a worse pandemic than the other one we’re also experiencing right now, IMO.
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More and more, it seems like life is becoming siloed because people insist on politicizing the most basic things. My daughter is also influenced by where we live—extremely liberal Northern CA county where 84 percent voted for Biden. We do occasionally encounter Republicans but they generally keep quiet.
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100 percent agree. The internet flattened access to facts—which on the surface seemed great, but it created a system where expertise and education are not required to have a global platform on which to speak. One can amass quite a following these days based on an alternate narrative that appeals to people on a emotional level, and not at all based on fact.
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Lol, where I live they called the state for Hillary with 0.00% of precincts reporting. Still, my kids never even considered politics as a limiting factor. If the younger generation is this focused on avoiding those that deviate politically from themselves, we, as a nation, are completely screwed.
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What they teach you in journalism schools is that good journalism requires multiple independent sources of confirmation for a story. Few adhere to that standard these days.
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