I went to Yale as an undergrad and I have mixed feelings. There certainly are people who wear Yale sweatshirts but I never have. I don’t want to be seen as an elitist snob. OTOH I was excited to root for Yale when we beat Quinnipiac in the Frozen Four a couple years back so maybe I’m mellowing.
I’m fond of my alma mater (Northwestern), but I don’t love it. OTOH, I do love NYU for giving my older D a full ride.
I used to. I fell hook line and sinker for the whole “Lead a just life” teachings of Boston College. I never attended BC full time, and it took me seven years at night to graduate. I volunteered for the inmates at San Quentin state prison to provide them reentry counseling. I donated money to the school, and my company matched it 100%. BC’s response, your daughter isn’t good enough for our school. A kid with a 4.07 GPA, who gets anxiety during things like the SAT. What was even more incredulous, when I queried the president of the college, I got NO response. What used to be love for BC has become a seething anger that their Jesuit mission is a farce.
Of course I love Yale. Who doesn’t? The academics, the social atmosphere, everything. It’s where I met the person with whom I have shared my life. She loves it too, by the way, which is interesting: in some ways, we had very consistent experiences there, and in others diametrically different ones. I adored my residential college. She couldn’t stand living there, and moved off campus as soon as she could. (But she still loves it in retrospect, because it’s how we met, and because with the perspective of time she realizes that there is a whole group of people she feels somewhat close to with whom she would never have been friends but for the residential college. She put the sticker on our car.) Our ardor cooled quite a bit when neither of our kids was accepted there. We got over that a long time ago, however . . . but we feel a lot of love for our kids’ alma mater as well.
I actually feel quite warm about my graduate institution, too. I did a lot outside the law school there, knew faculty and students in other parts of the university, and my sister was an undergraduate there at the same time. (My sister is nuts about it. It has been a central institution in her life.) And I really loved the law school, and it was great for me. My wife feels a lot of ambivalence about her graduate institution. All the time she was there, she felt oppositional, she hated it. But in terms of our daily life, it’s by far the most important of any of the universities we attended. Our core friendship group is based on her classmates there, it’s a dominant institution where we live, and there are scores of alumni, faculty, and administrators throughout our professional and personal lives.
Our kids both went to the University of Chicago. One of them loves it to pieces. He’s barely left it. He went back for a master’s degree a couple of years after graduating, and he now works for an affiliated institute with an office on campus. He is going to marry one of his classmates. The other, as is her nature, has a long list of good points and bad points about it. She appreciated it more once she got out into the world and could understand better what was unique and special about it. She has also experienced how prestigious it is in elite circles, that she gets the same sort of respect and presumption of intelligence that Harvard, Yale, Columbia graduates get. She has two master’s degrees, both of which she picked up while working full time, and she has no emotional engagement at all with the universities that issued them.
Duke - loved it at the time. Now I am just embarrassed by the petty band of kleptocrats and social justice warriors running the show. Duke Lacrosse scandal - President Broadhead and the Group of 88 faculty are still firmly entrenched on campus. Potentially $100M unaccounted for in the Kunshan (China) campus construction fiasco. No disclosed audit of losses. As shit started to hit the fan (2013), the BOT let each trustee craft their own personal conflict of interest management plan (held in secret by the University Secretary and Counsel and NOT disclosed to the rest of the Board or the public) which does not mandate prior disclosure of conflicts or prohibit participation and voting on conflicts as long as you have submitted your secret plan. Duke just hired from the depths of the UNC athletics/academics scandal new Dean of Arts and Sciences Valerie “Let’s move on” Ashby and new (Athletic) Assistant Director for Compliance Amy Herman - who was the Associate Athletic Director for Compliance at UNC (working 11 of the 23 years years of the fake classes for athletes documented in the Wainstein Report).
SO MUCH!!
I find ways to wear the shirt without getting negative reactions. I have a shirt that says Harvard in Chinese; Leverett House shirts; Veritones shirts; Kuumba shirts.
Talking about HYP vs Stanford, I received a bumper sticker as a Yale parent. It is still somewhere in my drawer. It just feels so out of place in a medium sized city in the midwest.
I graduated from UT and absolutely loved it! I met my husband there and our kids have been walking campus every chance we get. For me, I just enjoyed the sheer number of people. There were new adventures to be had every weekend and a constant stream of new friends through my time there. It had the “anything is possible today” vibe. We do still donate and are completely devoted, demonstrated by a whole wardrobe of burnt orange clothing! Hook 'Em!
Thanks for the Chicago insights @jhs. My son will be attending next fall and is incredibly excited, proud, and nervous. He fell in love with the place while doing his own college research before he realized the prestigiosity associated with the school. When he asked me about it all I had for him was that it was brutally expensive, brutally challenging, and proudly known as the place where fun goes to die.
@Choatiemom-Moes is still awesome. I was in there a week ago and felt like a kid at Toy R Us. I promised I would take my son to the Hash Bash this year if he picked UM, but alas, he picked Chicago instead.
I am neutral about my alma mater. I had both positive and negative experiences there, and now still have a mixed opinion of it. I don’t think it has been a great caretaker of its place among peer colleges. Similar schools have risen in esteem, while mine has either stayed the same (which is a relative decline) or declined. I think the previous president was not a good leader. Worst of all, our arch rival school seems to have grown a lot in popularity and gone up in the rankings, which does not make me happy, since the schools used to be on equal footing.
I do, but I could have equally loved a lot of other places. It was more the notion of being young and finally surrounded by people who were more “my tribe,” where it was ok to be smart and take your studies seriously. Falling in love didn’t hurt any.
I loved my college years and the friends I made but I shouldn’t have gone there. It was the only school I wouldn’t let my kid apply to. He had no desire to, so it was all good.
I love my alma mater (Wellesley). I really feel she was my “soul mother.”
Love my undergrad. It was a great experience. Love my grad school but in a very different way.
I love mine. My D loves hers as well.
Engineering undergrad at Embry-Riddle Prescott, and grad school at USC (California).
My undergrad alma mater was great. The campus, community, and location were all truly phenomenal. Powerful memories from that place… I would do it over again in a heartbeat if I could.
USC, on the other hand, I feel no real attachment towards.
I don’t love my undergrad. I enjoyed my time there for the most part, and I am grateful for the education I received for free due to a need-based full ride but no, I don’t love it. I haven’t been back since I graduated and have no desire to visit. I have never recommended the school to anyone and I am frankly surprised that it is so high in the rankings these days.
I liked my graduate school much more and I have been back there since I graduated, both to recruit and just to visit.
I probably love my kids’ undergrad colleges more than I love my own. I certainly have more shirts and stuff with their logos. 
@intparent - I was just about to say the same thing! I enjoyed my undergrad, met my husband there and still follow their basketball team fairly religiously. But, I love my kids’ undergraduate schools and experiences WAY more!! And, have to admit to loving S2’s school better than S1’s - although that will be our little CC secret :-S
Well… I might have a favorite, too, but I am not telling anyone except you guys.