<p>Not that I have actual experience or insight into the particular schools you were mentioning… I would like to add that the cultural/religious spectrum issue was also a factor in my son’s school list.</p>
<p>S was raised Jewish (very secular and liberal line, even though he is less liberal than we), and we are a multi racial, multi national, and multi faith family. As such, when we put together a potential schools list, we stayed clear from the Southern region, even though as an ROTC candidate, the odds of getting a 4 year scholarship look much better in the South (there are way more ROTC divisions in the South than NE, where we live), and couple of southern schools such as Texas A&M are known to be ROTC power houses. </p>
<p>I am sorry if this sounds like bigotry and bias against the whole region. But, we are talking about 4 years worth of life of an impressionable young adult who is experiencing world at large for the first time in his life without any support system in place and nearby, and we did not want to encourage him to be in a place where he is likely to stand out like a sore thumb. </p>
<p>By the way, this would apply in the other direction too. I am sure a young man/woman with a strict Mormon faith from Utah would have a great deal of issues to deal with in a liberal NE private school.</p>
<p>We know just such a student who made a comment that he has heard more swearing in one month at just such a school in one month than he has heard in his entire life before.</p>
<p>We, a liberal, non religious semi-Asian family, have raised our children in a 99% white, religious, conservative Rocky Mountain state. DS did not find his ‘people’ in HS but was not unhappy. Now that he is at a private east coast liberal college, he is feeling so much more comfortable in every way. I am waiting for him to come home for a visit and berate us for forcing him to live in such constrained circumstances for 17 years :). </p>
<p>Also consider Case Western if not on your list. Quite generous. Montana State U in Bozeman does very well with engineering placement (I know of one graduate starting a PhD at Stanford this fall), and Goldwater scholarships, and gives generous money to top students. ACT of 33/SAT 2140+ will get you 15K/year which will be nearly a full ride through WUE which includes CA. (tuition reduced to 150% of state (5K currently) for these scholars). Bozeman is low in Jewish population but not too conservative. In fact, I know a lesbian couple who love to spend time there and just bought a condo there to hang out in.</p>
<p>My D is a freshman at Alabama. Although we currently live in TN, we lived in NJ for the majority of our lives. D has been pleasantly surprised that there are more liberal minded folks than she expected at UA. The U of A forum is pretty active so I encourage you to ask any questions you have over there. </p>
<p>She has a friend who is Jewish who is currently a freshman at Georgia Tech; Atlanta is incredibly diverse; to me it is the least Southern city in the South. I wouldn’t expect your son to feel out of place at either institution.</p>
<p>well i don’t have a experience of that thing but i wanted to say some thing about topic that now a days as we all see that schools are basically start to demand new things like mostly schools are like new day new dress some people can afford easily but we have to remember those one to who can not afford so all the people are equal so the management also think that and make eduction easy as they can…</p>
<p>ihs76, my son just visited case western and loved it. so he will definitely be applying there. montana is a new suggestion to me. I’ll check it out. thanks.</p>
<p>@ davenmame- Honestly UMD CP is not a great example for this. It is a huge school that is extremely diverse. Most religions and ethnicities are well represented. Also if you look for a thread in college life that asked for the “chillest” school on the east coast, UMD won overwhelmingly. Everyone here tends to be every accepting of all people. So it’s not really a different environment for very many people unless you happen to be in one of the honors programs where there are large numbers of Asian students and most are upper class or very high middle class.</p>
<p>I would however reccommend UMD to the OP. Engineering is great here depending on the type. The Jewish holidays are an excuse for the somewhat Jewish to drink in the middle of the week. He will not be criticized for his parents. He might be handed a Bible on the way to class one day, but it’s happened to all of us–and if he stopped to talk to the Bible passer outer he would probably hear a great story about the ridiculous party they were at the weekend before.</p>
<p>Somewhat of a defense of University of Alabama – the campus has a small, but increasing Jewish student base (around 2.5-3% currently) and quite a few professors as well. They have just broken ground on a new Jewish Student Center to replace the aging inadequate previous location. Please hop over to the UA section and ask questions – many.most of the parents that post there are not from Alabama (CA, Hawaii, NJ, NC, etc) for more insider opinions.</p>
<p>With UA’s major push to recruit academically gifted students the OOS population is approaching about 1/3 and is climbing (I’ve heard over 40% of the 2010 admitted class).
The campus itself is probably left of center politically and far left of the general pop of the state’s non urban areas. I would most definitely not consider the campus super conservative religiously – predominately Christian to be sure, but not oppressive in any sense and I’ve rarely heard of it being an issue for the students. UA’s not quite where it was in the late 60’s and early 70’s where it was literally considered a Radical Left Wing subversive university with quite a few sit-ins, ‘riots (the students did not burn the Presidents mansion),’ and more than a few FBI floating around, but it is significantly more liberal than you might suspect. </p>
<p>Academically it is improving at a dramatic pace across the board and most particularly in the sciences/engineering area – faculty, students, and facilities. Since so many of the rankings have to do with peer review and past reputation, I think this 5-10 year push has put those ranking well behind the curve of the current situation. With so many schools cutting back and slashing programs/faculty.facilities UA has the financial resources and the current will to use them to scooping up a lot of Professors who are tired of being squeezed dry (or eliminated completely). </p>
<p>Tuscaloosa itself is a bit of a different story though much less conservative than you would believe due to the large influence from the University, proximity to Birmingham, and several international businesses which attract a surprising number of people to the area. The student population and administration is surprisingly welcoming of most people and I think you would feel a lot more comfortable there than you would ever imagine. This is a campus you have to visit to really understand that it’s far from what you would imagine. </p>
<p>Yes it is a football school and moderately strong Greek influence (20-25% or so), but if you don’t participate there is plenty else to participate in.</p>
<p>@ginab591 - my point was that my son’s upbringing was drastically different than where his is going to college. First, he was in a classroom of 1. Second, we live in a very rural area where it is almost entirely composed of white middle class Christians. Third, we are active in a very conservative fundamental Christian church where almost everyone is, well yes, white middle class Christians. The question, as I read it, was about experiences of a school that was culturally and/or religiously different than upbringings. I would constitute my son’s choice as drastically different. The sheer size of the school is a MAJOR difference. It’s not like my son is use to classes of 10 let alone 410! On top of that he has the cultural differences. I don’t think my son had ever seen so many different ethnicities and languages - providing tv doesn’t count - in one place. Before going to UMD everyone he knew was Christian. Yes, everyone. When I tell people from the community where he is attending, they think we are making a HUGE mistake in letting him attend. They think it is “evil” since it is not a fundament Christian college. My findings however, have been the opposite. He HAS met people who are like minded as well as people with different views. To me, part of the whole college experience is about my letting go, and letting him find out his own beliefs.</p>
<p>well i dint know that how many of people can understood me but i just wanted to say that i am seeing in my surroundings that the upper class student wee dressed and if i m seeing them so poor children s also looked them and they started feel that if i were rich so i could dress up like this and this so this is a humanity and if some one didn’t like my commenet
or hurt so i apology</p>
<p>My d attended the University of South Carolina after being raised in a suburb west of Boston.</p>
<p>She transferred out after one year.</p>
<p>My impression is that there were pockets of students at Univ of SC who did not fit the prevailing Southern mold, but my d prefers to be in an environment where she is not an outlier.</p>
<p>davenmame, I’m very impressed by your approach. I think it is easier for liberal parents to let their kids go to a setting that is more conservative than the one they grew up in than the other way around. Thanks for sharing your story!</p>
<p>Re comment upthread about Colorado College: Our family (also secular, Jewish, liberal) visited there and it is on my D’s list. We are friendly with a professor there who also happens to be Jewish (again, secular and liberal). My take is that the conservatism of Colorado Springs wouldn’t really impact the Col College community all that much – any more than a megachurch in suburban Chicago would impact my alma mater of Northwestern. I found the campus to be chockful of secular, Jewish, liberal kids (and Christian kids, as well, of course) who were more “granola” in their mindset (environmentally active, etc.) and I saw nothing that would make me suggest that the surrounding town would be problematic. I think there is a huge difference between a conservative organization being headquartered somewhere, and the kind of culture where people walk around asking someone’s religion, acting surprised that it’s not Christian, and intimating that they’ll go to hell if they don’t accept Jesus. I think Colorado is very, very different from the south on those measures. I wouldn’t worry.</p>
<p>I think that there’s something to be said for attending a school that will open up the scope of one’s political perceptions - perhaps one at which the prevalent left- or right-leaning tendencies are different from the perceptions that the student brings in. From that standpoint, I wouldn’t be concerned about these three schools. But the thing that I think would be a difficult situation for the OP’s son is finding a fit for his intellectual focus. Clemson and Alabama both have some wonderful strengths, but rampant intellectual enthusiasm is not among them. And while the selectivity level is higher at Georgia Tech, I think he’d find the vast majority of students there to have a very pragmatic, technical orientation - not one focused on critical thought and discussion of ideas.</p>
<p>gadad, I really resonate with your post. I think what my son wants more than anything are intellectual peers–although he’s interested in biomedical engineering, it’s because he wants to go into synthetic biology as a graduate student. His two favorite schools that we visited were Harvey Mudd and Franklin Olin–he loved the intensity of the curriculum, the intellectual rigor, the curiosity. He’s not adverse to going to a much larger school (he really likes Case Western and would jump if he got into MIT), but those tiny schools really floated his boat. Admission to both those schools in incredibly difficult, regardless of your scores and stats. And even with the half tuition scholarship at Olin, he won’t be able to attend without substantial need-based financial aid. So he’s applying to those schools, but I’m shopping around for options as back ups where he’d stand-out academically and be much more likely to get merit money.</p>
<p>They have an excellent engineering school, and it’s in a very liberal environment overall (on campus and off).</p>
<p>That being said, UA is very generous and you will probably get more aid from them. They’ve been on a recruiting push for the last few years for out of state talent. That’s a good sign to me! They’re also known for having really great dorms, even for freshmen. I visited last year and met with an old friend who is working there. She loves it there, even with the occasional small pocket of small mindedness she runs into. Birmingham airport is less than an hour away and Southwest flies there. </p>
<p>One more thing about Maryland - if Bob Erlich is elected governor, watch out! When he was governor last time and he didn’t get away with what he wanted in the legislature, he refused to raise “taxes” but he raised every fee imaginable and jacked up tuition at UMD-CP severely. It was so drastic, that I don’t believe it’s been raised since then, but if he is elected… well, he’s behind in the polls and it takes ALOT for Marylanders to elect a republican.</p>
<p>@davenmame-Yes I just noticed on the other board that your son was homeschooled. IMO that makes a bigger difference than everything else you stated. It would be a huge jump from personal attention to the 400 person lecture hall in BRB.</p>
<p>If he liked Olin and Harvey Mudd, he might look at another small engineering school - Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They offered my son even more money than RPI (which is another school you might look at and I believe was suggested upthread.)</p>
<p>OP: if your S likes smaller schools, what about Rose Hulman?
also, I really don’t know much about U of A, but I think that if it were my S, I’d want him to feel really welcome. My S has already ruled out several southern schools because he doesn’t want to be “the Jewish kid.” I’m sure I’m reiterating what you already know, but schools with large LGBT communities would be the most open to students from nontraditional families.</p>