<p>I too find it sad that all of a sudden a kid who can’t find her “fit” in the financially affordable option is being excoriated. Like “horrors” the kid who thinks Yale is a better fit than U Conn, and all the posters here going nuts that only a prestige whore would want to go to Yale.</p>
<p>I know teenagers who headed off to be a racial or ethnic pioneer somewhere and did just fine- others who lasted one semester (I think both Dartmouth and Cornell had to privately recruit a barber and stylist who knew how to cut African-American hair since Hanover and Ithaca didn’t have such a thing at the time.) Some people at the time said, “big deal”- get your hair cut when you go home for the summer. Others recognized that this was a not so subtle way of reinforcing all the other alienating experiences that kids had to deal with as a racial pioneer.</p>
<p>So OP’s sister may or may not come to love ND. Nothing wrong with her deciding that she’d rather be at a campus that’s more to her liking (for whatever the reason). I don’t see the PC police acting up when a kid chooses U Idaho over U Chicago (it’s so chic to choose a state school over the clearly overrated private) even if that kid decides that living on the South Side of Chicago with all those urban minorities is what’s bugging him/her about Chicago vs. Idaho.</p>
<p>So if you’re going to claim that it’s great to be a racial minority somewhere at least be consistent. Or call out the white kids on their racist assumptions as well. Or just concede that even if Sis didn’t choose her words with great care, it would be really hard to argue her siblings point that ND is a Catholic-infused environment with a lot of white folks and she doesn’t want to go there for four years.</p>