I’m an 18 year old gay guy. My college choice has narrowed down to these four colleges. I’ll be visiting all four before I make my ultimate decision. Obviously my ultimate choice will be where I can best afford and feel at home at, but I definitely don’t want to end up at a homophobic school or a school where there’s next to no dating options at the school or in the area.
It’d probably be best to contact the LGBT group on campus and ask them. Second hand advice isn’t great for stuff like this since people generally like to think that their group/school is more accepting than it actually is.
If they don’t have an LGBT group, there’s your answer.
Read the reviews on colleges.niche. Some of their academic reviews aren’t quite accurate, but school culture reviews usually are.
I don’t know if I’d trust Niche for this; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a review saying that the school is full of homophobes or isn’t accepting. Even for schools like Pepperdine or Liberty.
They have a special area for it, you need to check the bars on the bottom of a certain page. I think it might be “guys & girls” @Marakov29
Something you may want to consider is the size of the college and of the surrounding city. Many colleges these days are socially liberal, so the college as a whole may be accepting and welcoming to LGBTQ+ people (which is half the battle right there), but the dating pool may still be very small. Obviously the smaller the college/city, the smaller the dating pool will be.
Take Earlham (the first on your list), which has, according to US News, 993 undergrads. Since 44.9% are men, there are 446 men. The CDC and the National Health Interview Survey recently reported that 1.8% of men self-identify as gay and .4% as bi. Assuming that these nationwide numbers are representative of the Earlham population (which they likely aren’t), there should only be ten gay or bi men at Earlham itself. However, the percentages of gay men are might be higher for people in college. For example, a survey at Brown said that 12% of Brown students ID as gay/bi, and 17.7% of men at Yale say they are attracted only to men. If we meet in the middle and estimate that 16% of men at Earlham are gay or bi, it’s still only 71 students – not a huge dating pool. (Since we don’t know the numbers, this is an estimate that may be very far off. If I did the math wrong, let me know.) Obviously, your dating pool will obviously be a whole lot bigger than the number of people at just your school, since there will be other people in the surrounding city.
My main point, before I got distracted looking at those statistics, is that size matters (lol). The biggest school on your list, Clark University, is also the one in the largest city, and would likely have the largest dating pool. As you said, that isn’t the biggest factor in deciding, but you may want to consider it as a factor.
As @Marakov29 said, you might want to contact the schools’ LGBTQ+ groups and ask them.
For what it’s worth, we have visited Earlham and know several students there now – it is an open, welcoming community.
I agree with @ChasingMerit that size of campus and the surrounding demographics matter. Clark, in addition to being relatively large as an LAC also is located in a city that has several other colleges and universities and within a reasonable distance of Boston, which is saturated with even more colleges and universities. So you’re going to get a population that is skewed towards people your own age as well as being in a densely populated area overall.
That said, I believe Earlham and Beloit provide welcoming environments and prize diversity of all kinds. I know nothing about Hendrix.
Clark University is very welcoming and LBGT-friendly. The student body is very liberal.
Earlham is a Quaker college, and very inclusive and tolerant as a matter of faith. I would not worry about the college itself, but you might not find a flourishing gay community in the surrounding environs. Indiana does not have statewide anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ citizens, and so you won’t have legal protection off-campus.I can’t speak for Hendrix at all, but Arkansas also lacks legal protections for LGBTQ. Beloit has a very liberal reputation, and Wisconsin prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation (it does not protect on basis of gender identity, however). I think that Clark’s location probably makes it the most appealing for LGBTQ students.