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I wouldn’t call any of these characteristics “preppy.” I’d call them “academically rigorous” and “traditional.” For example, Bryn Mawr is a Seven Sister women’s college that meets all of these characteristics; I wouldn’t say it’s particularly preppy. Traditional, certainly.</p>
<p>Well, I suppose we disagree on a fundamental point. However I feel it necessary to point out that an inclusive attitude does not fall under the category of “academically rigorous”–it is a campus-culture thing.</p>
<p>The Seven Sisters are another good example of my point–while they now cater to a much different demographic group than they did 70 years ago, they still have the preppy stigma in certain circles, even if the majority of the students aren’t walking around in Lilly and and Lacoste.</p>
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<p>As I’ve posted before, that entitlement index is really misleading.</p>
<p>First, not every kid that goes to private high school is well off. (The affluent private high schools hand out a lot of scholarship money and those scholarship kids, if they’ve done well, are highly sought after by the selective colleges.)</p>
<p>Also, a lot of the private schools aren’t close to wealthy to begin with. Colleges do a lot of diversity recruiting in the urban parochial schools and I would think they show up as private schools. And finally, there’s lots of very well off public high school students in the applicant pool of expensive private schools. I’d guess more of those than actual boarding school students. </p>
<p>Looking at that index, I had to laugh at the identity of some of the schools that according to the index are significantly less entitled than the traditional top tier LACs. Schools that I know from first hand experience have rip roaring, beer drinking, fraternity dominated, who’s got the nicer car and clothes, be there or you’re square social scenes that are the only thing to do on Saturday night.</p>
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<p>Anybody who thinks Vassar or Barnard are “preppy” under any conceivable definition of the term hasn’t been there.</p>
<p>That’s kind of what I was trying to say. If you went to the school today you would never get that impression. But the women who attended the school in the past most certainly were preppy, and that’s why I say in SOME CIRCLES attending a Seven Sister school is considered the right thing for a preppy girl to do.*</p>
<p>*I can back this up with a personal anecdote so although I know people are fond of challenging my opinion and that’s perfectly fine, please don’t on this one.</p>
<p>^I think the difference in philosophy is this: I define a “preppy” school as one where the school culture is predominantly preppy. For that to happen, necessarily a large proportion of the students must subscribe to that lifestyle/viewpoint/whatever. You appear to define a “preppy” school as one which old-money preps view as acceptable destinations. Since your own definition of old-money preps is very narrow, I don’t particularly care what schools THEY view as acceptable; for example, there are surely preppy people at Vassar, but the school culture is not preppy in the slightest and it’s almost easier to be non-preppy than to be preppy there.</p>
<p>Yes; well, the only reason I even posted is that I felt the need to point out that the way “preps” in South are and “preps” at schools like Miami U are is representative of a completely different culture–one in which name-brands and trying to belong to a certain group is the most important thing. And I think there are a lot of schools that appeal to people with much different approaches to their lifestyleswho define themselves as preps, and these are the better places to be, in my opinion.</p>
<p>10mwil:
couldn’t disagree with you more; the students I knew at Davidson did not define themselves as ‘preps’ nor did they attempt to look any particular way. What they were: students who had attended private prep schools, whose WASP families had lived in the south for many generations-sons of generations of bankers(Charlotte is a major banking city), lawyers, physicians etc…who are simply the southern cousins of their ‘northeast’ counterparts that you seem to venerate. To somehow say that wearing old topsiders from East Hampton and attending Deerfield and Harvard is prep and wearing docksiders from your Hilton Head summer home, attending Saint Mark’s Episcopal school in Dallas and going to Vanderbilt is not-well, I agree with most of the other posters-I am not sure I see your distinction-other then if you are not from the northeast-today, it isn’t real. Just because a family got off of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, doesn’t mean they stayed in that area forever. My ancestors did not like the snow… :)</p>
<p>I understand what you’re saying–the Southern counterparts to the Northern preps. If I said anything that suggested I didn’t think they were “real”, I apologize for my imprecision–I actually have friends who couldn’t be MORE preppy–and they’re right out of North Carolina and Tennessee. My point is that there are knock-off preppy colleges that just aren’t representative of all preps (and a lot of them are in the Midwest and the South).</p>
<p>And I must say my distinction is real, though maybe not as obvious to many as it is to me (this is clear just because so many people disagree with me, haha).</p>
<p>Good lord, why would you want to send your child to a school for the sake of its “preppiness”, and thus limit them to an elitist subculture? The men wear bright green pants, for god’s sake. I was quite enamored with the idea of being “preppy” as a teen until I went to boarding school, when I realized that lobster-scattered pants and hippo-printed dresses were the signs of a very boring, oblivious kind of socioeconomic class whose members choose to distinguish themselves by dressing as foolishly as possible.</p>