What is the next best thing to Notre Dame? I love Notre Dame and am looking for a good backup with comparable academics, community, campus.
Boston College
Many would look at Boston
College and Villanova as somewhat similar alternatives. A bit further afield might be Santa Clara U
Boston College and Georgetown are usually cross-shopped with ND.
@informative BC and Georgetown are basically secular schools… there’s not much that distinguishes them feel-wise from say, Wake Forest or Vanderbilt. If your looking for a Catholic environment, I think it would be a mistake to overlook non “Catholic” schools that may offer vibrant Catholic ministries/student groups (you can google search this and contact club leaders).
Lol, I’ll be sure to tell BC and Georgetown they are secular schools now. Lol.
Especially with those crucifixes in every classroom. Yup, secular. 8-|
We toured BC. It is very Catholic. That said, non-Catholic students are welcome there, and you’d get a great education.
I agree with the BC and Georgetown going with Notre Dame…Georgetown slightly harder than Notre Dame to get in to and BC slightly easier (although BC business is quite competitive). I went to BC and my daughter is there now and while I agree that the schools are somewhat secular in that religion isn’t thrown in your face or even that prevalent, the student body is mostly Catholic. So I do think BC is the next best thing to Notre Dame if you are looking for a similar student body. And I would say Villanova is the next best thing to BC, especially for business. All of these schools attract similar applicants. Georgetown attracts similar applicants as well, but might also attract a bit more of a diverse and international crowd as well. Can’t go wrong with any of them they are all great choices!! Good luck!
I’ll add College of the Holy Cross to the list. Ranked 3rd among Catholic colleges in this list
I’d agree with the above posts. To expand on those suggestions, you might want to look at the list of Jesuit colleges (some of which have been mentioned above) and hopefully you can find a couple that are both academically and geographically in the range you are looking for. http://www.ajcunet.edu/institutions/
@wisteria100 That is a good list of Catholic colleges, but some of the rankings which were done using only Niche seem a bit off to me (ex. schools like Fordham, Loyola-Chicago, Xavier seem way too low IMO).
@happy1 I agree those rankings don’t seem right, overall. But Holy Cross is a great school.
@collegemomjam I agree Holy Cross is a fine school and I don’t think (or didn’t mean to) to imply otherwise. I was just making a general comment about the rankings.
@happy1
I would agree that I was surprised by the Fordham ranking.
@happy1 I knew what you meant and was totally agreeing with you and figured you knew Holy Cross is still a great school! Sorry if I didn’t make that clear! There are SOOOO many different rankings out there. We really need to look at the criteria used sometimes to make sure it is giving us the right impression. There are a lot of great, Catholic schools out there, and lots that aren’t Catholic too!
It really depends on what attributes of ND that you like and how highly you weight those attributes in your decision process. You could look at it in a number of ways:
- Jesuit Catholic Schools with strong academics, school spirit and alumni connections:
BC
Georgetown
Fordham (not sure about school spirit at Fordham)
Santa Clara U (not sure about school spirit at Fordham and SCU)
- Other schools with a balanced combination of school spirit, academics and big-time sports
U Wisconsin
U Michigan
Penn State
UVA
UNC
Duke
- Highly ranked tippy top academic schools that have big time sports teams that generally are not big sports successes:
Northwestern
Rice
Vanderbilt
Stanford (although sports are now more successful)
Wake Forest
Duke sucks in football and its basketball hasn’t done that well in the last few years and UVA is also lousy in football and isn’t really that consistent in basketball. Neither compare with Wisconsin/Michigan in terms of big-time sports atmosphere, which I would associate more with filling a big football stadium with close to 100,000 fans.
@IWannaHelp My post was somewhat tongue in cheek so please don’t read too much into it. I could have put UVA in the third category but put in the second as I have been down there a few times and always noticed the strong pride and school spirit of the students. Also, re: Duke it did win the 2015 basketball championship!
I went to BC back in the Doug Flutie days and it was amazing. Lots of fun and I received a great education. I have one daughter there now who loves it and a hs senior who is applying, but also applying to other schools, some with and some without huge school spirit. As I have told her, I think the school spirit is great and lots of fun, but if you don’t have it, it’s totally fine because there are so many other things to fill that time with! For example, a school like Emory…great school, great academics, but not exactly known for the rah-rah. But students love it.
ND, Georgetown, BC and Holy Cross are probably the four best Christian colleges in the country. You can’t go wrong with any of these. I’d prefer Georgetown or BC, as I couldn’t live on Worcester or Indiana for four years.