<p>I understand that regionalism is certainly not limited to a specific part of the country; however, looking through other threads in the College Search and Selection forum, I getthe impression that students in the Northeast often highly prefer/limit their searches to schools in the Northeast, seemingly moreso than students on the West Coast, Midwest, and South do in their own respective regions. I would be interested to hear what people's reasonings were on this subject:</p>
<p>Does such a bias exist? (My impression is just that--an impression.)
If it does exist, is it due purely to the long history and concentration of schools in the region?
What factors are keeping students in the Northeast?</p>
<p>I don't mean to be inflammatory at all. Just wanted to get an insight into the lives of students from other parts of the country.</p>
<p>Half of the best private schools are in the Northeast. If somebody from Texas or California wants to apply to those sorts of schools, they have only a few local choices (Stanford, Rice) and have to go across the country if they want a lot of reaches. Someone from New England can apply to many schools that are within a day’s drive.</p>
<p>agreed. for exceptional students, you’ve only got a few non-northeast options. </p>
<p>in the south, you’ve got duke and maybe vandy? and west is stanford, cal, and rice. since the US was primarily building itself on the east, many of the best colleges are there.</p>
<p>You have many more options than that outside of the east. In addition to some excellent liberal arts colleges and state universities throughout the country, there are several excellent private national universities in the midwest (Northwestern, Chicago, WUSTL).</p>
<p>While there are many top-notch schools throughout the country (many of which have been named in this thread), in the Northeast, there’s an extremely high concentration of them in a relatively small geographical area, and a very high proportion of THOSE are also very famous. Kids grow up hearing about them, surrounded by them, and end up not seeing much point in going elsewhere when they have so many options so close to home.</p>
<p>I don’t actually know if this bias exists more in the Northeast than, say, on the West Coast. Or anywhere else, really. But I’ve certainly seen it among some folks in the Northeast.</p>
<p>Why pay for flights when you can easily drive? The top schools on the West Coast are generally further apart, so people expect to have to travel long distances no matter where they go. IMO, once you’re on a plane, you’re on a plane. The hassle is moving belongings and security, not the length of the flight.</p>
<p>So I don’t think it’s NE or East Coast regionalism as much as it’s a greater willingness on the part of West Coast people to travel. Once you’re already talking about 6-7 hr drives or flights, going to the East Coast doesn’t seem that bad.</p>
<p>That is, the preference for NE folks staying in the NE is based on fact -high concentration of great schools - but is also intermixed with prevailing parochialism and the national tendency for students to - in general - stay closer to home, wherever home is.</p>
<p>That parochialism is what had kept people from NE recognizing that there are great public and private schools in other parts of the country.</p>
<p>Former example for engineering: Harvey Mudd is now known nationally.</p>
<p>People in the Northeast tend to think of Southerners as toothless hillbillies, Midwesterners as illiterate farmers in overalls, Westerners as cowboys still killing buffalo and fighting off Injuns, and Californians as suntanned bimbos. Red Auerbach used to say “New Yorkers think everything west of the Hudson River is camping out.” This famous drawing lampoons New Yorkers, but could be extrapolated to apply to the Northeast in general: <a href=“Private Site”>Private Site;
<p>More than half of the US News top 25 and top 50 national universities are NOT in the Northeast (13 of 25 and 29 of 50 respectively). Top LACs are a little more concentrated in the Northeast, but 8 of the US News top 25 and 20 of the top 50 are located in other regions. The Northeast certainly has the largest concentration of top colleges and universities, so many that it’s generally pretty easy for Northeasterners who want to stay in the Northeast for college to do so, with a wide range of quality choices. In most of the rest of the country, it’s not so easy. Here in Minnesota, for example, many students elect to go to the University of Minnesota, a pretty good public university, or the Uinversity of Wisconsin in Madison where we get on-state tuition under our reciprocity agreement; others go to one of the other publics in either state. But if you want to go private, there just aren’t that many choices. We have some very fine LACs, including 3 in the US News top 50 (Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf), but after that it drops off pretty dramatically. Neighboring Iowa has Grinnell; neighboring Wisconsin has Beloit and Lawrence; the Dakotas, nothing. Chicago has the University of Chicago and Northwestern, both outstanding schools and popular choices with Minnesota kids. Anything beyond that geographically and you’re a flight away (states are bigger out here), and once you’re looking at airfares, Ohio is really no cheaper and not much longer a flight than Pennsylvania or Massachusetts where there are dozens of good colleges to choose from. So I think it’s mostly just a question of the concentration of good colleges and universities in a single region.</p>
<p>Having lived at various times in the Northeast, the West, and the Midwest, however, I do think there’s also a pretty widespread anti-“flyover state” bias, more pronounced in in the Northeast than in the West, that does play a role here. If schools like Carleton, Grinnell, and Macalester were located in the Northeast, they’d be flooded with applications, their admit rates would be much lower, and their student bodies would likely be even strong that they already are. These are outstanding schools that remain something of an admissions “bargain,” significantly easier to get into than schools of comparable strength in the Northeast.</p>
<p>^^sorry, but who cares about those horrible rankings besides the like top 10. First of all, according to the “rankings” top 4=northeast. You also don’t have common sense seeing as the northeast is the largest REGION in the top 25/50. you cant just say oh majority isnt northeast…look at it and the next region would probably w.e cal falls into due to their huge system. </p>
<p>modest melody brings up a good point, plane tickets. most people dont go cross country for college because the distance from home and the expense of the plane ticket</p>
<p>The northeast has some much to offer in a relatively small area. There are a wide variety of tops schools to pick from, a wide variety of locations that might interest you, and overall a wide variety of opportunities available to you once you finish college: all within the same region. As long as you aren’t looking for a school that has temperatures in the seventies all year then you can probably find a school that fits you quite well here.</p>
<p>I’ve seen dozens of threads asking for colleges “in the Northeast or on the west coast” or “anywhere but the South.” It’s amazing how quickly people jump to conclusions about regions they often have never visited. The irony is those same people will urge a poster in a Michigan vs. Penn thread to pick Penn to “experience a new area of the country.” </p>
<p>Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong, and they’re simply deathly afraid of warm weather and friendly people.</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure what that outburst was about, collegebound. Didn’t I just say “the Northeast certainly has the largest concentration of top colleges and universities”? I thought I did.</p>
<p>But just for the record, here’s how the regions stack up:</p>
<p>Region / # in top 25 / # in top 50
Northeast / 12 / 21
South (inc. TX) / 5 / 11
Midwest / 4 / 8
West / 4 / 10</p>
<p>(Note, however, that 4 of the West’s “10 in the top 50” fall in the #41-to-#50 range).</p>
<p>I guess that pretty well confirms my statement that “the Northeast certainly has the largest concentration of top colleges and universities.” But it also confirms my claim that there are top colleges and universities in every region, and that the concentration in the Northeast is not nearly as pronounced as many Northeasterners imagine it to be.</p>
<p>what bclintonk said - that there are more top colleges outside of the Northeast than people imagine there are - is non-objective New England parochialism at work.</p>
<p>That said, with about 15% of the US population (6 New England states plus NJ and NY) the Northeast has more than its share of excellent colleges.</p>
<p>I really do think it’s anti-travel bias. Like I said, when you can drive, why fly? Once you break that barrier, who cares how far you go? The bottom line is the NE corridor (DC to Boston) has a tremendous number of schools within about the same distance as San Francisco to San Diego. I’d be within that belt you see similar patterns of bias to stay within CA (with perhaps even more because of how good and cheap the UC system is). That’s about the only other similar strip with that many top schools in the country, and even then the quality is not quite the same.</p>
<p>I was born in the midwest, but I just like the northeast. It has the most cities, the most history, the most money (it is the wealthiest region of the United States according to the US census). The urban areas are also more dense and navigable by mass transit as well as by foot (particularly important in college).</p>
<p>I consider Chicago to be a northeastern city in spirit, if (clearly) not in location</p>
<p>A lot of the top Northeastern schools are not in the Boston-Washington corridor—Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Cornell, RPI, U Rochester, Bucknell, Penn State, Colgate, Hamilton, Skidmore, Union among them. Others (Williams, Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke) are sort of borderline, technically not in the corridor but close enough that you could call it either way. On the other hand, most of these schools are within a 300-350 mile radius of New York City, the population center of the Northeast. </p>
<p>But if you look at a roughly 350-mile radius from Chicago, you’ve got U Chicago, Northwestern, WUSTL, Notre Dame, Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, Case Western, Carleton, Grinnell, Oberlin, Macalester, Kenyon, St. Olaf, DePauw, Beloit, Lawrence, plus a bunch of the best engineering schools in the country like Purdue, Rose-Hulman, and Minnesota in addition to some of the other already named. Not the same in number or density as the Northeast, I know, but I’d put that group up against the California schools. California might be a little stronger at the very top with Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley, and Pomona, but overall the Midwest schools are at least comparable if not stronger. Frankly I have my doubts about some of the UCs (after Berkeley and UCLA). </p>
<p>But I don’t see the same regional bias here in the Midwest. A lot of kids do stay in-state to go to their in-state publics (or for Minnesotans, cross the border to Wisconsin for in-state tuition there). But the generally high quality of public education in the Midwest sets a pretty high bar. A school has to offer something pretty special to beat the in-state publics which offer a quality education at an affordable cost. Yet large numbers of Midwesterners do go elsewhere; Illinois and Minnesota, in particular, are among the biggest exporters of college students. For Minnesota kids, sometimes it’s just a matter of going to Wisconsin-Madison, Grinnell, or Northwestern. But more often than not, if they’re passing up in-state tuition at “the U” or Wisconsin-Madison, it’s precisely because of the allure of going elsewhere, to another region, most often to the Northeast which has a kind of mystique as a center for college education, built up in the popular culture. I don’t have the figures to prove it, but I suspect the terms of trade a pretty uni-directinoal, with far more Minnesotans going to the Northeast than Northeasterners coming to Minnesota, even thuogh we’ve got soem private schools here that rival the best in the Northeast.</p>
<p>And by the way, most Midwesterners who go to college in the Northeast are driven there in the family minivan or SUV, at least initially. We Midwesterners know a thing or two about driving long distances. States are bigger here, and cities are farther apart; we drive long distances on a regular basis. A trip to New England & back is nothing. Sure, a plane ticket is required at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but the late-summer trek to drop junior off at college is a well-worn ritual in these parts.</p>