<p>SAT: CR: 700 - Math: 680 - Writing:700
I know this score is around the lower 50% of the ivy league pool scores. 3.9 GPA Sports, Performing Arts, and other electives, some community service.
Currently **taking PSEO<a href="college%20courses%20while%20in%20high%20school">/B</a> at a university and doing well.</p>
<p>Desires: I hope to major in philosophy. I have a conservative viewpoint, and I'm a traditional catholic. I want a school with a good reputation that my relatively high scores will put me in, but also I need the school and the students of the school to be grounded in the same principles as I am. I dont want a school like Reed or Columbia where ultra liberals dominate the academic setting and where "if you are a conservative, keep your mouth shut or you will be ostracized"</p>
<p>What's the best fit university, both academic wise (SAT scores) and that suits my interests? Could I be accepted to Notre Dame? Would anyplace college give me a full ride?</p>
<p>Thanks for any input, I appreciate it more than you know!</p>
<p>I don’t know if the above would give you a full ride, but I can tel you that ND doesn’t give much merit at all. </p>
<p>When you say “full-ride” - do you mean tuition, room, board, books? Or do you mean “full-tuition”? </p>
<p>Miss State might give you a free ride. You need a 1400 Math + CR for free tuition Alabama, but you would get 2/3 OOS tuition. Alabama isn’t “conservative,” but at least your beliefs won’t get ridiculed.</p>
<p>There are plenty of universities where your conservative views won’t get you ostracized. But I do not see why you require that students be “grounded in the same principles” as you. You are placing an unnecessary (and. in my view, very unfortunate) constraint on your education when you limit dialogue to those whose principles you agree with.</p>
<p>^ Agree. I’ve heard some conservatives say that they want to attend a very liberal school in order to learn the most about alternate ways of thinking. If you want to counter or balance the liberal views, maybe you should know firsthand what they are. Imagine late-night debates; are they better with those on your side?</p>
<p>i understand your argument, and I believe its important to know the other viewpoints, especially in the field of philosophy. but i mean it more in the sense of culture, atmosphere, and people I hope to make life-long friendships with… and from my experience, its nice to have people around you who understand you and can relate. maybe thats just me and we’re different. thanks mom2collegekids im applying to dallas. looks solid</p>
<p>I think the OP wants an environment where both sides are debated and discussed without one side feeling disrespected or “put down.” </p>
<p>It doesn’t sound like he wants a “one-sided” view. It sounds like he wants just some political freedom of speech. </p>
<p>There are liberal colleges where a conservative student will definitely HEAR the other side, but he won’t be able to express his point of view without being ridiculed, shouted down, or summarily dismissed.</p>
<p>Georgetown and the University of Dallas. And if your career goals are strictly in academia (rather than law, the state department, the intelligence and homeland security communities, think tanks, wall street, etc.), the University of Dallas will serve you as well.</p>
<p>I don’t think you would be comfortable anywhere in the Ivy League and would find the constant defense of your views to be exhausting over time.</p>
<p>I grew up in a household I thought was liberal. My parents believed that both Blacks and Women should be allowed to vote, for example. Today it seems ridiculous that suffrage should be a liberal issue or a conservative one. But when my parents were growing up it was.</p>
<p>My point is that what constitutes “liberal” or “conservative” changes over time. Not very long ago conservative meant balanced budgets and no foreign interventions. IMHO, the notion that political views are “fixed” in time or place will not serve students well.</p>
<p>I missed the part where the OP says, “grounded in the same principles as I [have]”</p>
<p>Maybe, he defines his principles as being open-minded, fair, and respectful. If that is the case, then he should want a campus where profs don’t “shut down” conservative voices and the student population isn’t tilted so far to the left that he must carefully tread.</p>
<p>“Maybe, he defines his principles as being open-minded, fair, and respectful.”</p>
<p>Boy, am I picky today. </p>
<p>“I have a conservative viewpoint, and I’m a traditional catholic. … I need the school and the students of the school to be grounded in the same principles as I am.”</p>
<p>The OP wants a conservative school with conservative students. No way around it.</p>
<p>Well, some of the “best” conservative schools would be Georgetown and Notre Dame. However, while I do not know the OP, I firmly believe that he/she should not ride off ivies just because they are very leftist (though if the OP is hookless, his/her SAT scores would probably need to improve before he/she applied there). </p>
<p>I am a devote Christian conservative. However, I don’t really care that Christians and people who love Ronald Reagan are minorities at HYPSM. In all honesty, 99.999% of schools in the US are left of center. So, go to the place where you will learn the most, not where you will be one of a thousand other like-minded students.</p>
<p>That’s not true. Princeton has an unbelievably active Catholic center on campus. We have events every single night, for those who wish to go to them. The conservative viewpoint, and any viewpoint for that matter, is tolerated and respected. Barring overt racism, of course. As a conservative Catholic, I feel perfectly welcome here.</p>
<p>And there is nothing wrong with wanting to be around people like yourself. Is every liberal student at Reed/New College/Columbia/Yale/etc. doing himself a disservice? Hardly. I honestly find that most of the “expose yourself to different ideologies” statements come when a conservative student seeks a conservative school (versus the opposite, of course).</p>
<p>Despite the OP’s ambiguous and/or poor choice of wording, it is pretty clear that he wants to have his opinion tolerated on campus. That follows from the next statement. His desire for a conservative campus is perfectly reasonable, for the same reason that a liberal student’s desire to attend a liberal campus is perfectly reasonable. Few would call the latter one out on it though.</p>
<p>I was going to make this point, too. Virtually every week some student states that he/she wants a liberal-minded campus where he/she will feel at home, and NOBODY suggests that this student needs to be willing to be around “diverse opinions” and be open to conservative thoughts, etc. </p>
<p>Instead, such as student is happily given lists or left-leaning schools (why not just hand them the USNews list of top 25 schools).</p>
<p>Yes, this is a problem for conservative students. Most colleges and universities are institutions of research and discovery, often the cutting edges of societal change, so they’re not very conservative.</p>
<p>I think people are overestimating the liberalness of the Ivies. I go to Columbia (as a graduate student) - while the school of public health is very very liberal, I’m in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as well and that’s less liberal - I’d say it’s relatively moderate. At Columbia there are a lot of liberal causes being agitated for but I think there is also a place for conservative students here, and I don’t think conservative students will get “shut down” by professors. Professors tend to be liberal people in general, whether they’re teaching at Columbia or a military service academy. However, they also tend to be people who value a diversity of ideas in the classroom and welcome debate and discussion.</p>
<p>I took a class on culture and diversity that was mixed grad and undergrad, so there were students from GS, CC, Barnard and other graduate schools in the university. There were pretty mixed beliefs, too - not everyone was liberal, there were some moderates and maybe one or two conservatives in the class. No one’s ideas got shut down; we listened to everyone.</p>
<p>I agree that while it’s important to search out places where you feel like you will be comfortable, making a liberal v. conservative distinction is taking a narrow-minded approach this process. Universities are neither liberal or conservative. They are made up of people who all have differing viewpoints that range along a continuum, not a dichotomy. People group all the Ivies into the same bunch, but there’s definitely a different political atmosphere at say Princeton (an undergraduate focused, smaller university in a small town in a wealthy area of New Jersey) than at Columbia (a large university in a very large city right around the corner from Harlem, with a history of social unrest).</p>
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