<p>Despite where the Mason-Dixon Line lies, I wouldn't consider MD or DC to be in the South. I live in Northern VA and it's well known in the South that true Southerners don't consider any area north of Richmond to be southern. :(</p>
<p>As a parent of a General, I am partial to W&L, but I think there are a lot of fine schools in the Southern states that provide an excellent academic experience. I wouldn't discount these colleges and universities just because of their geographic location.</p>
<p>I agree with Marite, and would say that the terms "Southern Ivies" or "Public Ivies" or "New Ivies" are absurd. It's like real estate agents who try to stretch the name of a prestigious area to include surrounding land. It smacks of used-car hucksterism. There are many good schools, small and large, that are not in the Ivy League. Why this rush to place oneself within a fabricated penumbra that is not logically possible? There is only one Ivy League. The ACC has a few fine schools, as do the PAC 10, the Big 10 and the Big 12. There are 10 or so excellent LAC's across the country. If one is a domesticated feline, why try to convince the world that you are a tiger? Why not just be a good cat?</p>
<p>Are the schools themselves using the title of Southern Ivy or Public Ivy or is it something some author coined to have an eye-catching title?</p>
<p>I prefer to think of myself as a Tiger while aspiring to be a cat.</p>
<p>No clue where southern Ivy was first coined. I read it here in a thread, and curious what would be a southern Ivy. I prefer the term Magnolia league. Seems more fitting for those schools entertwined in great southern tradition.</p>
<p>Only real comment I cannot understand...William and Mary a Northen LAC? W&M is heart of VA.....very southern in my opinion. Wondering what characteristics makes it a northern LAC?</p>
<p>My son had an Asian teammate/classmate at boarding school who explained to me what an "Ivy" was in the minds of his parents (Hong Kong) and other Asian parents. "Ivy" did include Chicago, Stanford, MIT etc. However, Swarthmore was suspect because not enough people had heard of it. The poor kid barely got his parents to let him attend!</p>
<p>There are more than 10 great LACs in this country. That's the kind of thinking (that there are only 10) that breeds hysteria in the college admissions process.</p>
<p>Going back to the OP's query, I wantd to suggest that although it is very appealing to have a child within four hours of home, there are a lot of great LAC options that will be overlooked if you abide too strictly by that. As someone who sent a child out-of-region to attend a southern LAC that has nmore than lived up to expectations, I can't add much to the discussion of schools in the South because I only know a couple of them well enough to speak (and I've spoken in the past on other threads). But in thinking of the OP's daughter's described interests, it sems a shame not to put a few northern or midwestern schools into the mix. (I agree with all those posters who beg to avoid the use of the term Southern Ivy, or any other Ivy for that matter.) </p>
<p>When I think of someone with strong academics and varied interests in performing or creative arts and writing but maybe also science, places like Vassar and Wesleyan come to mind. Middlebury has some wonderful facilities. So do countless others. and of course there is always Brown, where presumably course selection is highly flexible.</p>
<p>If distance is an issue, being near major airports will ease the trip home and I realize none of the thre I've mentioned quite fit that description, but they might start the prospective applicant on the road to thinking about schools that would be great fits in other regions. Also, "the South" is a pretty big region and I would think that there are lot of southern schools that are a lot more than a four-hour drive from a given home base, so why not just go in any direction necessary to find the right school(s), some of which may well be in the South?</p>
<p>theDad,
With all due respect, I think you are selling the Southern schools waaaay short and perpetuating a hierarchy of prestige and quality historically built from a northern perspective. If you’re sitting in a major Southern city (Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, FL cities, TX cities), the perceptions of the Southern colleges is much, much stronger than many on CC appreciate (although I would also say that, compared to Northerners, the Southerners generally care much, much less about this).<br>
Qualitatively, the Southern schools listed previously by George2007 are all excellent and can definitely get a student wherever he/she wants to go. </p>
<p>IMO many top Southern schools have been emasculated by a mostly Northeastern educational elite and these colleges receive lower relative rankings as a result of factors like Peer Assessment which underrate the quality of these colleges. IMO, if Duke and Stanford were to switch physical locations, then I would bet that the expression would be HYPDM rather than HYPSM. Despite these, in the Southland, I would contend that several of the Southern colleges have more prestige and regard than all but HYP and few in the South have hardly even heard about AWSH. </p>
<p>IMO people on CC don’t realize just how regional colleges are in America, both in terms of the student populations that they attract and the postgraduate work (and to some extent graduate school) opportunities that they provide. My personal belief is that only a handful of schools have truly national recruiting appeal (HYPSM) while another 50-70 nationally have some statistically relevant level of national placement. The top ten schools in the South are most definitely in this group and their graduates, every bit as smart and qualified as their non-Southern peers, can be found in varying numbers all over the US. </p>
<p>Beyond the academic aspect of an undergraduate experience, students should strongly consider the social environment of a four-year undergraduate experience. While the social life of the top LACs of the South (Davidson, W&L, LAC-like W&M) is probably not greatly different from that of their Northern peers, the same is not true for several of the previously mentioned National Universities. The full undergraduate package (academic, social, athletic, etc) will be different at Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest from their Ivy peers (Emory with its Div 3 athletic scene is perhaps the most similar). There is no comparable in the North to the top publics like U Virginia, U North Carolina, Georgia Tech whose true comps would be UC Berkeley, U Michigan, UCLA. No one that I know sees Georgetown or GW as Southern schools.</p>
<p>hawkette-I agree with your statement re: regional appeal. The vast majority of people know about colleges from details not involving the actual education.</p>
<p>Sports, alumni, a good or bad coworker etc</p>
<p>Agree with Bethievt's post #47. The drive to find equivalence with the IVy League helps breed hysteria by suggesting that the number of excellent universities and/or LACs is limited to 8, whether it is nationally or regionally.</p>
<p>Four hours from home is appealing, also a bit of a financial need. Financial aid awards are a great factor in college decisions. Thank you for your post, hawkette and mattmom. Truly informative for me.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If "Ivies" means relatively small but complete research universities with national/international focus and reputation, no LAC will qualify, and only Duke in the South unquestionably fits the bill.
[/quote]
I think Rice might have something to say about that statemet.</p>
<p>Emory, as well.</p>
<p>And Cornell isn't small by any standards!</p>
<p>There are no public liberal arts colleges. W & M as a LAC is something of a misnomer even in and of itself, esp. as it occasionally trumpets itself as America's first university.</p>
<p>Sure, these titles are invented to get people to read articles and to make the people who go to Colgate or Vanderbilt or wherever feel better about themselves, or make their parents do so. Remember, as many have pointed out, these are just athletic conferences, so the concept of a "Magnolia League" is, frankly, even more ridiculous. I am not certain what "entertwined" means...I can guess, but most of the schools set forth above have very little to do with one another, historically or currently, so there is no "great southern tradition" between, say, Emory and Washington and Lee and the University of Florida.</p>
<p>I shouldn't have excluded Rice from my list, that was just brain-freeze. But I think its market position is more comparable to Washington University or Northwestern or Vanderbilt than to Brown or Dartmouth. So I guess I stand by "only Duke" as equivalent to the Ivy League schools. Although Rice certainly gets extra points for its residential college system, which students seem to love and which provides an Ivy-like social experience.</p>
<p>As for Cornell -- it's not what I would call "small", but it's meaningfully smaller than the best-known flagship state universities -- the same size as UVa (which is small as state u's go), and about half the size of Michigan or Berkeley.</p>
<p>JHS,
I may be misinterpreting or overreading something into your comment above, but it seems like the only Southern school that you accept as an Ivy peer is Duke and maybe Rice. It also reads like you put Brown and Dartmouth in a different (higher?) category from Wash U, Northwestern and Vanderbilt. Was that your meaning? If so, I think you may also be underrating those schools not located in the Northeast. </p>
<p>I’m not sure how you measure it, but after HYPSM, there are probably 12-14 schools where the students are virtually interchangeable and the quality of the academic offering is on the same level. A decade or two ago, this was not the case, but with the expansion in 2007 to 3.4 million high school graduates (it was only 2.3 million as recently as 1994), you quickly realize that the 13,300 places freshman places at the Ivy colleges do not even begin to capture the total pool of very high quality students coming out of high school. Those great students are going somewhere and the schools in this next batch of “elite” universities have been the biggest beneficiaries of their broadened matriculation pattern. </p>
<p>If you’ve actually been to these schools, know the kids that are attending, seen the quality of the teaching and the resources dedicated to undergraduate students, etc., you see that there is not much to choose from among this group. The only real difference in this group of schools is the wrapper that they come in -Southern location and personality vs. Northern, urban vs. suburban vs. rural, Division I vs. real Division I vs. Division III, warm temperatures vs. cold temps, smallish vs. medium vs. larger enrollment, prominence of graduate programs on campus, etc.</p>
<p>HYPSM: Note that 2 out of 5 are not Ivies. Why not talk of excellent colleges or even top LACS and universities? Why use such a term that is both so specific and fuzzy at the same time as Ivy?</p>
<p>Rice is great if you want a LAC size and feel, but a research U resources. (2800 undergrad, which will be rising over the next few years to approximately 3500 undergrads. The increase in student population will begin with the completion of the tenth residential college in fall of 2008.)</p>
<p>wow, there's a strong anti-Southern bias here.</p>