Occidental and Santa Clara stand out on your list. Others have talked about Santa Clara, which has a reputation for being wired with Silicon Valley, so I’ll just put in a good word for Occidental. My son considered the school seriously a few years ago, and we visited the campus. It’s an excellent school academically, ranked within the top 40 liberal arts colleges in the country, and the campus is compact and beautiful and located in an interesting neighborhood. It is very accessible to the center of Los Angeles, but it is located in a leafy area a little to the northeast. The closest airport is Burbank, which connects to major domestic airports, although LAX is also possible. We are also overseas, and in terms of distance, we concluded that once you are in the air, it’s only a couple hours more to get to the West Coast (or the East Coast in our case, as we are in Asia), so it’s not that big a deal. Occidental would be a very different experience than GW, but if being part of a small friendly, liberal and creative college community and living in a beautiful area appeals to her, I wouldn’t write it off. We had a very good experience communicating with the admissions representative responsible for Asia,so you might consider reaching out to the representative responsible for Europe with any questions you have.
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