<p>^ That is a very well-articulated clarification.</p>
<p>The people I know who attended schools on the list have a curiosity about the world and they tend to go on vacation to places like Machu Picchu, Prague, Zanzibar, etc. But then I have friends who went to schools like Northwestern, Penn and Cornell and they’ll go on vacation to Las Vegas or Orlando. I’m not making any judgments here. They’re all equally intelligent but there are different sensibilities. You get the picture.</p>
<p>“I get a kick out of these lists, but don’t take them too seriously…”</p>
<p>“These lists” are different; this kind reports on a single feature that a few are looking for; others report a relatively meaningless one-size-fits-none conglomeration that offers little practical guidance.</p>
<p>William & Mary is the most intellectual public school and maybe the most in the whole South. Duke and Davidson would also be considered.</p>
<p>I think this list really emphasizes how the students relate to learning and interact with each other.</p>
<p>stupid list…really stupid list…how come someone can generalize something called intellectualism??? On what basis do these people dare to do these stupid rankings??</p>
<p>^ How? On what basis? See posts #20 and #22.</p>
<p>
The article itself is quite vague about how they went about the process. “[website] looked for schools…Thirty thousand student votes later…” Did they, for example, ask students to rate their schools from 1 to 10 on an “intellectual” scale? Did they ask students to vote for the schools they felt were the most “intellectual”? Were students randomly surveyed, or was this a self-reported survey? Readers want to know these things.</p>
<p>One wonders, for instance, if the lack of Caltech, MIT, or Mudd on the list is simply a function of those students having less time on their hands to respond to such things. </p>
<p>
Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? How do we know which schools deserve to be on such a list? Are we to rely on argumentum ad populum?</p>
<p>Most of us have attended only one of these colleges at best. People “know” that Carleton is intellectual the same way they “know” that Yale has a nice campus and “know” that Oberlin is gay-friendly. Have they attended that school? Probably not. Visited? Maybe. Know a current student? Well, are we counting our brother’s girlfriend’s best friend? When people ask for intellectual schools, posters usually rattle off the same tired old litany of schools - Swat, Reed, Chicago, “Midwest schools” (yes, apparently all of them), Hampshire, etc., without stopping to think about how they know those schools are intellectual - or, for that matter, how others are not. </p>
<p>What’s the firm evidence for such things? How do you compute the “intellectual” nature of Evergreen State as opposed to the New College of Florida? Take the PhD production lists, for example. While a rough guide, it is only that - certainly not a solid ranking by any means. Is there any difference in the intellectual nature of a classics major who chooses to go into banking and the classics major who chooses to go to graduate school? In my experience, the difference is primarily that the latter simply has a great deal less common sense. (I say this as a graduate student in a decidedly esoteric field.) Such lists may be more useful in conjunction with other ways of measuring intellectual aptitude – the percentage of students willingly writing theses, perhaps, or the popularity of “intellectual” extracurricular offerings. As far as I know, nobody has ever done such a comparative study, which would admittedly be a hefty undertaking. Until such a study can be done, however, I think such lists are often more harmful than good. There is often a false dichotomy between “intellectual” colleges and “not intellectual” colleges, when in reality most colleges fall somewhere along the spectrum between the two, as well as having students covering the entire spectrum.</p>
<p>This one of the most pointless and random lists I have seen. One reason Brown is very intellectual is that “students rarely stop talking about their academics?” Give me a break, students use the system to take easy classes and boost their GPA’s for law school admissions. The quote would be more accurate if you replace the phrase “their academics” with “law schools.”</p>
<p>I really do like Luckie Starchild’s travel analogy (post #22).</p>
<p>Maybe instead of Most Intellectual Colleges the category should read:</p>
<p>“Most Likely College Students to Vacation in Kazakhstan”</p>