<p>I feel sad to see that our society is so polarized that our kids’ experiences have to parsed through a political lens. </p>
<p>A larger percentage of faculty are liberal, so it stands to reason that many schools will provide a liberal education regardless of the bent of the student body.</p>
<p>This is true for schools like Union and Gettysburg that don’t seem particularly conservative to me, even with frats as part of their culture. Hey, Wesleyan and Amherst both have frats.</p>
<p>My S’s LAC, Williams, is often painted as having an athlete culture, and statistics are given to support this, but my son, who never met a ball he liked, was very comfortable in a culture that was extremely supportive of the arts.</p>
<p>I am sorry my examples are East Coast – not snobbery just familiarity. I don’t want to opine about schools I am less familiar with.</p>
<p>With Stanford the equal of Harvard in selectivity (and yield? I’m not sure) and Vanderbilt in the single digits I think the East Coast no longer has a stranglehold on prestige or desirability in our country. Just random examples – no dis to anyone. Pomona may be the most selective LAC.</p>
<p>LAC’s just get less respect, period. People have often been shocked that my S chose Williams over U of Chicago. No geographic prejudice, just big name research u over LAC. U of C now has an acceptance rate of Ivies too.</p>
<p>So many ideas of prestige/respect are from the past with LAC’s still trailing. (I suspect this will continue. Only a very small fraction of our students in the US are educated in the liberal arts and community colleges actually have the most students in the US. My school has 22,000 day students which around 10,000 evening students, all frosh and sophomores. The community college one county over has similar stats I think, though I am not as familiar with them (though I do teach courses there too.)</p>