Would you say UPenn is liberal? I know most ivy leagues are. However, I am a diehard liberal and I want to make sure there will be a welcoming atmosphere. I know UChicago, Yale, and UC Berkeley are very liberal… is UPenn similar.
I’m from the South, and the reason I am not applying to Vanderbilt, UNC, etc. is because of the abundance of rich southern legacy children. Do colleges like UPenn have lots of rich “trust fund” kids?
@popcorny Yes it is safe to say that Penn is liberal, as are all of the ivies. The overwhelming majority of students here are socially liberal but you will find many who are fiscally conservative. So many students, while they are socially liberal, they are also fiscally conservative. Also there are many kids who are liberal in all areas and a small minority who are socially conservative (meaning anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion etc).
All of the ivies have rich legacy kids, although most come from the northeast, not the south. There is no top school that doesn’t have at least a decent number of rich legacy kids. In my experience at Penn most of these kids are actually super hard working and ambitious and with the exception of a few, actually nice people, no different than the rest.
If this helps, My son did overnights and class visits at Penn, Columbia and Yale. In his interactions with students he felt they were all liberal but Penn was more pre-professional. He said at night the kids at Penn were all talking about future plans, career internships, etc even discussions of frats were about the future career connections a frat can bring, whereas at the other schools they didn’t discuss these things so much (at least when he was there).
Penn has many kinds of students, but they tend to be liberal, but practical. Typically believing in respecting other people who may be different, but most students are probably not interested in protesting the General’s Chicken like at Oberlin, for example.
There are a lot of rich people at Penn for sure. Penn might not be as liberal as Brown, Yale or UChicago, but definitely has liberal leanings and you will be able to find your crowd if politics is your thing.
Also I would have to agree with above comments – Penn students are probably in general less concerned with politics in general, compared to the socially aware students at Brown, for example. They are more caught up in the atmosphere of preprofessional drive and the campus culture of work hard, play hard.