Yes, there are places outside the south that regularly make the list of “most segregated metro areas”. They may not make the news as much about poor race relations or segregation because (a) fewer minorities live in those regions, and (b) the politics there are not as obviously driven by “racial conservatism” (i.e. they may have more left-leaning views on economics, union labor, etc. that affect political leanings instead of having politics being mostly defined by conservative views on race).
Agree with this. I think lkg4answers’s guidance counselors had it wrong/backwards. For one thing, there’s value in living outside of the region you grew up in. I went to a school in NC from snow white Minnesota and it was life enriching for me, both the exposure to more diversity on campus than I’d had in high school or would have had at, I don’t know, Carleton or somewhere, but also through experiencing southern U.S. culture in a way that allows me to speak on it now as something other than just caricature or inherited conventional wisdom. For another, the problem at my particular university was not any prevalence of racial bias in the off campus community - it was the lack of mingling of white and black culture on campus itself. I don’t believe that’s a specifically southern problem; that’s an issue across the nation.
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Surely people wouldn’t rank Boston College ahead of Wake Forest
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feel like Andy Bernard on The Office may have helped spread the word about Cornell (lol).
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With all due respect to your counselors, that strikes me as pretty uninformed. There are areas within virtually every state - including Texas, North Carolina, and California - where biracial persons, persons of color, LGBT persons, etc. would likely feel unwelcome. It’s a sad fact of life in this country. But note that the largest racial group in the Rice student population is Asian, and the “surrounding community” of Houston elected a lesbian mayor in the recent past. (I can’t speak for Duke from direct experience, though I suspect that the situation is similar in the highly-educated Research Triangle.) There are of course many reasons why Rice or Duke or any other school might not be a fit for a certain student, but I would hope that counselors would allow students to investigate a bit before steering them elsewhere based on stereotypes. (And I would say the same about counselors in more conservative areas who issue blanket warnings that all schools on both coasts are “too liberal.”)
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I might quibble a bit with Georgetown here. Its basketball program was a non-entity nationally until the 1980’s, and has returned to general irrelevance after about a 15 year blossoming (they haven’t even made the Sweet 16 in 15 years). Certainly, they picked the right time to have a good hoops program, right when the NCAA tournament became a big thing and people were for the first time exposed to teams outside their local conference because of it. Nonetheless, my kids were shocked when I told them Georgetown used to be a powerhouse, perennial Final Four team when I was a kid. Bill Clinton, Anthony Scalia, Robert Gates and the like all went there long before John Thompson showed up.
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No doubt that it has always been a very good school. Before rankings though it was in the same realm as other very good regional schools. Back then there were really only a handful of schools on everyone’s radar regardless of where they lived, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT. Their acceptance rates were relatively high. There wasn’t a mad rush for every student to apply to all the “best” schools, because they knew their regional private and state options were very good.
I may have just tossed some names in a parenthetical without giving it much thought. Perhaps you’re right. BC may get some residual “Boston also = Harvard, MIT, Tufts” association points, combined with Wake Forest having had much more of a regional reputation until the last 20 years or so, and the higher prevalence of BC grads in large financial centers in the north. I guess I’ve always seen them as about equal, though Wake’s usually a few places higher in the rankings that brought this thread about.
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Honest question: was it really that more students in the pre-rankings era were aware of quality local/regional options, or because they perceived (rightly?) that HYP only accepted well-connected applicants from elite NE prep schools and their applications were a waste of time? I had assumed the latter, but I have no particular info or insight on this.
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I grew up in the ‘80’s in California and everyone had heard of Stanford but we had no idea what Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth was. Harvard was “the Stanford of the East” LoL
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True story: I thought for my entire childhood that G’town was an HBCU, probably because it was so rare for a non-HBCU to have a Black coach. It wasn’t until I was investigating colleges myself in the early 90s that I learned otherwise.
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Right, but I guess my point is you could say the same thing about Emory or Tufts, which probably get as many applications annually as Georgetown these days, but most definitely not because of any sports team. I just don’t get the sense that G’Town leverages (or could leverage) its athletics the way that USC, Duke, ND, Stanford, and others did/do, although it did establish a broader national brand of sorts through its basketball team 35-40 years ago. It tries to, no doubt - hoops is certainly featured in the literature our D23 has seen - but as opposed to other places she may apply to, in the rankings of “has a campus culture that includes a lot of school spirit tied to athletics” Georgetown is close to the bottom of the list.
I think it was about the perception of value and effort. Most felt they could get their needs met staying close to home.
Name recognition gets more interesting for LACs. Even the ones that know all the ivies, many would think that the likes of Williams, Amherst are community colleges.
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I agree 100%. I just think they’re more in the Rice, WashU, Vandy camp where national awareness came from rankings. Maybe GTown belongs in that camp too. As you say, the hoops dominance was evanescent. 
Along similar lines, does it ever happen in Massachusetts that “Amherst” and “Dartmouth” are sometimes taken to refer to University of Massachusetts campuses?
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I have a friend who went to Williams who still sometimes gets in response to saying he went there, “Oh, Williams and Mary”.
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I went to Syracuse because they had Pearl Washington …literally. And the school acknowledged basketball helped attract students.
They had their journalism rep long b4 but no doubt basketball and the rise of the big east helped continue or re establish its prominence.
No doubt - the vast majority of society has heard of Syracuse whereas mention Bowdoin or Colby to someone, most who know would say are superior, but most you’d ask would give you blank stares at their mention.
Sports means a ton.
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I don’t doubt it. I don’t know that any of the counselors actually lived in those states/regions. I assume that their perceptions are influenced by interactions with the AO that is assigned to our HS.
How do some of the top LACs fit into this? I would consider schools like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Middlebury Etc… in the mix with many of these schools.