<p>^Not really. Downtown New Haven has become one of the best college towns in the United States. It is on par with Ann Arbor, Madison and Charlottesville; totally packed with theaters, museums, stores, cafes, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, as there are 50,000 students in the area. Because Yale is the only Ivy League school located in the center of a real downtown with numerous 24/7 stores, city hall, etc. (and that's only because it is so old), you could argue that there is more to do within a few blocks of the Yale campus than within a few blocks of all the other Ivies combined. On the whole it is a large and very diverse city, very much like New York, with wildly rich areas as well as poorer areas packed with recent immigrants (but also amazing, $1.00 tacos better than anything I've ever tried in Mexico or the border states). There are also unbelievably high-quality parks and ocean beaches just a 10-15 minute bus trip, walk or bicycle ride from the downtown.</p>
<p>Having traveled extensively, I would argue that Wellesley, Yale and Princeton are the 3 most beautiful campuses in the U.S. Incidentally, they were also among the most expensive to construct. People just don't build buildings or ornament them to the extent that they did when those three campuses were constructed.</p>
<p>i heart PRINCETON!!!
well i'm a little biased cuz i used to live there. haha.
but seriously, that campus is small but amazing.
would absolutely love to go there...<em>dreams</em></p>
<p>Columbia would be nicer if you couldn't see the entire campus from one place...gets kind of depressing that its so nice but surrounded by traffic.</p>
<p>Hats off to Stanford with no contest. No campus has created such a paradise and their is no campus enterance greter than driving of palm drive to the Oval and facing the main quad. And I'd say their engineering, bio, and arts facilities are the best I've seen outside of Cambridge. To top it off, no other canpus has a full fledge mall with a Nordstrom on campus.</p>
<p>Posterx, I would agree that New Haven is a dump, Yale is notorious for neglecting it's surrounding community. Go outside of the campus no more than two blocks in any direction and it a very run down low-income neighborhood and empty buildings. Yale made a symbolic move of buying all the land around the perimeter of the campus and just letting the grass grow to solidfy the barrier. It's a sad thing, second wealthiest non-profit in the world and that's what they give back to the community. Harvard's not even that stingy.</p>
<p>I would have to say that I, for one, despise Stanford, as far as aesthetic appeal. It looks like a bland Mexican village for the most part. And the palm trees are obnoxious. I live in Florida, and we don't even use them like that here. It's just so boring and monochromatic.</p>
<p>Personally I find Stanford's campus incredibly boring, homogenous and shopping-mall fake. I know several Stanford alumni who wish they went to school in a place that was more "real" and had more 24/7 life to it. Cre8tive, it sounds like you're talking about New Haven 15+ years ago. A small house four blocks from Yale sold for $1.5 million last year. There are thousands of luxury apartments and condos, extending for many blocks around the campus, and now dozens of new restaurants as well (unfortunately, most of which, at up to $80 per person for dinner, beyond all but the wealthiest students' budgets), plus a nightlife scene so active that streets have to be shut down to accommodate the crowds. The only overgrown grassy sections anywhere near Yale are where a large factory building was just demolished and being turned into an enormous new public park, and already ringed by brand-new expensive homes, the other being the old "Route 34" highway near the main hospital and Pfizer Corporation advanced clinical research center that was removed and is being converted into a new $500,000,000, 15-story international cancer treatment center that will be larger and more advanced than Sloan-Kettering when it opens next year. In reality, Yale gives much more back to its community than Harvard does. It even has a homebuyer program that pays for any employee there to buy a home within a 4-mile radius, which is one reason why the city has improved so much. </p>
<p>While of course there are mile after mile of enormous, $2M+ mansions, because after all, New Haven is the third-wealthiest urban area in the United States after San Francisco and Silicon Valley - (see <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=4163841&postcount=66%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=4163841&postcount=66</a> ), obviously there are a few low-income areas nearby packed with immigrants, just like any other real city. NYC is another place where a huge proportion of the population is foreign-born, but you find the same kinds of demographics in parts of Cambridge near Harvard, or any other urban place. If you want total suburban isolation, you might want to look at places like Stanford or Hofstra.</p>
<p>Stanford is all the color of dried dung with a lot of undistinguished architecture.</p>
<p>Check out Yale, Brown, Dartmouth. Almost any school with a lot of land, set in nature, will be pretty, but then again, they tend to be pretty due to the landscape primarily.</p>
<p>I think Yale's my favorite, but I also like the gothic buildings of Princeton, Duke, OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE of course.</p>
<p>Then the pretty mediterrainean(SP?) buildings of Stanford, Rice, Pomona, Pepperdine (mostly b/c of the ocean views and flowers..) and U San Diego</p>
<p>Some other gorgeous ones are Salve Regina (mansions off the bluffs of Newport Rhode Island!), Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Vandy, Columbia, Notre Dame, Northwestern, BC, Holy Cross, Fordham's rose hill campus, and Catholic University (the Basilica!!!)</p>
<p>I think I pretty much just named them all....hehe</p>
<p>Cornell is often called "the most beautiful campus in the country" on posters and such.</p>
<p>I haven't seen all the campuses in the country, but of the ones I've seen, it's the most beautiful - architecture, gorges, big hill, classic quadrangles.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cornell is often called "the most beautiful campus in the country" on posters and such.</p>
<p>I haven't seen all the campuses in the country, but of the ones I've seen, it's the most beautiful - architecture, gorges, big hill, classic quadrangles.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I visited Cornell. I think it has a beautiful campus but not the BEAUTIFULEST. Its really in the middle of no-where. No flowers, just snow in MARCH when I visited.</p>
<p>I really like Cal's and UCLA's campuses. I haven't seen any campuses outside CA,though. </p>
<p>People keep talking about how Stanford has a nice campus. I really don't see it all. Everything looks the same and you have to bike really far to get to class.</p>
<p>in regards to Stanford's campus, I kind of like how all the buildings look similar and everything is uniform...i guess its kinda like an OCD thing...where I like the buildings to look similar..but i know what you mean...I think i also am attracted to it (that sound kinda weird/inappropriate now doesn't it?) because its foreign and Californian (is that even a word) and I'm from the burbs of Wisconsin... stark contrast if you ask me...</p>
<p>
[quote]
I visited Cornell. I think it has a beautiful campus but not the BEAUTIFULEST. Its really in the middle of no-where. No flowers, just snow in MARCH when I visited.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, based on your shocked emphasis of MARCH, perhaps you're from the South. Snow in March is normal and expected in the North. It's quite beautiful for many of us who like winter, ugly for those who do not. In the Fall it's stunning with all the leaf colors. In the Spring it's vibrant with new growth and that first warm day of the new year. In the summer it's simply sublime. </p>
<p>Why does being in the "middle of nowhere" affect a campus' beauty? Many people love Ithaca with all its quirky progressive culture, quality dining, and "gorges" topography. If you did more than visit and got to know the city, you'd understand.</p>
<p>Based on other posts, I think you have a grudge against the school. </p>
<p>I don't really care if it's the "BEAUTIFULEST" (?). I'm not going to wage a campaign to convince anybody. I was just pointing out that many people think it's quite beautiful. Why does someone always have to disagree?
Beauty's beholden to each eye based on a thousand different factors. The very reasons you didn't like it were precisely why I did. C'est la vie.</p>
