<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>I'm a rising senior who is planning on applying to colleges this fall. I'd categorize myself as a pretty smart and intellectually curious kid. I want to go to a "good" school, with an academic reputation, however, what's more important to me is a school that genuinely stimulates its students intellectually. What I mean by this is a school that has many students who are intellectually curious, care about ideas for their own sake, and don't solely care about grades. Additionally, a school is "intellectually stimulating" if the classes are more than just pre-professional, they really try to cultivate the minds of the students and cause discussion. Which schools are known for being intellectually stimulating? All I know of right now are a bunch of LACs, and a few top-tier schools with great core curriculums (like UChicago and Columbia), but that's about all I know. Please help me out by telling me which schools stimulate their students the most intellectually, and also provide me with the schools that have little intellectual stimulation (these schools would have students who care only about grades, huge emphasis on pre-professionalism, or have boring classes/students, etc.). Thanks so much! I really appreciate it!<br>
:D :D :D :D :D :D </p>
<p>It is true that such schools for intellectuals exist. There used to be more of them because there used to be more students interested in these things than exist today. I don’t mean to awaken that old saw, but to suggest that you can get an intellectual education anywhere you go if you’re willing to go out and get it. The most intellectually engaging college is the one where YOU become an ambulating human sponge who bumps into everyone on campus and soaks up what each person has to teach you. Some are better teachers than others, but any college is a target-rich environment for ambulating human sponges. If you model this behavior, you will find friends who are attracted to it, too. Spend more time in target acquisition than classroom sieve mode and you will find intellectual stimulation. It’s up to you. </p>
<p>A bizarre question, but look into these:</p>
<p>Sewanee
Reed
Centre
Kenyon
Kalamazoo
Grinnell
Mount Holyoke (women-only)
Of the “elite schools”: probably Swarthmore, Chicago, Pomona, and Yale</p>
<p>Look at the Colleges that Change Lives</p>
<p>Maybe look at St. Johns (Great Books curriculum) - campuses in MD and New Mexico</p>
<p>I strongly doubt that any of the colleges in the USNews top (100 or so) colleges, and indeed many below these that would inhibit a student such as yourself from getting the “stimulating” environment that you desire, this in terms of courses, extra curricular activities, professors, and students. And for that matter these same colleges would for most part offer someone who’s exclusively into “career” an equal option.</p>
<p>Some schools do attract kids with more of a pre-professional focus, however. USC, for instance. While I actually rate USC rather highly, I doubt many folks would say that the Southern Cal student body is more intellectually-inclined than its peers.</p>
<p>For student body quality, here’s how I tried to quantify it:</p>
<p>National Merit Scholars per capita (highest at Caltech, HYPMS, Duke, UChicago, and a few others)</p>
<p>Avg. Test Scores adjusted for affirmative action strength (which I approximated very roughly by looking at National Merit Scholar:Achievement Scholar ratios) </p>
<p>Strength of intellectual competitive programs (debate, science stuff, hackathon teams, etc.)</p>
<p>And I found out you’ll need to look at a lot more than “intellectually stimulating” since most colleges specialize in a certain type of intellectual stimulation- CMU does the Lunar X Prize, hackathons, etc., while places like UChicago do some fun stuff with the sciences and Northwestern has really good debaters. I think an “intellectually stimulating” school tends to be one with very passionate people, but then you have to consider what they’re passionate about. The only ones where you can get it all, just because of resources and an enormously broad appeal to applicants, are HYPMS and WASP- the elite schools that swallow up a disproportionate amount of amazing students. LACs as a whole might seem to have it all, but personally I find it misleading since it’s more breadth than depth for most of them.</p>
<p>^ Did you look at real National Merit Scholars or sponsored National Merit Scholars?</p>
<p>@dividerofzero Test scores should not be considered when trying to find intellectually stimulating colleges seeing that standardized tests do not test intellect. Also, I’m not sure how you possibly came to te conclusion that most LACs have breadth, not depth. Unlike schools like Harvard or Stanford, LACs are entirely undergraduate focused. So only the undergraduates are getting funding and attention rather than competing with grad schools for funds and attention from professors. They tend to have the most indepth learning because of this.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats I think in general, there’s a correlation (once you adjust for confounding factors). I’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Commended scholar more intellectually stimulating than most NMS’s unless he/she is really good at some other involvement (which is accounted for).</p>
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<p>In terms of student quality. Outside WASP and a few others (Swarthmore, Wellesley), it’s inconceivable for all of them to have super-talented student bodies on par with Stanford’s; they don’t seem to specialize as thoroughly but the crowd is rarely confined to a small set of interests. I was talking about student bodies rather than their actual facilities. Dealing with input, not the process.</p>
<p>@dividerofzero That is because most LACs pride themselves on educational experience over selectivity and SAT scores. It’s impossible to quantify whether or not a college has a super talented student body. However, they attract the most intellectually curious students out there because they have so many different quality programs to explore. In fact, if you look at lists where professors are ranked, LAC professors are ranked the highest because they only care about their undergraduates.</p>
<p>Also, you are failing to explain the correlation between intellectual curiosity and test scores. </p>
<p>Who is more curious?</p>
<p>The kid who sat down every day for 2 years taking the exact same test over and over again learning how to master it? Or the kid who is bright, but not test savvy who chose to explore different curricula in high school that ranged from science to English to theatre arts? </p>
<p>@AnnieBeats Yes, and I’m not disparaging them for that. The LAC experience is wonderful, as many people I know can attest. I could do an adjustment for that, but I was mostly focused on getting the smartest student bodies when I did that analysis (I then analyzed how well people did after graduation to try to come up with an input-output score; I couldn’t perfect it but LACs did do well under the formulas I used).</p>
<p>I’m not sure about the most intellectually curious students; what I found was that the preference for National Universities is even more pronounced among “distinguished” (i.e. National Merit, Intel STS, etc.) students so that’s wehre my depth vs. breadth view comes in- I think a lot of really good debaters, for example, are going to McKenna and Pomona- but the very best gravitate toward UChicago and Northwestern and Stanford (Rosenthal is just one example, I know, but he seems to be really improving their program).</p>
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<p>Intellectual curiosity is a vague phrase that I interpeted at intelligence * passion. I contend that test scores are a valid measure of intelligence and do correlate with how interesting a student is in academic areas and certain other spheres of involvement.</p>
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<p>Whoa didn’t expect to see that stereotype again. I honestly don’t know any kid who studied that hard forro who waste months or years on test prep are probably not the ones who figure out how to beat tests and handle the situation strategically. Honestly, these people aren’t mutually exclusive, and the prime examples of people who “explored” stuff like this (that I know) also did very well on standardized tests relative to the student body.</p>
<p>Obviously you will create a formula that will suit the findings that you WANT to find. You should take a statistics course you know. Because you are trying to calculate and analyze intellectual curiosity-- something that has no numerical value. Your data is biased. You can’t just pick and choose what you think should be considered, and then base your evidence off of your own information. It doesn’t work like that lol.</p>
<p>I agree with Annie. Some wise poster once said that there are “seekers” and “doers.” That really resonated with me because I have one of each. The “doer” was well packaged for college admissions. He is energetic, jumped through all the hoops, and essentially followed the path laid out for him. He’s very bright, but task oriented. The “seeker” (just as smart if not smarter) follows her own path. She is the type of student who will read something of interest in her AP History text and then spend the next 2 hours researching and reading outside material related to that topic. It’s not unusual for me to find her reading classical literature when she should be working on homework. She had no interest in SAT test prep or ECs for the sake of padding her resume. She wouldn’t have been admitted to HYPSM (nor was she interested), but she is one of the most intellectually curious people I know. </p>
<p>@AnnieBeats I took AP Stats in HS and there wasn’t anything else offered (at least not the semester I checked the community college). Yes I’m aware of the issues with my form of analysis and don’t claim it’s bulletproof at all (after all, I did say it didn’t work out). I did begin by giving it a definition and working from that (for the sake of making things quantifiable and providing a logical first step); I’ve made that explicit several times in this thread. But yeah, thanks for assuming I need to take intro statistics. Guess I should tell CMU to take away that AP credit. Honestly though, I just like quantifying things so I can slightly increase the odds of catching blind spots in my reasoning by forcing myself to consistent standards. Yes, I began with a set of assumptions because that’s what I planned to extrapolate from- after all, I wanted to find the sort of community I considered worth being with, one that fit my definition of “intellectually stimulating.” That meant certain things got a ton of weight and others no weight at all. Good thing I didn’t claim it would work for other people or even share it until it became relevant.</p>
<p>@Overtheedge That’s a good analysis. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, though- I know many people who fit in both categories and those are the people I want(ed?) to be with for my college years.</p>
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<p>In terms of course offerings, LACs are often more limited in both breadth and depth, mainly due to their typically small size. It is instructional format of courses that may be a reason for some students to prefer them.</p>
<p>LAC students probably do self-select for intellectual curiosity, due to the relative lack of pre-professional emphasis (e.g. in majors offered). This is likely part of the reason for relatively high PhD study rates among graduates of some LACs.</p>
<p>Of course, the above generalizations may not apply to each individual school.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus Yeah, there’s a good amount of variation in LACs (although they all tend to de-emphasize pre-profesional programs relative to their NU counterparts). I guess we just have differing ideas of what intellectually stimulating student bodies look like, but I agree that the programs at LACs are generally designed for the Renaissance-y types (would’ve used “Renaissance man” but that’s kind of sexist and I don’t want to exclude women when talking about LACs since they seem to do a better job of not being male-dominated in most/all cases).</p>
<p>The rankings are there for a purpose. Most if not all top ranked schools are intellectually stimulated. They did not get there by giving free “A;s” to all students. Either by default or not, they tend to recruit applicants with the highest GPA’s and Test scores, so that alone helps these school continue with the tradition of hosting gifted and self driven students.
Others that fit these criteria, but do not necessarily get the ranking nodes are specialty schools like engineering, Law, Medicine etc.
Rose Hulman (engineering), Washington University st.Louis (medicine), Berea College (Teaching), Carnegie (Computer Science, Art) etc…have just about the best and brightest in their classes when it comes to these specialties, but when thrown into comprehensive rankings, they get fewer points than the big leagues.
Then again, the idea that college s what you make out of it is also very true.
So, in all, do your research extensively; use excel spread sheet to compare them side by side if it helps, and attend where you find as the “best fit”,- then give in your all, and let nature rule.
Bets of luck to you.</p>
<p>While I don’t think intellectual curiosity is quantifiable, I think dividerofzero did a fair analysis. I take issue with lumping high stats kids as grinds. An intellectually curious kid would likely perform well on standardized tests.</p>