Yo Obed, interesting article

Apr 23, 2024, 4:18 PM

https://www.thefp.com/p/kids-skip-ivy-league-for-southern-schools

Obed® and also ATL PAW MAN®

"Southern colleges are also seeing a surge in applicants from northern out-of-state students. In 2023, for example, about 19 percent of total enrollment at Clemson in South Carolina came from New York and New Jersey—a big change from 2017, when the top out-of-staters were from the Carolinas and Georgia. Almost half the undergraduates from University of Miami in Florida came from out of state in 2023, with students from New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts taking three of the top five slots. Meanwhile, more than half of Elon University’s entire enrollment for 2023 hailed from northeastern states, with Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York leading the charge.

“Never before have we seen so much interest in colleges like Clemson, Georgia Tech, and North Carolina State,” says Rick Clark, the assistant vice provost and executive director of undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech, noting that kids are coming from places like Wisconsin or New Hampshire. “That’s just unprecedented.”

Archie Glazer, 16, at home in Newton, Massachusetts, is interested in attending a Southern university—and is part of a growing movement of students from northern states looking for a higher education alternative. (Sophie Park for The Free Press)
Archie Glazer, 16, from Boston, is one prospective student looking to head south for college in a couple years (Elon is his top choice, but he’s still looking).

“Kids up north were pretty unhappy during those Covid lockdown years,” says his dad, Larry Glazer. “And colleges down south were offering something different. My son and his friends would look at TikTok and see all these college kids going to football games, throwing parties, living their lives. It has an impact.”

Julie Ketover, a mother of two in South Jersey and a Yale alumna—she graduated summa ### laude in 1996, with a BA in psychology—wasn’t sure what to think when her oldest daughter Alex applied mostly to Southern schools like University of South Carolina, Elon, and University of Georgia.

“She was looking at Clemson,” says Ketover, a former attorney turned life coach. “I was like, ‘Clemson? For a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey?’ ”

Alex is now a sophomore at the University of Miami, and many of her friends from New Jersey have also opted for colleges in the South, like the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia. “And these are some really smart kids,” says Ketover. “Their priorities are just different from ours.”

“These kids aren’t drawn to old gothic Ivy League edifices, musty libraries, hallowed dark oak halls, and ghosts of dead white men,” she added. “They want luxury. They want comfort. A lot of these Southern schools have invested in infrastructure. They have nicer dorms. They have nicer facilities. There’s air conditioning.”

“Kids up north were pretty unhappy during those Covid lockdown years,” says Larry Glazer, 55. “My son and his friends would look at TikTok and see all these college kids going to football games, throwing parties, living their lives. It has an impact.” (Sophie Park for The Free Press)
They also don’t have the same incentives to pick a school for its supposed “prestige.” As many students are beginning to realize, a marquee college name doesn’t always translate to greater success. A 2023 study by a Dartmouth business professor found that just 11.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have an Ivy League education, and only 9.8 percent got their MBA from an Ivy League.

Georgia Tech’s Clark says the kind of education that propels students into a stable upper-middle-class life is no longer exclusive to elite universities. “Some of the highest paying careers right now are STEM-heavy,” says Clark. “Some Ivies offer that, but you can also get it at Virginia Tech, Clemson, NC State, and Georgia Tech, where it’s cheaper, warmer, and friendlier. It’s a better return on investment.”

Ketover, the Yale graduate, agrees. “I don’t know that the value of an Ivy League education is the same as it used to be,” she said. “People ask me all the time, ‘Would you do Yale again?’ I would. I loved it. But it used to mean something to go to a really, really good school. I think it means less today. I’m working with clients in organizations that are hiring, and it really doesn’t ####### matter to them where you went to college. You got your degree, and that’s enough.”

Another factor driving kids away from the Ivies and other elite colleges is the wave of antisemitism that’s spread across their campuses, particularly after Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7. After the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign in the wake of their disastrous testimony to Congress last December on how they’re handling Jew hatred on campus, one college consultant said he’s seen many student applicants turn away from the Ivies.

“We are working around the clock with students to restructure their college lists as a result of the fallout,” says Christopher Rim, the CEO of college consulting firm Command Education. “One student we work with recently abandoned her yearslong dream of attending Columbia” because of antisemitism claims. “We’ve also seen a number of Jewish students who are interested in transferring, especially from Columbia, Cornell, and Penn.”

Ketover, whose daughter was a freshman at the University of Miami during Hamas’s attack, said she was impressed when the college’s president Julio Frenk became “one of the first college presidents to issue an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas.” She added: “It made us feel so much better.”

It should be noted that elite Southern schools like Duke, in North Carolina, and Vanderbilt, in Tennessee, are not entirely immune to the radical politics sweeping American campuses. But the advantages once offered by elite universities, like the freedom to debate ideas and disagree, increasingly seem to be disappearing. In the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), four Ivy Leagues were in the bottom fifteen—Yale, Dartmouth, Penn, and in last place (with a score of 0.00), Harvard.

And that climate of censorship is rubbing off on kids. According to recent polls, over 80 percent of college students say they self-censor when expressing their views on campus, and at least 69 percent would be at least somewhat uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor about a political topic. (Meanwhile, a large number of Southern colleges rank high when it comes to fostering a climate of free speech.)

“I’ve always believed that education is about critical thinking, not indoctrination,” says Matt Griffin, a lumber supplier from Chocorua, New Hampshire, and the father of two sons. When his oldest son decided to enroll at college sports powerhouse Clemson, Griffin encouraged him. “Now that they have all the football money, they didn’t build a diversity center, they built a business school,” he says. “I told my son when we visited the campus, ‘That's what you wanna see.’ ”

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Yo Obed, interesting article

100%. Im gonna channel my inner Tiggity here:

I'm less swayed by Larry's covid argument than I am by

Its a pretty well acknowledged transition point

And as for part two of the argument.

Re: 100%. Im gonna channel my inner Tiggity here:

My daughter is a unicorn at Penn. White, Gentile, Southern.

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