I appreciate Moby's observation of regional folkways by including WaWa info, but where's Sheetz?
(I know nothing about Chatham as a University, but the campus is beautiful and was unavailable as a wedding venue the weekend Red and I got hitched.)
Sheetz does not have good food and no amount of regional pride can change that.
2: That Connecticut fuck we have in the Senate lives, allegedly, right next to the campus.
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
Pro tip: since you will be coming from out of state and public transportation in this country is terrible, only consider schools within a half hour of an airport. Getting rides further than that is difficult. (Unless your kids will have cars.)
That's an excellent point!
Although I suspect if there was a dream school that was a PITA to get to, we'd probably just make sure the kid had a car.
Small, rural schools almost always run shuttles to/from airports and/or train stations at break times.
I thought Drexel was good and engineering focused? At any rate, they always gave out a big scholarship at PA state Mathcounts in middle school, so in my head they're good.
Franklin and Marshall changed my life (they let me take a bunch of classes there my sophomore year), and so I will love them forever. Lancaster is on the short list of places I'd most want to live. Very dense and walkable, but small, with interesting restaurants and whatnot, and a train to Philly. I'm a dense small city guy.
So many Jesuit schools on that first list!
Franklin and Marshall also has "houses", but you're not supposed to say "like Hogwarts" anymore.
Of the Indiana schools, DePauw is a good SLAC but in the middle of nowhere, Wabash is one of only three mens-only schools in the country (they seem to survive on the basis of people whose social life in high school was being an athlete, but aren't actually good enough to play in college), Rose-Hulman is an excellent small engineering school but Terre Haute is kinda awful. Butler is a big second-tier state school. The rest I don't really know.
Berea in Kentucky is an interesting place, it has mandatory work-study.
The first list (Tuition Exchange) seems to be pretty much uniformly better than the second list (TEP). I'd pretty much ignore the second list, unless you're really worried that her application won't be competitive.
I think my boss in Ohio went to Barea. Or her dad taught there. Something.
The Ohio listv really misses lots of good schools in a way the Pennsylvania list doesn't. Of those listed, Case Western, Wooster, and Wittenburg are good.
Depending on if you want urban, rural, or door-nailing.
A few things I know about the Massachusetts schools on the list, not at all comprehensive:
- Babson: Entirely a business school. Suburban Boston.
- Bard College at Simon's Rock: Notable as an "early college" that takes students after 10th or 11th grade. Having trouble with the model, about to move to a new campus, future uncertain. Was in far-western MA in the Berkshires, new location is across the NY state line with the rest of Bard College.
- Boston University: Big - the largest school in the Boston area (36k) and in fact all of New England, generally well respected, would probably be a bigger deal locally if there weren't so dang many hotshot universities around here already. Right in the thick of things in the city.
- Emerson College: Arts/communication/performance college, even more in the thick of the city. Well-respected within their focus.
- Hampshire College: whoah, dude. The most hippie college of the Five Colleges in the Amherst area (the five are UMass Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst College, and Hampshire). Famously not very structured, leading either to awesome DIY education or total slacking. The ability to interact and cross-register with the rest of the five is highly relevant. The location is somewhat out of the way in what is already a low-density (multi-)college town in the middle of the state. Kind of struggling financially, came close to merging with another school recently. (I used to live across the street from the nearest bar to Hampshire and saw more than a few 21st birthdays celebrated there.)
- Lesley University. Until recently Lesley College, a teacher's college in Cambridge. Has delusions of grandeur these days. I guess it's OK? Good location anyway.
- Mount Holyoke: Women's SLAC, see above about Five Colleges. Located the farthest away from the other four.
Bard College at Simon's Rock sent me absolute mountains of promotional materials when I was a high school senior.
I am enjoying this thread and appreciate all the contributions so far!!
I have a secret hope for Franklin & Marshall. My colleague's kid went there through the Tuition Exchange program, and it seems like such a great option.
Marketing people are good at targeting.
National Louis University in Chicago is basically a teachers' college, I knew someone capable who I think went there? To say something I'm sure you have covered-- check for recent firings, past reputation may be less relevant in times of financial upheaval for anyplace small especially.
If she wants to get a Masters in Art Therapy, Lesley is *the* place to go around here. I don't know anything about their other programs,
.
BU was easy to get into when I was applying, but now it's much harder. I would want to know whether she would be living on campus. The housing in Allston is pretty sub-par, lots of bed bugs and still incredibly expensive. They dropped football, because they could not afford to spend more money on other womens' sports, so hockey is the game the students go to as spectators, if, as a Texan, football is importing to her, it would probably not be the place to go.
Mount Holyoke is probably the least competitive of the 7 sister schools, but you can cross register at the other colleges, and I think their alumnae are quite loyal.
After the revolution, we'll nationalize Louis.
Such an inspired move for an Italian fashion brand to start a whole college so it could be the college they're the apparel for. Very meta, most postmodernist, such intertextuality.
29: I knew someone who went to Mt Holyoke and would have been happy to put heebie in touch with her. She was that kind of person and career foreign service. I know she really loved it.
My kid qualifies for a tuition exchange program like you are talking about Heebie, because my wife works for a University, but in practice, at the school he attends there are very few available slots. It gets run as a lottery and he didn't win.
The TEP ones in MA are not good. Unless, she wants something purely vocational. Regis has a nursing program.
My sister went to Scripps and liked the 5 colleges in Claremont. I don't know anything about Pitzer, but she studied in the theater program which was based out of Pomona, so there might be opportunity to take classes t the other campuses. She knew a lot of the Claremont-McKenna people because she was a competitive runner, and Scripps had a joint cross-country and track team with Claremont McKenna.
CT - Like Bucknell, I think Trinity gets a lot of preppy people. I believe Tucker Carlson went there.
18: It's actually sort of weird that it's on this list since it's a tuition-free school, but its faculty have to send their children somewhere too. We'll be visiting this summer because it's my dream school for the current junior, though maybe too much of a reach. We'll also visit the state's only HBCU though it's hard for me to guess how much those will be targeted politically and how much that matters. (The local public university has an automatic admission program for local kids who meet minimal standards, which means we'll have a fallback no matter what.)
37. The Claremont Colleges (which include Pitzer) are all good schools, and students are allowed to take classes at the other colleges in the group. The schools share a single campus, and the area feels very college-town-y and very safe. However, Claremont is a sleepy suburb that is close to pretty much nothing interesting. It is far from LA proper, and it is also significantly hotter than LA.
I've heard that the valley is too warm to live in.
40: My sense was that culturally Pitzer is a bit like Hampshire in Massachusetts, more open and kind of hippy.
40: I also wasn't sure what the engineering options were if you went to one of the schools other than Harvey Mudd.
If any of your kids are foolish enough to go to Arkansas, Hendrix is a pretty good liberal arts college. Pricey, though.
Stay away from the other three. In fact, probably stay away from Arkansas, at least until we get rid of Sarah Huckster Sanders, who apparently intends to destroy education in our grate state.
Maybe the new pope will be from Arkansas and revitalize the state?
If she goes to Villanova, she can share an alma mater with the pope.
(An American pope! I confess I'm disappointed. I was rooting for the Filipino guy.)
AWB worked at Fairleigh Dickenson until last year or so, and I'm sure would have thoughts if you were thinking about it specifically.
In the Bay Area I think GGU is faltering a lot and has never had a great undergrad reputation. I don't know Dominican 's current status but I think it has a better reputation.
In the Bay Area I think GGU is faltering a lot and has never had a great undergrad reputation. I don't know Dominican 's current status but I think it has a better reputation.
Throwing in some comments on the Maryland schools, Goucher is a pretty good, expensive small liberal arts college, a former women's school that is now co-ed, with a well-regarded premed program; St. John's is the famous Great Books program where your child learns Greek and French that at least one commenter went to; Loyola is a Jesuit school that I'm mostly familiar with from its lacrosse program; Washington College is a decently-regarded SLAC way out on the Eastern Shore that is notable for its lacrosse program (Maryland being Maryland) and also for being one of the oldest remaining SLACs; MICA is a fantastic art school, just below the RISD/Cooper Union tier. I can't speak to the others, even the ones where I knew people who went there, which I would imagine means they're mostly undifferentiated.
Santa Clara seems pretty good.
My cousin law had a great time at Occidental but no one else I know there did. In fact I know more transfer outs from there than any other school. ( As did Obama! ) Might depend on major.
Have had some happy students at Chapman. Strong film program.
Have had happy friends at USF.
Will have to examine rest of that first list more carefully.
I've been to St. John's. Interesting place.
I don't anything about Ohio school, except that she shouldn't come to Ohio -- not with our current legislature.
In NY, there's lots of schools I don't know much of anything about, but Fordham is a serious big university; Pratt is also serious for art and design (or at least used to be? But I think it still is); Manhattan College (actually in the Bronx) is a good local commuter school for striver-ish professionals: if you're in NYC, your bookkeeper or your building's HVAC engineer went to Manhattan.
Bard and Iona are both good liberal arts kind of colleges (Iona's a university? Who knew? I thought it was a SLAC.) Rochester Institute of Technology is I think a good engineering school -- not quite MIT, but respectable.
I know two people with kids at RTI right now.
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) or Rensselaer Polytechnic (RPI)? They're easy to mix up -- pretty comparable but I think RPI is stronger.
The former. It surprised me because I'd rarely hear of it then two people I knew (who did not know each other) have kids there the same year.
Alaska Pacific University:
Small, pretty good, though not well-known outside the state. Historically Methodist but currently has no religious affiliation. A few years ago they were looking into officially becoming a tribal college but I don't know if anything came of that. (Long association with Methodist missionary work with Alaska Natives, so that's a strong relationship and a fair portion of the student body.) The campus is right in the middle of Anchorage but surrounded by forest and actually surprisingly isolated from the city, which could be a good or bad thing but I gather is generally felt to be a negative. It is a nice campus in itself, and adjacent to the University of Alaska Anchorage, with which it shares a library and probably some other facilities. Fairly expensive I think but the tuition exchange would take care of that.
Is that where the guy got pounced on by a moose?
53. I live within a short walk of Occidental, but oddly enough I don't know anyone who works there or who went to school there. Pretty campus though, and I can vouch for the neighborhood.
St. John's College (MD/NM - the campuses are separate and operate autonomously but the differences are slight):
As snarkout said, famously the Great Books school. Very very small. Extremely standardized curriculum; you get two electives your senior year but otherwise everyone takes exactly the same classes and you have zero choices. The curriculum is focused on the Great Books, which are read in chronological order over the course of the four years, so you start with the Greeks and Romans freshman year, then medieval stuff sophomore year, etc. The centerpiece of the curriculum is Seminar, which is where you read and discuss the most humanities-like books, but there are also math and science classes (still Great-Books-oriented! Euclid, etc.), plus Greek and French.
Transferring between the two campuses is easy and people often do it from year to year. Both campuses are very nice but quite different from each other. Annapolis is literally colonial and very classic-campus picturesque, and is right in the middle of town next to the Naval Academy. Santa Fe is more modernist Pueblo-revival style and a little more spread out, and is on a hill on the outskirts of town.
It's very much not for everyone and was definitely not for me, but almost everyone else in my family went there and liked it.
62: You'll have to be way more specific than that.
Ithaca College:
Small, pretty good, big focus on music. On hill across town from Cornell, which tends to overshadow it in reputation but there isn't a whole lot of direct interaction. I think somewhat more connected to downtown Ithaca due to size and proximity; Cornell is kind of its own world.
Clark University:
I applied here and got in but didn't end up going. Pretty much a SLAC despite the name. Good programs in psychology and geography and nice campus. Worcester is a little rough and rust-belty but I don't know how much that affects the student experience.
We don't really have elk up here. I think they've been introduced a couple of places but they're not native. Lots of moose though.
I saw the first lady of Maryland just walking her dog when we visited St. John's.
67: I don't know about Clark. I worked with one person who went there, and somebody else just lost her job as a reference librarian there. I'm not familiar with the neighborhood around it, but I hear that Worcester is on an upswing, just because so many people are priced out of eastern Massachusetts. As of February it's a sanctuary city for the transgender community.
The Guardian liveblog was doing interviews with random people in St. Peter's Square to fill space before the announcement, I went back there to see if there were live reactions from non-Americans (I imagine they had at least mixed feelings), but no, they immediately switched to all the international leaders' reactions as the new way to fill space.
I had a high school friend who went to St. John's. My from a distance n=1 impression is that the place was a proto-fascist cult, and she turned into an anti-vax MLM devotee. I'm not making a causal claim, but I'm not not making a causal claim.
It definitely attracts weirdos of various kinds.
I poped it up in a new thread, per request.
Oh, I'm putting Pope stuff in the wrong thread, huh.
Hawaii Pacific University, my alma matter, is just fine and located in Hawaii. But I do expect they will be on hard times because they are heavily reliant on international students who may be deciding to stay home these days.
The art gallery at Rocky Mountain (Billings) is half named after my grandfather. Who was the dean of art there for some ridiculously long amount of time.
I'm entertained by the wild assortment of schools on this list.
McDaniel (Westminster MD) has some strong pluses and strong minuses, which I don't think correlate well to what HP would need or want. It does have winter, though.
I just drove by Bard College! There was a REALLY good ice cream shop nearby. I was visiting friends in Kingston.
Stay tuned for all my other content-free comments on schools whose names I recognize.
79: If your grandfather was named "Art" there are lots of galleries named after him.
My cousin went to, and liked, Lewis & Clark in Portland. My attitude is tinged by residual Reed rivalry.
I used to have a sweatshirt from Whitworth (Spokane) because of how it's my last name, but nobody should go to college in Spokane.
What about the one Halford recommends that teaches naval architecture and one other subject? In NYC I think?
Of course there's still time for Unfogged to buy the abandoned New England college that came up the other day and get accredited.
If you want a tremendous amount of winter, the Concordia that is in Moorhead, MN, is a nice little liberal arts college with good music and an unusual mascot (which I assume is important here). I adjuncted a class there when I lived across the Red River in Fargo a decade ago.
Hawaii is interested in going out of state, to somewhere with winters
Nobody has much addressed this point.
Living in central NH, I'd suggest not going anywhere much south of Pittsburgh (NH) if you want decent winters, unless it is in the mountains. They have gotten less and less wintry in the quarter century since I moved here, until now they too often resemble 4-5 months of mud season. The winter just/almost past was the first in several years, maybe since before Covid, that we had much of a season for x-country skiing, snow-shoeing or outdoor ice skating. Rain and sleet occur much more frequently in December-March than used to be the case.
The Pittsburgh stricture above leaves a lot of thinly inhabited ME, the northernmost 5 miles of NY and VT, the UP and a bit of the mitt of MI, the Twin Cities in MN, etc. One of the schools on the 2nd list, Albion College in MI, was quite good (checks notes) 60 years ago, but my information may be out of date; anyway, it is too far south.
The Twin Cities, from where I moved and which back then were quite appealing and manageable, contain a number of schools on the first list, but many include saints' names (I'm not counting St. Paul, which is likely more about location than anything else about the institution). This may be a deal breaker given what I think I recall of your ethnic/religious background: YMMV.
Western Colorado University in Gunnison, CO seems like a good bet on the climate score, but I don't know anything else about it.
The one Canadian institution on the first list is in metro Vancouver which I believe has many charms, but a serious winter is not one of them.
Depending on how important this consideration is, you probably should rely on Teo for institutions near him.
Hawaii is interested in going out of state, to somewhere with winters
Nobody has much addressed this point.
Living in central NH, I'd suggest not going anywhere much south of Pittsburgh (NH) if you want decent winters, unless it is in the mountains. They have gotten less and less wintry in the quarter century since I moved here, until now they too often resemble 4-5 months of mud season. The winter just/almost past was the first in several years, maybe since before Covid, that we had much of a season for x-country skiing, snow-shoeing or outdoor ice skating. Rain and sleet occur much more frequently in December-March than used to be the case.
The Pittsburgh stricture above leaves a lot of thinly inhabited ME, the northernmost 5 miles of NY and VT, the UP and a bit of the mitt of MI, the Twin Cities in MN, etc. One of the schools on the 2nd list, Albion College in MI, was quite good (checks notes) 60 years ago, but my information may be out of date; anyway, it is too far south.
The Twin Cities, from where I moved and which back then were quite appealing and manageable, contain a number of schools on the first list, but many include saints' names (I'm not counting St. Paul, which is likely more about location than anything else about the institution). This may be a deal breaker given what I think I recall of your ethnic/religious background: YMMV.
Western Colorado University in Gunnison, CO seems like a good bet on the climate score, but I don't know anything else about it.
The one Canadian institution on the first list is in metro Vancouver which I believe has many charms, but a serious winter is not one of them.
Depending on how important this consideration is, you probably should rely on Teo for institutions near him.
I suspect to Hawaii, anything from North Carolina up will feel like winter. She just doesn't want it to be 90° in March, and she wants to see snow now and then and wear cozy sweaters.
APU is definitely a good choice if winter is an important criterion.
81: A loved one will be attending Bard in the fall. Details on the good ice cream place?
Bard is probably the only school in the United States that's a player class in D & D.
Quick, Moby, say something else we can try to disprove
Follow-up to 31: https://www.fandm.edu/stories/italian-fashion-internship-provides-perfect-fit.html
Ranger/bard/rogue is a really unbalanced party, to be fair.
If team mascots are enough to qualify, Furman University's teams are the Paladins.
That obviously doesn't count because of all the Fighters, Warriors, Wizards, etc.
We have a Soldier Academy which is close but not close enough to Fighter College.
I would argue that Barbarian College is probably Oriel.
My comments on these schools--at least the ones I recognize--all depend quite a lot on the kind of environment Hawaii wants and what she wants to study. My school is on the list, and (of course) you're welcome to stay at Casa Robot if you want to do a campus visit.
If you can't go to college
Go to Coe
If you can't go to college
Go to Coe
If you're stupid and you know it
Or your SAT scores show it
If you can't go to college
Go to Coe
Oh, I typed a comment earlier but apparently never hit post. Of the NC schools, Elon is a respected university but your mascot will be--not a joke--the Fighting Christians. People kept telling Noah to add it to his application list, but I made it clear there was absolutely zero chance I would ever send a penny to "Fighting Christians" for an application fee, much less private school tuition, so short of *them* paying *me* actual cash, their reputation was beside the point. Your mileage may vary.
Warren Wilson is a very hippie school in the mountains where one of my closest friends got her MFA alongside James Franco of all people. Not sure how well it survived the hurricane flooding though, and the mountains are still kind of a mess generally. Meredith is a good, long established women's college in Raleigh that has a lot of cooperative classes/programs with NC State. Nothing else in the list really stood out.
Also, "Elon University" is pretty goddamned close to "Adolph University" or "Kanye University" at this point, even though they had the name first.
There's Thiel College on the list.
omg. Jammies had a group of students giggling and goofing off during a test. They called him over to see a photo on one of the girls' phone. They were all very happy and excited. It was a photo of a positive pregnancy test.
What's the big deal? You've had lots of babies.
Cal Arts -- good if you want to study art or prefer to be as far as possible from Sheetz or WaWa and remain in the continental US.
Oxy -- great SLAC. Funky, interesting faculty and students. Not my favorite part of LA (bad air and hot summers), but not at all bad.
Pitzer -- the hippie-dippiest of the Claremont Colleges. Great place (though also not my favorite part of LA).
American -- great if you want to study DC-type stuff.
GW -- same as above. I'm sure people can differentiate between the two. I'm not one of those people.
New College -- so sad. Fuck the fucking fucks who fucked over this once-great place.
U of F -- still a great school. You couldn't pay me enough to go there, because the weather is hell, it's too Greek, and Florida is hell-bent on self-destruction.
Berea College -- cool place that's worth a look for the right kind of kid.
Tulane -- used to be a safety school for meh students who were rich. Now is less of a safety school for smart kids who are rich. NOLA would be a great place to be an undergrad.
Goucher College -- kind of a cool place in some weird ways. Flies under the radar.
St. John's -- if you're the right kind of kid, there's no better place.
Babson College -- wanna study business? Don't!
Clark University -- quite a good school. Also flies under the radar. I've never quite understood why.
Hampshire -- I don't know, man. Some people really love it.
Holyoke -- great school.
Hillsdale -- if you're the right kind of kid, there's no worse place.
Carroll College -- kind of a neat place. Pretty underfunded.
Syracuse -- it is what it is. Some people love it a lot.
Case -- excellent place in a lot of ways. It's in an interesting part of an underrated city.
Lewis and Clark -- awesome place to be an undergrad. Less focus on competitive heroin use than there is at Reed.
Bucknell -- good school. I think Mobes covered this one.
Dickinson -- same as above.
Drexel -- good at what it is. Or do I mean Duquesne?
Duquesne -- same as above.
Villanova -- wanna be pope? Go here.
Pitt -- one of the most underrated universities in the US. Located in the most underrated city in the US.
Bennington -- rich school for rich kids. Blah.
Puget Sound -- really nice SLAC. Underrated. Students love it.
That was me. I'll now read what others have said.
I violently disagree with what everyone else has said in this thread.
I don't think any of the California schools pass the winter test.
California has winter. Just not like people from wintry climates understand.
In fact, is there a single four-year California college in an area where snow falls locally every year? There are some colleges near mountains but they're in valleys nearby that still get quite hot much of the year.
Even the community college system has very few campuses in colder climates. Maybe just Truckee, South Lake Tahoe, and Mammoth Lakes could be considered to have both "winter" and temperatures lower than 90 in April.
118: I agree but I'm going by the vague criteria in this thread. Without the snow requirement, some of the places on the tuition lists could pass the colder-than-Texas test.
Bleg: whale oil was critical to the first industrial revolution. Discuss.
I disagree. Coal was crucial. Whale oil was a weird diversion that ended up not leading anywhere in particular.
I have to go to bed so I can't elaborate further at this point.
123: perhaps not critical, but important - as a lubricant for machinery, and also for use in preparing textiles for spinning. Presumably the IR could have happened using substitute oils like seed oils or slush (slush was used as a lubricant on board ship anyway).
Seed oils would compete to some extent with other agriculture though, or with eating of the oils.
Slush - the layer of animal fat that forms on the surface of the water when you're boiling up meat. Skimmed off by the cooks, who sold it to the captain on behalf of the crew. Because the crew owned their meat rations, they owned the slush, and therefore if the captain wanted to use it as a lubricant and preservative for the standing rigging, he had to pay the crew for it.
The money paid for the slush went into a common fund which was used to buy luxuries - mostly food items such as spices etc - for the crew, and which was known as the "slush fund".
130: well, true, but if you've got a whaling fleet then it's employing lots of skilled sailors who could otherwise be out catching herring, so the same applies.
(Herring is far superior to whale anyway.
Fan the queen's wantin men tae gang fecht wi her foes
It's nae tae the roast beef devourers she goes
But awa tae the north 'mongst the brave and the darin
Tae the lads that were brocht up on tatties and herrin'.)
No, I mean fields planted to oil crops rather than something else, or edible oils going to lube not food.
Seed oils? What if they crew eats them? We may as well vaccinate the ship's company if we're going to bring seed oils on ship.
For what it's worth, my assessment is close to Moby's (two sisters went to Lehigh, another to Duquesne, and I taught at F&M for two years.)
134: yeah, I know - but in either case you're getting part of your productive capacity that could otherwise be supplying food (farmers and fields, or fishermen) and using it to produce oil instead.
135: as I'm sure you are aware, there is a Hornblower short story in which he goes into lockdown ("Noah's Ark").
Nelson was enthusiastically in favour of vaccination. Here's part of a letter he wrote to Lady Hamilton in 1801, advising her to get their daughter Horatia vaccinated:
"...Give ten thousand kisses to my dear Horatia.
Yesterday, the subject turned on the cow-pox. A gentleman declared, that his child was inoculated with the cow-pox; and afterwards remained in a house where a child has the small-pox the natural way, and did not catch it. Therefore, here was a full trial with the cow-pox. The child is only feverish for two days; and only a slight inflammation of the arm takes place, instead of being all over scabs. But, do you what you please!..."
I only recently learned that the Hornblower books were not pron.
119: Got nerdsniped and checked -- your best bet is the Christian school Simpson University in Redding, I think?
Well, great. Now what am I supposed to do with these fifteen barrels of rancid salt beef tallow?
Can't believe snarkout got athwart my hawse like that.
On the New Jersey list, Stevens Tech is excellent for engineering. It's in Hoboken, and by subway is closer to the Greenwich Village/student friendly part of Manhattan than Columbia or most other New York City schools. St Peters also has excellent Manhattan access, and Seton Hall almost as good.Also true of their basketball teams .Kean is a regional state college for Newark and surrounding area and has few if an dorms. Generally, if your dream is to live in New York City after graduation, New Jersey is a good place to be. Most of the others in Northern New Jersey are close to train stations with service to NYC.
Stockton is a mediocre regional state college for the Atlantic City area, but it's strong on marine ecology and some other ecology areas. But as far from everything as is possible in New Jersey.
When I was in high school, Fairleigh Dickinson was widely known as Fairly Ridiculous, but I don't recall why. Also, contrary to local rumor, it is NOT the model for the fictional Emily Dickinson College featured in Animal House.
Princeton Theological Seminary is top line if you're into that kind of thing, of if the draft is reinstated with an exception for theology students.
My daughter goes to Champlain College in Vermont. It's right on Lake Champlain so it has incredibly beautiful views, and excellent hiking and skiing access. University of Vermont and Champlain are both in Burlington, so it's a good college town, and for urban life it's an hour or so from Montreal. It has a major in video game design, which draws students from all over the world. Also allegedly strong in cybersecurity.
V
semi-related, if your students ask what they can do with a degree in math, you can point out that the new pope was a math major. Possibly the most math pope since Sylvester II introduced the abacus to Europe. Also he (Leo XIV, not Sylvester II), went to Villanova in Philadelphia, as the local news keeps reminding me.
American vs. GW: American has a campus, GW does not (for the most part; I think there's a campus for freshman now or something like that). 20 years ago, American's library was much worse but ILL through the local consortium was quick and I don't think physical books even matter to college students these days.
PA: Friends who went to Lehigh loved it, and I gave an invited talk there as a grad student.
140: Redding is at the very end of the Sacramento valley. You can get some good views of the mountains there, but the city itself is barely above sea level and it gets pretty hot. I'm not sure the last time it snowed there but it's seems unlikely it snows every winter.*
That said, I went on vacation in the area in April/May a few years ago and it hadn't gotten hot yet. The previous year, it was still in the 90s in October.
*The interstate starts climbing into the mountains right after you leave the city heading north, and the stretch of road into Oregon does get snow every year.
Thinking about lube, mostly.
Lube is important for machinery but it doesn't actually use much oil relative to other uses, and lots of kinds of oil work. It was also an important but minor use for palm oil imported from West Africa during the "legitimate trade" era (which was mostly used to make soap).
137: Vaccination was huge in that era and most elites were super into it. (Including the Founding Fathers, which is why it's so funny when anti-vaxxers try to invoke them.) The king of Spain sent a spectacularly expensive expedition around the world to bring vaccination to the Spanish colonies, and in most places they were too late because the colonists had already imported vaccines from other sources.
OT: I asked if there was any candy in the house and instead of an honest answer ("No"), I was given 92% cacao.
Apparently, there was an office in the Pentagon that was responsible for keeping the airplanes from falling off the carrier deck and DOGE killed it. Another one gone.
Another one today, or are you talking about the one from a couple of days back? One in December, and then two in the last two weeks for three lost planes total -- is that all or is there one more?
Don't send a kid to college in Redding. The city and region have been captured by a crazy-ass church.
My bad. It was one of the three you mentioned. The headline mentioned four mishaps and a lost plane, so I thought it was a new lost plane. But it was a review of recent incidents, three planes lost and one collision with a boat.
four mishaps and a lost plane
A worthy successor to classics like Top Secret and the Hot Shots movies.
156: starring Hugh Grant as the hapless Commander, Air Group.
(Distant splash)
CHARLES sits bolt upright in his bunk.
-- Fuck.
We just finished college search #2 and I also have some relatives who have gone to a couple-
Muhlenberg- Artsy nephew went there, liked it, but pretty focused on arts/theater
RIT- Decent mid level tech school. University of Rochester is the stronger school in the city though.
NY list has a lot of commuter schools around the NYC area.
Skidmore is a good liberal arts college
Lesley- my wife taught there as an adjunct for a while. Don't, very poorly organized administration.
Wentworth- Near Northeastern so decent location, probably similar level to RIT?
WPI- BIL went there and we considered it, fairly strong science school. About an hour west of Boston, Worcester has been trying to build itself up as an MA second city (convention center, minor league baseball team, arts). A decent sized academic cluster (UMass med, Holy Cross, Clark). Regarding winter, Worcester gets quite a bit more snow than Boston.
A few other urban Boston schools (Simmons, Emerson, Suffolk) that benefit from proximity to the bigger academic scene. Emerson is arts focused. Simmons used to be women only, not sure if it still is? Maybe undergrad is, grad coed. Suffolk more business focused. Others have talked about BU, the strongest of the metro Boston on the list. Two hockey arenas like a block apart! One has dorms right above the rink! They spend a huge amount on student amenities- we took swimming lessons there when the kids were little, also two separate aquatic centers attached to the two nearby hockey rinks (the older of the two pools sucks)
159: BU used to have a reputation for attracting rich International students who went clubbing, known as "Eurotrash". I realize that's offensive, but don't know a better word for the particular group. Is that still true?
Not that I've heard, or at least no more than other expensive universities that like international students paying full price.
161: It was an aesthetic. Much more clubbing, less nerdy. But also, very different from BC.
I just want to thank everyone again!! this is all super helpful.
Don't ask for help with the FAFSA, because I did that wrong.
According to this sticker, you can get 16 clowns in a Nissan Maxima.
I am getting old. That drive just killed my leg. And I didn't even have any clowns in the car making it cramped.
Son #2 had a great first year at BU, just arrived home 30 minutes ago. His dorm was a room in a brownstone house, great location and view. He has had a really good experience there so far (he is in music performance fwiw). I went to artsy Hampshire back in the day (before transferring to UMass) but the ominous communications say "stay away!" (they are in financial straits apparently and could go boom any time).
106: Not even a dead one in the trunk? Dude. What if there's an emergency?
145: Are you thinking of George Mason, not George Washington? I think GW has a pretty normal campus and a decent law school for folks who couldn't get into Ivies. GMU is the commuter school with limited campus and famous libertarians.
This is an unhelpful comment, because everyone's made the helpful ones.
Illinois: Blanket No, special recognition to Judson College, which is evangelical wingnuts (as opposed to Wheaton College with old-fashioned religious wingnuts). Elmhurst College is acceptable if you like upper middle class suburbs.
Hope College in MI: For the Christian devout, naive, and socially awkward. It's actually pretty OK academically, and the area is pretty. Remember how we all made fun of Mitt Romney for saying the trees in Michigan were just the right height? I apologize for that. He's right. The trees here are EXTREMELY nice. I missed proper trees after living in Texas.
168: One of the three clowns we carry in life.
Kalamazoo College and Wayne State in MI are both pretty good.
Wayne State is doing pretty big infrastructure upgrades so their campus is a mass of construction at the moment. It's fairly urban, pretty diverse, lots of international students (for now, who knows). It's pretty good for medical-related undergrad fields. There's enough nearby to have a pretty fun four years. It's got that standard land grant, big state school type vibe generally.
Kalamazoo College has two academic areas where it's known/respected more widely than I'd expect: chemistry and medieval studies (!). They have a big annual conference for the latter. It's also where the men's under 16 tennis championships are played in summer. It's a small school, lots of interaction with faculty, but seems generally pretty low pressure. The kids I've interacted with seem nice and pretty sharp on average. It's not remotely diverse other than Kalamazoo is very accepting of queer folks of all stripes.
The trunk was full of clothing and random dorm crap.
Moby was prescient; we lost another plane into the drink.
Just like the plane Qatar is bribing Trump with.
177 about that, I did a thread (as I know you know Moby)
https://bsky.app/profile/barryfreed.bsky.social/post/3low2ndq25s2e
https://x.com/barryfreednyc/status/1921633433287000487?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
Yeah. I'd never say this publicly, but I'd throw Qatar under the bus to get rid of Trump. It wouldn't even be a question.
This week there was an 8 hour city council meeting, and there was exactly one topic: ceasefire resolution for Gaza. Seven hours and 125 citizen comments on the topic, before council voted it down.
I would just like to boast that I published 5000 words on Israel-Palestine this morning, and so far, out of 100 local views, no one has said anything negative. Two people said nice things. Do I win a diplomacy award?
Three weeks ago, I wrote up the first discussion and things did get a little contentious on the FB post where I promoted it. (But no one really lit into me specifically.)
There were letters from Greg Abbott and the assistant attorney general threatening to strip the city of its grant funding and ability to take out bonds. It was kinda wild. And Chip Roy wrote an obnoxious but less threatening letter as well.
The real treasure is apparently the small, densely populated strip we stole along the way.
I'm really not into the premise of Micky 17. Or the voice.
Korea must be really fucking bleak.
The fuck? I'd switch to Schlinder's List to cheer up if I wasn't watching this with others.
I'm already in a dystopia where sometimes Mark Ruffalo is on the screen.
Looking at the international section of the list, I'm fascinated by LCC Interntional in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Definitely meets the "has winter" qualification. On-campus housing looks super-cheap: less than $1000 per semester. I probably bicycled past the place on my way from Vilnius to Tallinn; there aren't that many routes north out of Klaipeda.
Limited majors and I didn't spot a faculty list, but there was a research publiction list, which I guess could be helpful. LCC identifies as a Christian institution, but partners with a Quaker school in the States and lists liberal denominations among its institutional links, so they probably aren't obnoxious about it. Lithuania is culturally quite Catholic (in my limited experience) but it struck me as a cheerfully pagan kind of Catholicism. There was, however, a section on the web site devoted to basketball. I guess evotion is how a country with a population less than half of DFW collects three Olympic bronze medals and never placing lower than eighth. Anyway, Lithuania is cute, fascinating, seasonally wintry (but stay for 17 hours of daylight in the summer!), and doing undergrad there would be An Experience.
Huh, I'd forgotten that Lithuania was Catholic. Meanwhile Latvia is plurality Lutheran, and Estonia majority no religion.
How are the mighty fallen.
Does anyone remember where that article was, about the history and surprising robustness of COBOL? It seems like the kind of thing that would have been in WIRED this year, but I'm coming up empty.
Probably not what you wanted, but it does speak to the early history of COBOL:
https://tcm.computerhistory.org/Timeline/Cobol1985.pdf
I semi-regret not going to Klaipeda with a couple of people I met in a hostel in Vilnius. But I was heading north into Scandinavia and would have risked missing out on the midnight sun if I took too many detours given that I was stopping for a couple of days in each place I'd already planned to visit. I took a bus to Riga, then Tallinn.
In the end, I probably could have skipped Rovaniemi. But then I wouldn't be able to say that I've seen both the northernmost McDonald's and the northernmost Burger King (in Tromsø, which Wikipedia tells me now has a McDonald's too).
192: maybe something by Nathan Tankus?
I guess I have to get a new outfit to wear at Cannes and I have less than 24 hours to do it in.
It's not ideal, but can you just repurpose your outfit from the Met Gala?
194: I would probably trade midnight sun for Klaipeda. And I liked Klaipeda!
It came at the end of about 120km of bicycling, in part because in the days before GPS and detailed maps, I got us off course by about 10km in the southern suburbs. We had started the day in Taurage and made good time all day, but it was still a lot of km for us. The hotel we found right near the river was pleasant, and the restaurant just on the other side was surprisingly good.
But none of it was so great that I would have skipped an opportunity for midnight sun to spend extra time there. The closest I have gotten to continuous daylight is Helsinki in midsummer a couple of times, and that was awesome. The real thing would be even better, I think.
195: no, it was more like "COBOL is suprisingly robust, and whenever something breaks, it's actually the other code layered on top of it. It was derided as being outdates when it was still being built, because a bunch of women designed it, with the express purpose of making it visually easy to digest."
I saw at least on article of that tone, and was kind of irked. COBOL is actually quite brittle in a few common ways, and no more likely to be free of logic errors than any other kind of programming system. If anything, there's a combination of survivor bias and ossification going on - the COBOL that's still around (lots of it!) doesn't get modified much, and the bugs have already been worked out or worked around. It's probably true that the, say, web front ends glued on top of it are newer and less battle-tested and thus buggier, but it's not because they are not COBOL.
200: I'm going to guess it might be this one linked by Barry in a thread at the end of March:
https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/
And a couple of belated notes on the college list.
For western PA I would agree mostly with Moby on most of his comments but would add:
I think Allegheny is a somewhat better and is at least up there with several of the Eastern PAs like Gettysburg and Dickinson. My perspective is from 20 years ago, however, and I see current rankings do not agree*. It is in fact located in a very dreary town even more firmly in the grey skies zone in the lee of the Great Lakes than Pittsburgh.
I would also potentially recommend Chatham (now coed since 2015). Small but some decent programs in environmental and sustainability area. The campus is great and they recently added a beautiful extension north of the city. I have done a few programs there and had very engaged students, much more so than I have encountered at several other local colleges and universities.
*Doing a cursory look at the ranking I see that there seems to be a somewhat general improvement in the east of the eastern schools versus the eastern rust belts schools in general since I last looked closely. Probably not too surprising given overall geographic and societal trends. **( But of course one really needs a to take most of the rankings with a boulder of salt.)
So anyway, listen to Moby and not me.
In particular, DFHC has really taken a hit, and the top Ohio LACs now go Denison, Kenyon, DFHC whereas it would have been the reverse for many, many years***.
***After Antioch started self-destructing in the late 79s.
I will add that one child went to an NY school on the list, Alfred. Which I probably would not recommend unless the prospective student really was focused on one of its odd mix of stronger programs in art, theater and engineering.
It ended up working pretty well for my kid* after a fairly rough start, but only because they connected with a very simpatico professor in their department and did a lot of non-classroom stuff. I did enjoy finding ever more remote backroads to make the drive along the hypotenuse rather than the sane right angles of I-79, 90, and 86. (Oh except for the ice and snowstorms hitting right at all the breaks.)
*Although I think for that particular kid, some other places might have worked better.
Denison is a great school, but you're basically going to school in Columbus and who would do that?