Posted on 10/18/2002 5:52:07 AM PDT by Hobsonphile
I believe that your children should choose a college / university by its caliber of education first and by its political or religous affliation - second, if not last.
As a parent, you should have already prepared your child intellectually, emotionally and politically to deal with the real world prior to going off to college. After Freshman Orientation, they are completely on their own and they will have to fend for theirselves in the arena of ideas. To send them to a more "sheltered" environment in college just postpones the unfortunate jousting with liberal ideology later in life. College is a training ground for the mind and the same goes with politics. One can quickly disable a liberal's arguement if they have started practicing early and a liberal college is a target rich environmnent.
The more "condusive" the conservative and religous colleges for your children potentially may not be as intellectually stimualting compared to the liberal universities. Plus, there's a stigma in the working world for graduates from one of "those" colleges. It is unfortunate but there's just too many liberals in the hiring process and there is a unsaid disdain against graduates of conservative and religious colleges in certain industries.
Give your children the tools to better themselves and let them choose to fight intellectual and ideological battles one on one instead of potentially stacking the deck against them from the beginning of their adult lives. Once they are in the real world intellectually loaded for bear, then they can start doing some real damage against the liberal and wrek havok against their bastions of power from the inside out.
jriemer
VMI has gone through some interesting times, as the Chinese say. Only now are the SAT scores (without adjusting for the 100 point increase of the 1995ish renorming) back to where they were for my class and the class ahead of me. There was a very wide spectrum of ability and academic seriousness at the Institute. Our best were as good as any, but.... In truth, and not taking anything away from what makes VMI a character-building education, in the classroom and seminar room, I was much happier at the University of California as a graduate student.
Kings Point is a great school. My daughter is an avid sailor and has been to many regattas over there. Were you on the sailing team?
There is book parents and High School Juniors should get when looking at universities and college.
Choosing the Right College is book updated anually. It is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (www.isi.org)
The Online companion can be found at http://www.collegeguide.org/
I wish I had known about it when I was a senior.
Thank you, thank you and thank you. I will use this information. Very best, yendu bwam
I went to Cornell, which I was a little surprised to discover is a strongly liberal school. I double majored in math and physics. My professors may have had a political inclination, for all I knew, but it was far less interesting than the subject at hand, so it never made it into class. That attitude tends to be pretty widespread in the sciences. So if that's the field your kids are looking at, just look for a good school, content in the knowledge that they won't have any time to care about campus politics.
Drew Garrett
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