After interviewing deans, admissions officers, guidance counselors and students–and keeping an eye on the news–we’ve put together a list of schools that have buzz. Some of our picks are private, some are public. Some have innovative curricula or comprehensive financial-aid packages (always a plus). Some focus on the arts, while others are known for tech or business acumen.
Lately we’ve been told that students are less concerned with location and more interested in applying to “families” of schools with comparable curricula or campus lifestyles. If you’re among these students, you can use our list to create a family of your own: at the bottom of each entry, you can see where else students who chose these schools applied. In many cases, these “runners-up” have stronger brand names than our up-and-coming “winners.” That’s OK with us. We focused on schools that might surprise you. (For the complete story, see page 26 of the Kaplan-NEWSWEEK col-guide.)
BEST ALL-AROUND
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
Yes, it’s in a tiny corn-farming hamlet. But Grinnell is as cosmopolitan as any school, with 1,500 students from all 50 states and 55 countries. Average SAT scores hover around 1350, and famous alumni include Intel cofounder Robert Noyce and jazz great Herbie Hancock. Grinnell has brawn, too–its basketball team won the Midwest Conference championship in 2001 and 2003. And Grinnell encourages a broad range of undergraduate research. Senior Holly Maness, a 2003 Goldwater scholar, has already been published in prestigious journals for her astrophysics research on nebulae.
But it’s not all lab life; Grinnell hosts plays, concerts and on-campus movies–all free. And the new dorms are great. It isn’t cheap: total tab for 2003-04 will run $31,060. Grinnell is among the fewer than 40 colleges–all of them top schools–that still offer need-blind admissions, and most students receive some form of financial aid. No wonder applications are up 10 percent.
MOST OLD-SCHOOL
St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md.,
and Santa Fe, N.M.
What does Annapolis have in common with Santa Fe? Not much, except for St. John’s, which has a campus at each beautiful location. Students choose a primary campus, but about a third of the 900 kids spend at least a year at the other. There are no majors; everyone earns a degree in liberal arts. –Founded in 1696, St. John’s has its students read Plato, Aristotle, Homer and other greats; they also take four years of math, three years of science and three years of language. And though students have to request permission to see their grades (most don’t, unless they’re bound for grad school), they’re subjected to an old Oxford tradition called the “Don Rag,” in which teachers give students a review at the end of each semester. The school seems to be getting good reviews itself: applications are up 17 percent.
MOST TECH-SAVVY (IT’S A TIE)
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Terre Haute, Ind.
We are not all things to all people," says Charles Howard, dean of admissions. Isn’t that the truth–until 1995, Rose-Hulman didn’t admit women. Today, it’s a rising star among tech peers like Caltech and MIT. Rose’s 1,650 students work on group engineering projects, redesigning everything from Hot Wheels-style racetracks to the Halo brace that’s screwed into patients’ skulls. Extracurricular activities are similarly inventive: one of the most popular is racing flying robots. General Motors recently narrowed its recruiting list to 20 colleges. Rose is one of them.
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh The dot-economy is history, but don’t cry for techie-mecca Carnegie Mellon. It’s already moved on, giving students a broader education with an emphasis on information technology and the arts. Its robotics program–home to such academic celebrities as Hans Moravec, who pioneered robotic walking–is as strong as ever. For years the campus joke has been that there are more undergraduates named Dave than there are female students. As of 1995, it was true. These days the “Dave to girl” ratio is much lower–women make up 39 percent of the 5,347 students.
MOST QUIRKY
Reed College, Portland, Ore.
For this fall, Reed drew a record 2,282 applicants–a quarter more than the previous year–for just 315 slots. Perhaps they were drawn by Reed’s vast academic possibilities. Students explore the intellectual world from French poetry –to nuclear physics (there’s a reactor on campus–the only one in the country for undergraduates).
MOST CAREER-FOCUSED
Bentley College,
Waltham, Mass.
A few years ago, folks outside Massachusetts might never have heard of Bentley. Today the school of 3,800 undergraduates is enjoying a spike in applications. Bentley markets itself as “America’s first business university” and says it focuses on future-CEO types; this year it had a record of 763 firms recruiting on campus. It also draws students interested in the arts–well, the business of the arts. Kate Davy, dean of arts and sciences, is a former theater critic.
MOST FUN-LOVING
Carleton College, Northfield, Minn.
Here’s a high-flyin’ statistic provided by a school: Carleton has about “1.9 Frisbees per student,” says Paul Thiboutot, dean of admissions. Carleton is also the kind of place where the president tells a ghost story on Halloween. Located 45 minutes from the Twin Cities, in a town of 17,000, Carleton offers students 17 “interest houses,” including a yoga house. More than two thirds of its 1,900 students study abroad. But it all comes at a price: the bill for 2003-04 will be $34,395, making it the costliest of our choices.
MOST FOR YOUR MONEY
The Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Wash.
The administration wasn’t pleased when Evergreen was named No. 1 on a certain magazine’s 2002 “top schools” list. (It was High Times, the pot user’s periodical. The school immediately protested.) But it has a lot of other things to be happy about. With states increasingly focusing resources on small liberal-arts colleges in their systems, Evergreen has become a contender for those who might head off to pricey private schools. It has a private school’s size (4,080), curriculum and educational chops. But tuition is only $3,441 for in-staters. (That may ex-plain why just 891 of those students were nonresidents–they pay almost four times as much.)
MOST DIVERSE (ANOTHER TIE)
Occidental College, Los Angeles
This small school has been building momentum since the mid-’90s, thanks largely to students looking for a minority-friendly environment in a large city. Nearly 40 percent of its 1,830 students are minorities. But the campus is a friendly place for everyone–the new Learning and Living program makes sure freshmen don’t get overwhelmed by coursework.
Louisiana State University,
Baton Rouge, La.
Chancellor Mark Emmert says LSU is often overlooked by Northerners who suspect it hasn’t changed much since the civil-rights movement (or, heck, the Civil War). But a visit to the chemistry department tells a different story. The department head, Isaiah Warner, is black and, in the last decade, he’s made LSU the nation’s top producer of black chemistry Ph.D.s. Emmert says the school has had “a huge increase in interest” from Northern applicants. LSU hosts many minority-recruitment programs, and 24 percent of its 29,000 students are minorities.
MOST HAPPY
Goucher College, Baltimore
Goucher rightly calls itself “a small college with a big view of the world.” Through a network of Baltimore-area colleges, Goucher’s 1,250 students can take one class a semester at any of seven other campuses–including Johns Hopkins. Goucher also boasts a student-teacher ratio of just 10 to 1. Most professors give out their home numbers, says John Olszewski Jr., senior class president. And for an urban campus, Goucher is unusually bucolic.
MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
Rhodes College, Memphis, Tenn.
Applications have been way up at this small liberal-arts college founded in 1848. Get set for tough competition: half the 483 freshmen graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes. Maybe they’re coming for the gorgeous Gothic campus or palatial dorms. But since more students nationwide are heading to graduate school instead of facing the job market, it may have something to do with Rhodes’s record: 97 percent of its students who apply to law school are accepted (the national average is 62 percent); the numbers are comparable for med-school applicants.
Rhodes students also apply to Vanderbilt, Emory, Davidson and Duke.
