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Finding a college that fits is a student's, and parent's, greatest challenge

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
September 9, 2003

I had to get up early while visiting my family in California a couple of weeks ago to answer questions on a Newsweek.com live chat. The subject was the new Kaplan-Newsweek "How to Get Into College" guide, to which I had contributed. There were a lot of incisive inquiries that made me feel stupid, this being my favorite:

"There seems to be two different types of schools, those run by beer swilling Greek systems, and those run by the last extreme Marxists who, if they noticed the Berlin wall falling, would blame it on the ghost of Joe McCarthy and bad dental hygiene. I would really prefer to send my daughter and my dollars to a school where the faculty doesn't hate the United States and the student body doesn't think huddling over the toilet, saying 'Coming right up, two beers,' passes for a civil engineering course. . . . Other than BYU, or Notre Dame, where can a socially conservative family send their children without supporting either Marxist dinosaurs or power puking muscle heads? I turn to you in our hour of need." ---Carlsbad, Calif.

The questioner was exaggerating the problem, of course, perhaps just to wake me up. But it is true, given the nature of American youth culture, that most colleges seem a bit too leftist and liquorish to parents like me. I thought the Carlsbad parent deserved a better answer than I could come up with that morning.

I remember my excitement as a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1964. We had rollicking debates in the dorms between the Lyndon Johnson Democrats, including me, and the equally numerous and astute Barry Goldwater Republicans. These discussions kept us up into the early morning hours, and when I transferred to Harvard that fall, with the presidential campaign nearing its climax, I anticipated even more fun. Instead, any mention of Goldwater's name elicited an embarrassed silence. I am not saying I believed the rumors that the few Harvard undergraduates for Goldwater were locked up in the dorm attic, but I was too afraid to check. The chances for debate are much healthier these days at even our most politically liberal schools, but conservative students still often feel they are being perceived as barely tolerable Neanderthals.

I also have problems with the drinking in college, although I admit that I am way out of the mainstream on this. I still think Carrie Nation was a righteous babe and really wish they had given that Prohibition Amendment more of a chance. Most American parents don't want to ban liquor from campus as I do, but I think most of us hope for policies the promote moderation and protect non-drinking students from feeling they are unfashionable dorks.

So to make up for my inadequate response to the parent from Carlsbad, I have consulted with several experts and come up with some suggestions. And if you have any relevant personal stories, I would like to hear them.

The most light-hearted answer to the pleas of right-leaning parents and students is in the 2004 edition of the Princeton Review's The Best 351 Colleges (a rival to the Kaplan-Newsweek guide, part of the Washington Post Co., so I am risking my career to bring you this helpful recommendation.) The Princeton Review book starts with that Doonesbury cartoon in which a college professor is gazing wearily at his class and saying, "OK, just curious -- how many of you are drunk this morning?" Then it offers its category rankings, so parents and students can identify the top 20 party schools -- University of Colorado-Boulder is number one -- and the top 20 stone-cold sober schools -- Brigham Young University leads that list.

The book has fun with the cultural side: the Air Force Academy leads the Princeton Review list of schools that attract "Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution" and Lewis & Clark College heads the list for "Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians." On the political side, "Students Most Nostalgic for Ronald Reagan" find Washington and Lee University on the top of their list and "Students Most Nostalgic for Bill Clinton" seem most prevalent at Bard.

There are many guides with more serious and detailed advice for conservative families, such as William Bennett's Choosing the Right College, Frederick E. Rugg's Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges, and Steven Antonoff's The College Finder, as well as The Campus Life Guide to Christian Colleges and Universities and Peterson's Christian Colleges and Universities.

The John Templeton Foundation Web site includes an honor roll list of 100 schools that emphasize "the expectations of personal and civic responsibility in all dimensions of college life." The list includes several colleges, such as Wheaton in Illinois, St. Olaf in Minnesota and Wabash in Indiana, that were recommended for social conservatives by the high school educators who helped me compile the hidden gems list at the back of my book, "Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That Is Best for You."

St. Olaf's Web site says that tee totaling can be fun. It has a list of "411 Things to Do on a Date in Northfield," such as singing Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of Yellow Rose of Texas, or chaperoning a junior high dance or building an igloo. John Povey, a Red Bluff, Calif., parent, said when he dropped his daughter off at Pepperdine University he appreciated an orientation skit playfully noting the school's conservative bent with lines like, "Dude, do Christians actually go to the beach?"

Several high school counselors suggested that parents like me should relax. "Unless one attends a rock hard evangelical college, there definitely will be sex and alcohol," said Paul Feakins, director of college counseling at the Norfolk Academy in Norfolk, Va. "However, I know many students who have had no difficulty in maintaining their own standards and being supported for it on their campus."

Antonoff, an educational consultant in Denver, noted that larger state and private universities usually have enough students of every political and cultural persuasion to make a newcomer comfortable. Deb Donley, the post-high school counselor at New Trier Township High in Winnetka, Ill., said college freshmen's "assumptions about life, relationships and politics will be challenged no matter how perfectly they believe the politics of the campus fit their ideology" and that is how it should be.

Students or parents who want to minimize social distractions can look for schools with single-sex dorms (New York City-based educational consultant Bill Short said that helped sell one of his clients on Pepperdine), or even a single sex college. I noticed that many of the Princeton Review's stone-cold sober schools, such as Wellesley and Sweet Briar, were for women only.

College shoppers should also be aware that perceptions of what students are doing on campus are often wrong. Alexis R. Cohen, the public relations officer for Dominican University of California in San Rafael, showed me a survey of her small, conservatively oriented school. Even there, students thought 30 percent of their classmates drank alcohol three times a week, when only 3 percent actually did. The students thought the percentage of non-drinkers was only 4 percent, when it was actually 20 percent.

If a student is easily distracted, and a campus is full of interesting diversions, parents have grounds to worry, and perhaps look for a different kind of place. But, much as we try to overlook it, we are not in charge of our children's lives any more, and they have to learn to deal with the world's temptations.

Judy Hingle, now director of professional development at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, said when she was still working in a high school she used to tell students that every college "is a party school, if partying is what you are after. Every school can provide serious academic challenge, if that is what you are seeking. The real key is for the student to find the place where they can feel comfortable with their peers, and with themselves, so that they have the confidence to take advantage of the opportunity to grow and learn."

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.