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(Rate Your Students)
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and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Evergreen v. Ivy

Intriguing little story this morning on NPR about Loren Pope, whose book, Colleges That Change Lives, has grown enormously in appeal year by year.

You can see why. In an American college story dominated by lumbering Ivies like Harvard, whose anal hoarding of billions of endowment dollars doesn’t seem to have generated a satisfying liberal arts education for its students, Pope brings to light more agile places with better student/teacher ratios and higher levels of student satisfaction: Reed, Antioch, Grinnell, Goucher (UD, you may recall, spent one horrific year at Goucher - but that was when it was a women’s college), St John’s College Annapolis and Santa Fe (a perennial favorite of UD’s, who likes to visit the nearby Annapolis campus), Beloit, and others.

The NPR piece focused on Evergreen State College, which has 3,000 feet of beachfront…

As more and more Americans realize how many excellent colleges there are - many of them in settings more inspiring than New Haven - the Ivies run the risk of becoming drab asylums for the status-obsessed.