If you could get into any university you wanted (tuition is not an issue), what would you choose and why?

athlete wrote:

Caltech - MIT with a lot better weather. Visit nearby UCLA to get girls.

Only someone from LA would call that "nearby".

I turned down Caltech for Cal for grad school. For science, I think the size of the university is important because of the resources and number of opportunities.

USC and UCLA are hellholes with no funding. Overrun by asians looking for a cheap degree

Cornell is a hellhole too. Drives you to jump off their bridges.

MIT is great if you love what you do. If not, you'll probably kill yourself.

Liberal arts if you aren't set on what you want to do with your life.

USC and UCLA are hellholes with no funding. Overrun by asians looking for a cheap degree

USC denies qualified Asians to keep the campus Caucasian and to satisfy the alumni. USC has numerical racial quotas that limit Asians to 20% of the student body. I heard Stanford does that too. UC schools are public institutions and are barred from setting racial quotas because of Civil Rights amendments in the US Constitution.

Pat Haden wrote:

USC denies qualified Asians to keep the campus Caucasian and to satisfy the alumni. USC has numerical racial quotas that limit Asians to 20% of the student body. I heard Stanford does that too. UC schools are public institutions and are barred from setting racial quotas because of Civil Rights amendments in the US Constitution.

You're a bit confused. Although Bakke v. UC Davis, back in 1978, did recognize certain constraints on the use of racial quotas in the admissions processes at public universities, the primary constraint on racially discriminatory admissions practices within the University of California system these days is the California constitution, as amended in 1996 with the passage of Proposition 209, which expressly outlawed discrimination and preferential treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity in public education.

As for your comments about the use of racial quotas at private institutions, I doubt very much that you're correct. Although private institutions don't have the same constitutional constraints as public institutions do, they still have to be careful about running afoul of state and federal civil rights statutes. I don't doubt that they discriminate on the basis of race, but I think that they're much more sophisticated about it than you suggest.

Call me crazy, but University of Hawaii manoa... moved away from HI when i was 15, ALMOST went back for college, however no universities had menʻs track, and barely cross country. And only UH manoa had the major I wanted, and they donʻt even have menʻs XC. So I stayed on the mainland and am now running at a fairly high level at a solid university, my heart still aches for the islands though.

It's been 30 years since I was into that but I recall UCs were forced by the courts to end racial quotas in the early 80's. Bakke was later. Bakke is the KKK / Jim Crow again, i.e. Separate But Equal, racist, anti-Black, anti-Mexican. Nearly every Asian frat & sorority, Tong, OCA, JACL, JA-VFW, etc. I dealt with supported Affirmative Action for Mexcans and Blacks and agreed to sacrifice their people's admissions slots for their Brothers and Sisters, Hermanos y Hermanas. Asians believed then and I think today still that the door should not be shut behind them just because they've made it. So don't try to lump Asians into your KKK/NEOCON hate, because Asians don't hate Blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and Muslims, and believe they should be a part of California. USC and Stanford trustees/alumni are still dominated by white racists that insist on keeping USC and Stanford white. I guess they think of Jews as white which is an improvement. I wonder if they feel the towards Iranians, Turks, Arabs whom are white and are 85% of the science department faculty ?

I went to LSE. A great school, and a great city. But knowing what I know now, and wanting to be surrounded by the very best, I would choose IIT.

As a Hilo boy . . . go Kohala!

Pamona or Reed.

right now, if you're a half-miler, tough to beat Columbia's athletic/academic/location combination

Notre Dame all they way for its sports academics and traditon

For me it would be Brown undergrad and Yale med. Most stress-free way to an MD. Brown - no distribution or area requirements, designer majors, pass-fail grading option. Yale - great education, tests optional. Both places full of bright, liberal, motivated students. Sweet.

If I could do it all over again...and was not planning on a being a career Air Force officer, it would be Princeton for undergrad, then Vandy for law school

Avocados Number wrote:

At MIT, I received degrees in philosophy and computer science and engineering. My main focus was on what is sometimes called cognitive science, which for me included studies in philosophy of psychology (or philosophy of mind), psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence. I had no complaints about MIT in those particular areas of study; I don't know of a better place to have studied those subjects at the time.

Tufts has a great undergrad philosophy program, arguably the best in the country. This is particularly strong in philosophy of the mind as we have Daniel Dennett. Also, it combines excellently with the best international relations program in the nation and a solid political science program.

It's hard to say that there is one "best" school. It all depends on a combination of the atmosphere people are looking for and the strength of the individual program they're considering.

I wanted to find a small to medium sized school that wasn't completely isolated and had strong liberal arts curriculum. And I've found a great fit.

SaImon wrote:

I would love Oxford or Cambridge. Imagine how serious and academic your environment would feel with professors speaking in posh British accents.

I left Oxford last year. My tutors over the years were... 3 x America, 2 x Greek, 1 x Argentinian, 1 x Japanese, 1 x Yugoslavian, 1 x Spanish, 1 x Irish and 1 x English.

Definitely a bit broader subset these days!

Looking back - Oxford was an amazing place for 3 years but certainly my college didn't really try to push me and I was fine just coasting along on minimum effort which was really a waste of the opportunity. If I had the chance again I think I'd have still have gone but would definitely have looked more seriously at going to the US - and if so Stanford seems like the best choice by far. They've apparently got a fairly decent club team as well I could have run with a 31:38 10k (given that I wouldn't be near the Varsity team).

Pat Haden wrote:

It's been 30 years since I was into that but I recall UCs were forced by the courts to end racial quotas in the early 80's. Bakke was later. Bakke is the KKK / Jim Crow again, i.e. Separate But Equal, racist, anti-Black, anti-Mexican.

A lot of people have been confused by the collection of opinions that constituted the Supreme Court's decision in Bakke (which was issued, as I said earlier, in 1978). You seem to have been more confused than most.

Tufts undergrad wrote:

Tufts has a great undergrad philosophy program, arguably the best in the country. This is particularly strong in philosophy of the mind as we have Daniel Dennett.

I don't know anything about Tufts's undergraduate philosophy program these days, but I remember Dan Dennett very well. I met him back in the '70s, when he was a young professor at Tufts and I was an undergraduate at MIT. I believe he published his first book, Brainstorms, shortly thereafter. He worked rather closely with a number of my advisors and professors at MIT, including Ned Block (philosophy of mind and psychology), Joe Weizenbaum (artificial intelligence), Jerry Fodor (philosophy of mind and psycholinguistics), and (I believe) Marvin Minsky (artificial intelligence). At the time, I had the impression that he didn't have many colleagues at Tufts who shared his academic interests and enthusiasms, but he's obviously done very well over the years, and I imagine that he's attracted a number of good scholars to Tufts. My own academic interests and inclinations were very similar to Dennett's; if I had been willing to risk the vagaries of doctoral programs in philosophy and the job market for philosophy professors, I might have chosen a similar path. Anyway, I'm glad to see that he's still out there, writing and talking about important things.

DocLove wrote:

How can it not be an issue?

IF you can get into any university you want, THEN tuition is not an issue. And there's more than one reason for this identity to hold.

I haven't really read about Bakke in 20 years. But I've been to UCSB, UCLA, Stanford, Cal, and USC campuses this fall already. Cal and UCLA are 1/2 Asians. UCSB, Stan, USC are like 20% Asian. But UCSB is 20% because Asians don't apply there as much. USC & Stanford are 20% because of White Racism. USC and Stanford practice a really a weird traditional US form of discrimination as well given Asians are of all colors and origins. South Indians/Sri Lankans are as Black as (the singer) Seal and Amazonians. Many Iranians, Syrians, Arabs, Israelis, and Turks are Caucasian/white and of course Olive-skinned. CJKs are orientals. Polynesians have equatorial features. So it really isn't 'skin color based' racism, it's really 'Continental-ism', i.e. against people from the mythical Asian continent.