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

I didn't go there, but from what I hear, MIT is the real deal - no fluff factor. It is hard as anything, and the students absolutely love the challenge. If you can survive MIT, you can survive any program. The running may be D3, but the academics are amazing.

Voted you for best original thread maker.

Stanford. They've got the academics, the running, the weather. The students are smart and motivated. Plus, I love their quirky band.

Co-sign on Stanford. Great school, great weather, great athletics. Not much else you can ask for really. All the accolades of an Ivy without the negative stigma.

Oregon...purely because of the tradition.

That's easy. Two of the top world class academic universities just happen to be:

USC #1 in Major Marathon medals

UCLA #1 in Olympic and Worlds Track and Field medals

Either Stanford or MIT, for reasons already stated.

Seems to me Princeton has the best blend of academics, resources, tradition and athletics. It's close to NYC if you need it, but rural enough to be a self-reliant place.

Dartmouth is good too - but a little less academic than Princeton.

Hogwarts

I'd figure out which school is the easiest to graduate and has a pretty good cross/track team.

William and Mary. Great school, amazing location, great cross country program. As it is I'm in community college.

This was me. I chose Williams.

Stanford, Oregon, or any Ivy League university but Cornell.

It's been decided already. Each year UCLA has the most freshman applications in the nation followed by UC Berkeley. Neither school discriminates against Asians like USC and Stanford does so if you are a pale face, good luck :-) You better have destroyed your state record in XC or T&F or you don't stand a Chinamen's Chance in Hell of getting into UCLA or Cal.

'top-notch academic program

tuition is not an issue'

How can it not be an issue? Its a rhetorical question just in case you want to reply

Well, if I had it to do over, I would look at the list of top party schools and choose accordingly. Or maybe the Sorbonne - I might get a chance to overthrow the French government; I mean, how cool would that be!

But seriously, I would say Stanford. I would like to go to the most "prestigious" (may Will Strunk forgive me) school possible if money was not an issue, and though Harvard and Yale are arguably more prestigious, Cambridge and New Haven are just too cold.

Old News wrote:

It's been decided already. Each year UCLA has the most freshman applications in the nation followed by UC Berkeley.

One of the dopier comments I've seen on this subject.

Just a hypothetical question. I'm asking you that if you could go to any school you wanted, which one would you go to? The base assumption is that your tuition would be covered.

There was a similar thread some months back, and it got me thinking about this. If I were to attend college now, I might go for Cambridge (England), which I think has the finest intellectual atmosphere of any English-language university.

If it were BITD when I graduated from high school (gad--40+ years!), I would probably make the same choice I did then: Cornell, which was preeminent in my field of study (linguistics) and which had a Ford-funded program designed to get students through their bachelor's/master's/PhD in six years.