University of Iowa. Super Awesome.

Get off Ibram's case why don't you? He's been in the south enough to know he doesn't want to live there, so why do you try to change his mind?

College can be and usually is a life changing experience. Why make it harder than it has to be? Sure it's good to step out of your comfort zone occasionally and find something in common with people you think you wouldn't have anything to share with. However, to do that properly most people would need a comfort zone to start with. Seems to me, Ibram's been an outsider for most of his life (many of us are). Why do you want to deny him a chance to find a "home"?

Thank you, manephelien.

No kidding. My jaw dropped when I saw the price tag. But I notice that most students there get financial aid, and the average is $10K, so maybe he can get some too.

Nah, that's what the Cellar is for. ;)

Besides, Ibram has already been exposed to much more than most kids his age. In real life and also here. He's been around the world. I assume his classmates in high school are mostly conservative military brats. He's in a conservative country. Has a conservative dad. Here on the Cellar, he's been exposed to a motley group of individuals with differing ideas. He's been forcefully challenged more than once.

After all the exposure to different ideas he's had so far in his life, and with his feelings of being an outsider, I think finding an insular home can be a good thing.

At a minimum, now he has a concrete idea of how different schools out there have different personalities. That's what he should be looking at.

The idea that a vast tract of land, comprising half of the entire nation, has a distinct, mandatory, political attitude, still hasn't been satisfactorily explained. It's been tip-toed around, and dealt with peripherally, but still, there it is, as the (faulty) basis for someone's whole argument.

Ibram, ultimately, you'll go where you feel comfortable. I have a sneaking suspicion that your constitution may well not be up to wintering in New England, since you've spent so much time in more temperate climes. Everybody being essentially the same as you, while initially comforting, gets really boring after a very short while. Nearly any campus (except say Grove City College or Liberty University) is going to give you a core of people that you'll end up hanging out with because of your similarities, but your differences are really what's important.

Funny story about Grove City ... my best liberal self-proclaimed extreme lefty friend went to college there.

Why? Not because they had the academic program he wanted.

Not because he wanted to go to a school with strong, conservative, Christian Values.

Not because he was an Atheist and wanted to shake up people with strong, conservative, Christian Values.

No, the reason he chose Grove City was ... at the time the school had the highest female to male student ratio in the entire country, and he knew that even with the emphasis on strong Christian Values he was going to get laid, and laid plentifully.

The plan worked.

He also ended up meeting his wife.

Who remains a Christian, while he is happily Atheist.

They have remained married for over thirty years.

Or claimed. It has been strawmanned quite a bit, though.

North, south, east, or west, hicks will be hicks.

Who are them? Where is there? What is being claimed here? If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, why isn't it a duck? You tell me.

'Them' are conservatives, and there is the south, where there is both institutionalized (state) social conservatism and an undeniable conservative majority.

Look, Flint, drop it already. You arent going to make me want to go down south, nothing is, and all you are doing is pissing and moaning and whining over semantics. There is no reason, no reason for you to continue pitching a fucking fit, other than to make yourself feel better.
Drop it, dude. Lay off.

I don't care where you go. But it isn't semantics, it's sloppy thinking.

There are conservatives no matter where you go. You aren't obligated to hang out with them "down here" any more than you would be "up there" ...

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

Good read.

If you want to avoid this sort of thing in the future, I'll let you in on a secret. If you'd started out by saying, "I'm really interested in schools up in the New England area, I just love the people I've met there and the atmosphere really suits me," instead of "Screw the south it sucks," no one would have thought twice about it.

It's. Not. Sloppy. Thinking. No one claimed that the south was all conservative, just that it is more/mostly conservative. It votes conservative, it behaves conservative, and if it looks like a duck....

You're attacking where there's nothing to attack. If you're frustrated that by being in the south, you were 'labeled,' it's not really a big deal. Because everyone here knows that the south isn't ALL conservative. Hell, I live in Georgia and I'm probably one of the more liberal folks on these forums.

You're still missing the point, but I think repeating myself would be excessive.
Where you've gone wrong is in trying to read my mind, instead of simply reading what I've posted.

And is every second of your life spent in traumatized, repressed agony? Are you harassed by beligerent rednecks as soon as you step out the front door? No? Me neither. It must be some pretty sloppy thinking to assume that living in the South would be like that. What a difficult point.