Why are Northern Kids Flocking to Southern Universities?

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11/20/2022 02:01

Subject: Why are Northern Kids Flocking to Southern Universities?

Anonymous

The people shocked by the UGA application numbers reminded me of this article. It’s paywalled, but you can access it if you have Apple News.

To summarize, the kids interviewed say they are looking for a more “normal” college experience, whether as the result of less stringent Covid restrictions and/or less overt political activism (and, yes, the impact of new abortion laws is discussed). Auburn’s application numbers last year would indicate that the young woman interviewed who went to Auburn was not an isolated case.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a41397404/southern-colleges-admissions-boom/

https://apple.news/A_qCsVporSlKxvlntKvvd3A

The process, Vincent says, was affecting her friends’ mental health, and she was vehemently turned off. So when her father, who went to college in the South, suggested she consider Auburn, a public university in eastern Alabama, she did. Within seconds of setting foot on Auburn’s lush, rolling campus—where stately brick buildings coexist with such world class amenities as a $72 million athletic facility with a huge, paw-shaped hot tub (Auburn’s mascot is a tiger)—she was smitten. “Out of all the campuses I toured it was easily the most beautiful. The number of people playing spike ball, throwing a frisbee, having picnics…” She also noted that back home it was much chillier. “Everyone just looked so happy” at Auburn. “I was like, This is where I need to go.”

Vincent, who enrolled the following year in Auburn’s Honors College, where she’s studying engineering, may sound like a quirky outlier: a New Yorker who decides to go rogue and attend a college in a deep red state that has a respectable 99 ranking among national universities on the sacrosanct U.S. News and World Report college list. But she is part of a growing trend among high school students in liberal hubs like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago who are deciding to forgo the competitive, cutthroat environments of Colgate and Columbia for the more rah-rah vibe of places like Auburn, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, Clemson, the University of Miami, and other Southern institutions that have traditionally been written off by coastal snobs as football-and-frat-party schools that let anyone with a measurable GPA in their doors.

Some Southern universities—Tulane, Emory, and Vanderbilt, for example—have long attracted a steady stream of non-Southerners thanks to reputations as rigorous schools in cool places…..These schools are not thought of as Southern Southern; the biggest subset of Tulane’s class of 2026—30 percent—is from the Northeast.

What’s different now is that lower-tier Southern schools have started to enter this desirable group. Fifty-seven percent of the incoming freshman class at Texas Christian University, a midsize school in Fort Worth—where students walk around in cowboy boots on the mornings of school football games and down BBQ and queso at the Stockyards, a preserved Western district in town—are from out of state. Seventeen percent of those hail from California. Compare that to 2008, when more than 70 percent of TCU’s incoming freshmen were from Texas. Thirty miles down the road, at Southern Methodist University, a $79,000-a-year, Tara-like oasis in the middle of Dallas famous for boulevarding (high-class tailgating) and alums like Bumble co-founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, 62 percent of this year’s incoming freshmen are from out of state.