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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to W&L on a full academic schorlarship.  I was literally the "son of a CEO" (as a PP so grossly phrased it)  and from the south, and I hated it.  I pledged a fraternity, went through initiation and never set foot in the place again after being initiated.

Too much drinking, too much racism, too little critical thinking.  Just all around gross.

For kids who need college paid for, it might make sense, but it's an uphill slog for any thinking kid.[/quote]

Someone should let the brilliant kids there know that you don’t approve. Sorry you weren’t capable of taking advantage. Sounds like a you problem. My 2014 grad is in a fully-funded PhD program and her entire friend group is bright and absurdly accomplished.

OP, dopes like this won’t help you. Visit the three schools and see what you think. The student profiles are very similar and there are very few kids at any school in this category who aren’t smart and capable and ambitious. See where they send graduates. Look at outcomes. [/quote]

The Good Old Boys Club drives much of the "outcomes" and those "outcomes" are reserved for the right type of person.  I will leave it to the OP to decide if they would be a beneficiary or even want to be a beneficiary of that arrangement.  For most, it is a bait and switch.

All 3 schools are fine institutions but only 1 has the pictures of 2 slaveholders (Washington and Lee) on the diploma.  And as recently as earlier this year, doubled down on keeping them there.

https://www.wlu.edu/the-w-l-story/leadership/office-of-the-president/messages-to-the-community/2019-20-academic-year/response-to-diploma-petition/
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I think issues like pictures on a diploma are beside the point.  If you go to a school named after Lee, you know what you're getting into.  It's also going to be tough to find a historical figure that's pure as the driven snow.

My concern when I was at W&L was what I perceived as very thinly veiled racism and the lack of diversity. The diversity of my freshman dorm hall consisted of one white catholic kid and a Jewish kid from Charleston SC.  Everybody else was a WASP.  I didn't know any Black kids at all.

My first week on campus, I went to a KA rush event (I didn't know anything about KA -- whose foundng documents celebrate the confederacy --- or I would not have gone).  The event involved guns, binge drinking, causal, overt homophobia and a LOT of implied dislike for Black and Jewish people (phrased as celebration of W&L, the confederacy and the south generally in contrast to northern, urban environments and the kind of people who live in those places, or annecdoes in which every Black or Jewish person is identified by race/ethnicity, no matter how irrelevant to the story --- e.g "that Black security guard").   During my freshman year, I also saw a flier for a "discrete Klan rally", which I remember thinking had to be a joke or something posted to make the school look bad because it seemed so absurd.  I ended up pledging the second most liberal fraternity on campus, but the misogyny even at my fraternity was mind boggling and not something I was not at all prepared for based on my older brother's fraternity experience at a large, southern state flagship.

I was at W&L quite a while ago, and I think the university has been making an enormous effort to change which I welcome since my family still has deep ties to the area.  But W&L is not somewhere I'd ever in a million years consider for my kids.

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