robby writes:
> For what it’s worth at this point, I’ve only heard of 2 schools on that list, and
> those are Mills College (Oakland, CA) and Trinity University (San Antonio, TX).
I think there are several that are better than either of those. I’d rank the places on the list as follows from best academic reputation to worst (although none is really bad):
Pretty good, some national reputation:
Carleton College (Northfield, MN)
Reasonably good, some local reputation:
Beloit College (Beloit, WI)
Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
St. Mary’s College of Maryland (St. Mary’s City, MD)
Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA)
Mills College (Oakland, CA)
O.K. state universities or local colleges:
Trinity College (Hartford, CT)
Lafayette College (Easton, PA)
West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV)
Butler University (Indianapolis, IN)
Hobart & William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY)
Trinity University (San Antonio, TX)
Belmont University (Nashvile, TN)
No reputation that I know of:
University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, VA)
Augustana College (Rock Island, IL)
University of West Florida (Pensacola, FL)
University of the Incarnate Word (San Antonio, TX)
Washington College (Chestertown, MD)
even sven writes:
> Did you come in here only to crap on Roger Thornhill’s neices every move?
Roger Thornhill came here to ask for advice, and I gave it. Our motto is “Fighting ignorance,” not “Making people feel good about decisions that they’ve already made and aren’t going to change.” Look, I have a lot of ambivalence about students going on foreign exchange student programs. Sometimes they are excellent for the student, allowing them to learn things that they wouldn’t otherwise learn. Sometimes they’re almost a scam. It’s hard to say whose doing the scamming. Sometimes it’s the students scamming their home universities and their parents into getting a trip abroad and calling it part of their college education. Sometimes it’s the universities scamming their students into thinking that they are getting an education from a foreign university when they are doing no such thing.
My niece announced at our family Christmas get-together that she is going to major in International Relations, is going to learn Arabic and study the Middle East in particular, and is going to spend a semester at the American University of Cairo. This is a good example of someone studying something at a foreign university that they can’t learn as well in the U.S. On the other hand, I think that some bad examples are the summer programs that a number of American colleges and universities have where a group of its students will go to study at Oxford, Cambridge, or University of London for a summer. While there, they will only study with other students from their American college on the same program. Often they won’t even have British professors. The American college will send some of its professors to teach these courses. In other words, all the college is doing is renting out classrooms and teaching the same courses with the same professors that they would have done back in their own classrooms. The students then get to claim that they studied at Oxford, Cambridge, or the University of London.