I Wish These Four Schools Appeared On More College Lists

It’s been seven years since Educated Quest went live with its first college profiles. These days you can find profile pages posted since the start of last year. However, I have visited over 150 colleges across most of our country, and have only now started posting updates.

In reporting on colleges, I not only want to cover “known brands,” I also want to make readers more aware of interesting schools that do interesting things.  There are several schools that I’ve had the opportunity to visit more than a year ago that I wish would appear on more college lists, including these four.

Bryn Mawr College (PA). One of the remaining “Five Sisters” women’s colleges, Bryn Mawr is part of an academic consortium with Haverford, Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania. It’s a small school (around 1,300 undergraduates) with the endowment and resources of a much larger one, offers strong leadership development programs, and does a great job towards recruiting an ethnically diverse student body.  

Consider this school if you’re a woman who is looking at any of the extremely selective liberal arts colleges in America, co-ed or all female, and your politics lean leftward.

Juniata College (PA).  This school uses “Points of Emphasis” instead of majors for more academic flexibility, has a reasonable sticker price for a private liberal arts college, offers generous scholarships (no minimum GPA to renew them), and operates its own small business incubator to launch student-run businesses as well as its own field station for environmental studies. Juniata’s location is isolated, but so are many other liberal arts colleges that have more famous names.

Consider this school if you’re already looking at small schools in Central Pennsylvania or the neighboring Mid Atlantic states, lack the test scores to get into the more selective among them, and are leery of colleges with a very active Greek social life. 

Miami University of Ohio.  A t-shirt sold in the downtown bookstore reads “Miami was a university before Florida was a state.” This state school might be less famous to some than the “other Miami,” but the vast majority of students are undergraduates. If you want a state school that has a campus with the look of “Ivy and Colonial America,” Miami has one of the most attractive around, and the community has preserved interesting traditions. Miami is also known as the ‘Cradle of Coaches’ for producing successful football coaches who have won national championships and Super Bowls, and ‘Mother of Fraternities’ for being home to the alpha chapters for five national social fraternities. The sports program may be lower profile than you would find in the Big Ten, but the spirit level is just as high. 

Consider this school if you’re also looking universities such as U of Virginia, UNC-Chapel Hill, Syracuse, or any Big Ten school that has a very active Greek social life.

University of Cincinnati. This is one of the “Big Four” schools, among with Drexel, Northeastern and Rochester Institute of Technology that emphasizes cooperative education, where you alternate between full-time work and full-time in the classroom. Aside from being the only public university of the four, Cincinnati has one of the nicest urban campuses around, and shares the local job market with only one other four-year school, Xavier University. There’s less competition for a good co-op or internship than you would find in Boston or Philadelphia. 

Consider this school if you’re also looking at the rest of the Big Four, or any school in the Big Ten.

I’ve kept this post to four schools, but there are more that I’d hope to see on more college lists. If you would like to share your own “must list” schools, want a copy of my last profile of one of them, or don’t like my choices, please feel free to comment.

Need help on the journey to college? Contact me at stuart@educatedquest.com, or call me at 609-406-0062.

Sharing is caring!