Excerpt from Town & Country below. I guess it's a financial play by bammer and to a lesser extent, AU, merit scholars and out-of-state tuition markup.
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BY NICOLE LAPORTE AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN STAUFFER
PUBLISHED: OCT 2, 2022
In the fall of 2019, Brennan Vincent was a junior at Mamaroneck High School. Located in the groaningly wealthy suburbs of New York City, Mamaroneck is a top-ranked public school where, during college admissions season, “everyone’s competitive, trying to get into the same five schools,” Vincent said recently.
Indeed, during Vincent’s junior year it was a given that her peers hired independent college counselors and worked with essay coaches to pave the way to acceptance letters from Cornell, Brown, and other top-rated schools, most of which are located in the Northeast. “It was a ‘Who do you know?’ or ‘Who do you know who knows someone?’ type of thing.”
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.”
Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.
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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. Emory is considered a kind of Williams College located in a hip part of Atlanta as opposed to the Berkshires. Vanderbilt, in the heart of Nashville, is a work-hard-play-hard sibling to Dartmouth. (Some refer to “Vandy” as “the Harvard of the South” due to its brick-and-ivy campus.) And the University of Texas at Austin, a public Ivy located in the proudly left-of-center Texas capital, “is the UCLA of the South,” says Jennifer Kaifesh, an independent college counselor in Los Angeles. North Carolina has its own widely appealing, and highly selective, gems in the form of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These schools are not thought of as Southern Southern; the biggest subset of Tulane’s class of 2026—30 percent—is from the Northeast.
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Why Are More and More Northern Kids Heading South For College?
College applicants—including those from liberal Northern enclaves—are flocking to traditional Southern schools, where the vibe is more rah-rah than radical reckoning. Is it a new front in the culture wars or just a twist in an overheated admissions cycle?BY NICOLE LAPORTE AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN STAUFFER
PUBLISHED: OCT 2, 2022
In the fall of 2019, Brennan Vincent was a junior at Mamaroneck High School. Located in the groaningly wealthy suburbs of New York City, Mamaroneck is a top-ranked public school where, during college admissions season, “everyone’s competitive, trying to get into the same five schools,” Vincent said recently.
Indeed, during Vincent’s junior year it was a given that her peers hired independent college counselors and worked with essay coaches to pave the way to acceptance letters from Cornell, Brown, and other top-rated schools, most of which are located in the Northeast. “It was a ‘Who do you know?’ or ‘Who do you know who knows someone?’ type of thing.”
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.”
Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.
REPLAY PHOTOS
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
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. Emory is considered a kind of Williams College located in a hip part of Atlanta as opposed to the Berkshires. Vanderbilt, in the heart of Nashville, is a work-hard-play-hard sibling to Dartmouth. (Some refer to “Vandy” as “the Harvard of the South” due to its brick-and-ivy campus.) And the University of Texas at Austin, a public Ivy located in the proudly left-of-center Texas capital, “is the UCLA of the South,” says Jennifer Kaifesh, an independent college counselor in Los Angeles. North Carolina has its own widely appealing, and highly selective, gems in the form of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These schools are not thought of as Southern Southern; the biggest subset of Tulane’s class of 2026—30 percent—is from the Northeast.
