Alabama Recruitment

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by UHDEEGEE

I wouldn't make this assumption at all. My son has the smarts and the $ and is being heavily recruited already for Fall of 2010 by Columbia, Emory and Rice to name a few, yet he has narrowed his top two choices to 2 state SEC schools.

I would agree, although it's a fairly recent phenomenon. My Southern HS regularly sends kids to the Ivies/Stanford/MIT, but a good number of the kids who are accepted to an Ivy and a Florida school will often pick the Florida school because of Bright Futures. Also, family tradition and the fact that most of one's friends are headed to Tuscaloosa or Gainesville often sways the kids.

If the statistics still bear out from the 1998-1999 school year, the majority of students at Duke, Vandy, Rice, and Emory are from the Northeast.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by BadCat25

The elite southern colleges are Duke, Vandy, Emory, Rice, Davidson and one or two others. The Southern kids with the smarts and the $ went to these schools or went North for their education.

Really? They still let Southern kids into Duke? (I kid. Sort of.)

I'm going to have to call bull, or at least partial bull, on this. This gets into that "the South is not a monolith" discussion we've had on GC from time to time. What's true in some parts of the South may not be true elsewhere in the South.

Without cutting any of the schools you mentioned (well, except for the cuts I already took at Duke), I've known very few people with smarts & money who chose to go to Vandy, Emory or Rice. Those schools really aren't on the radar screen of most people in NC -- the people I have known who went to those schools were typically from Tennessee, Georgia or Texas respectively (or their families were). Likewise, relatvely few people go north to school unless they get scholarships. And don't try arguing that NC isn't really the South -- you've already identified Davidson as an elite Southern college, so that dog won't hunt.

Around here, if you have the smarts and the money and you're looking for one of the "right" places to go, you go to UNC (not that the money is as big an issue there), Duke, Wake Forest, Davidson, UVa, Hampden-Sydney, or maybe William and Mary. (In other words, you go to school in North Carolina or Virginia.)