If you already live in a state with a top-tier state university and upi don't live right on top of the place so your kid can preserve some illusion of running away a little from home or getting out from under parental thumbs, no reason not to start there. Still....
Here's my experience based on Princeton undergrad and Indiana U Bloomington, MA. (I'm younger than Justin.)
--For better (more possibilities for individual attention, freer faculty open door policies) or worse (socially incestuous), small is beautiful. My other small college option was Oberlin, which I think would have beena lot more politically congenial if also maybe a little smug about that. The need for mass mobilizations of many sorts aside, I think I would have been overwhelmed if I had been dumped onto the IU campus as an undergrad--and I am from the largest city in MT.
--There were a fair number of brain-dead careerists at Princeton, but on average people there were more open to flights of intellectual exercise at Princeton than the undergrads I knew at Indiana.
--Re teaching: Princeton is justifiably proud of its undergrad teaching and is pretty self-concious about having even senior administrators teach undergrads. When I was there, I could have had the president of the U for a section of freshman econ, the dean of faculty for a section of freshman physics, or the dean of the grad school for Comparative Literature.
At IU-B, a lot of program administrators have teaching responsibiltiies too, but I do not remember about senior administrators. I knew a lot of Russian history grad students who got dumped into TAing for American history classes just because that is where the undergrads were. I also took both grad and undergrad classes from some real scholars who were very accessible.
Some of teaching excellence really really depends on the field. For instance, despite the presence of Tucker and Cohen, really good Russian history and literature people at Princeton, in many ways Russian East European area studies at IU-Bloomington offers a broader range of top notch study opportunities and resources than Princeton.
--I have no doubt that I met people from a broader range of backgrounds at Princeton than if I had gone to college at the U of Montana. I also probably met bigger jerks.
--One up side of going to Princeton: people there have higher expectations and grander sense of possibility than IU-B. A downside: they can be pretty spoiled and provincial. My favorite provincial comments:
At Princeton: "Montana? Is that by Iowa?"
At IU-B, an undergrad dorm receptionist reading the phone directory: "We don't got no Raymundo, but there's a Jesus." (To be fair this is a harder test, and in IN they have a town they call PEE-ru.)
--Many grad students regardless of background are better-grounded and more freely intellectual than undergrads. This was true of the grad students at Princeton and IU both, even in some of the more frankly careerist programs such as MBA. Some of this is just age; some of it also having made voluntary decisions to get more education.
--I speak from the perverse perspective of someone with poor enough parents that pretty much wherever I went to college I was going to have to get scholarships. That basically put the schools I applied to in the position of competing for my cheery face, at least to the point of writing financial aid packages to make the cost of their institutions equal or less than the cost of in-state tuition in MT. I have mixed feelings about this actually, since I got to go to Princeton and some of my better-off friends got great educations in state schools all the way, but definitely have your kid get scholarships!
There. Elitist? Who me?
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