One of the most important things I learned from my time at Exeter was that I did not want to go to a small, rural liberal arts college. Of course, I wish I wanted to go to a small rural LAC–I love the outdoors and there always did seem to be lots of good schools that I couldn’t seriously consider because of size and location. Geography was the first criteria for my school list. So I found it rather interesting when the New York Times reported today that lots of rural schools are trying to ‘urbanize’ to garner some special cachet among applicants.

Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize [NYT]

CONWAY, Ark. — Across from the red-brick Collegiate Gothic campus of Hendrix College in central Arkansas lie a few beat-up ball fields, tennis courts and an expanse of woods. Downtown Conway is only a half-dozen blocks away, but it is “not overflowing with amenities,” as Frank H. Cox, a member of the Hendrix board of trustees, diplomatically put it.

For decades, colleges like Hendrix in rural areas of the country embraced a pastoral ideal, presenting themselves as oases of scholarship surrounded by nothing more distracting than lush farmland and rolling hills. But many officials at such institutions have decided that students today want something completely different: urban buzz. “You can’t market yourself as bucolic,” J. Timothy Cloyd, the Hendrix president, said.

At the same time, officials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young. [...]

All the same, I’m not sure that I would suddenly change my mind if these newly pseudo-urbanized schools were on my radar when I was applying places. If a college is in the middle of nowhere, quite a bit has to be done to convince me that I won’t notice where I am. I gave Ithaca (Cornell U.) the benefit of the doubt after I visited, since its physical beauty was accompanied by a nicely developed civilized town. Driving just a short while out, of cousre, I quickly remembered where I was, but for my time on campus I might have been fooled.

Then again, these schools are not really trying to fool someone into thinking they’re in Manhattan instead of rural Ohio or somewhere similar. And I laud some of the efforts to make for a nice appealing campus. But when schools describe their intentions sounding like they’d stolen their press releases from boilerplate condo developer fare, I start to get a little bit suspicious. I guess the question I have is whether the people who seek to attend many of these schools are really drawn to the environment there, and if so, to what degree, and with what compromises?

I think you can market yourself as bucolic, though. Perhaps it’s better not to use words like ‘lazy’ and ’slow’ but there are some very enticing aspects of rural living in semi-wilderness. Don’t market ‘nothing to do at night but drink and drag race’ –instead, ’subsidized university night-vision goggles!’ Remember, some people like the outdoors and don’t want it scarred with new athletic centers and paved over into parking lots for the new people moving in for no particular reason but to drive up rentals for college students.

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