USC? Texas? The Texas that just jumped to the SEC for the money? Miami? Yes, a veritable paragon of virtue. Nebraska? That’s a shit school. Penn State? The school that covered up a child molester for decades?

These schools are not our friend. They do not share any of our values.

Get into than ND for some of their programs. Also, I was absolutely stunned when taking my 3 kids on college tours. There is one and only one other college that is run almost exactly like ND… USC. The freshman year of studies concepts, dorm life, etc. the campus is also fairly compact and self contained v spread randomly around the city like many of its peer city based colleges. In 2017 they had guaranteed dorms through junior year and were actively building more dorms to increase that to a senior guarantee too.

Along similar lines for state schools - I couldn’t believe where florida is ranked now. My daughter is a rising sophomore there. It was her fallback to ND. They are top 5 public schools now - but are ranked 26th overall for 2021. ND was 19th for example.

ND remains unique with single sex dorms and the dorms being a mix of all 4 classes v single class per dorm in large part. ND is still the better true full college experience because of campus life. But… ND no longer has a wide academic margin on a lot of state schools we used to look down on 20-30 years ago.

1. USC isn't a state school.
2. The dorm guarantee at USC may have arisen, at least in part, due to the fact that the adjacent part of Los Angeles to the USC campus isn't exactly the safest place in the world.

This thread is about both USC and state schools (texas and a list of others). My post is that USC academically is nearly a clone of ND and the way they run the university as a whole was shockingly similar to ND - down to the dorm life aspect too.

They have always owned a lot of the land around the school and/or influenced it heavily for student living in apartments. Their push for expanded dorms goes beyond safety. It’s part of a recognition of what campus life for more than just your freshman year brings to the table.

My cousin went to ND (1983 grad - I’m 89). He is a graduate of ND, harvard and Stanford. 2 of his kids went to ND, one to Carnegie Mellon and the other to USC graduating 2018. He will say the same thing about how shocked he was how similar USC is to ND. He will also tell you he made his wife write the checks for payments to USC - he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Except Penn State. Now that’s a shit school - but for reasons independent of their academic standards.

I'm not saying it's an Ivy League-caliber school academically, but in the greater scheme of things, it's certainly not a bad school academically. I did a check on US News rankings recently, and if memory serves, Penn State was about smack dab in the middle of the Big Ten. If the sole issue were academics, I'd be okay with my kid attending Penn State. Of course, it's not, so I'm not.