Would you move to Texas for USD 5k more a month

[Constance17]

DH has been offered a job in U.S, we have children aged 6 & 8. What concerns you most?

Also I would personally give Reed a wide berth. I know it has a reputation as extremely academic but when I checked the website I just got strange vibes. Sure enough they have had some recent uproar and student protests, which of course are OK in themselves but the Freshman actually got sick and tired of the upperclassmen interrupting their (very expensive) classes and told them to get a grip. They have also swallowed transactivism whole. So it’s the wokest of the woke (for a price). That’s the danger of some of the smaller private colleges, they are living in a privileged bubble. Some of these kids have never had a job before college and it shows. I would look seriously at some of the excellent public universities so that there is true diversity of race, class, geography, politics etc.

@OVienna

How can you overlook Bryn Mawr on that list?? hmm

math left Bryn Mawr off the list for the excellent reason that @Owlbabie5 is looking at colleges with her son and Bryn Mawr is a women's college.

If it's any consolation, my DD is currently applying to Bryn Mawr.

@IdaBWells

So it’s the wokest of the woke (for a price). That’s the danger of some of the smaller private colleges, they are living in a privileged bubble.

I agree completely. That's one reason Vassar isn't on my DD's list. The wokenss has progressed beyond the bounds of sanity, spilling over into antisemitism. So many colleges have gotten to the point that only a tiny range of political opinions are tolerated. Yale is probably the worst of the Ivy League for this and there are plenty of small liberal arts schools where the inmates are running the asylum.

It's gotten Oberin sued by a local business they almost drove into bankruptcy and Oberlin now has a $44 million judgement to pay.

Jury Finds Oberlin College Libeled a Bakery and Awards $11 Million in Damages

The bakery was also awarded $33 million in punative damages that Oberlin is appealing.

One thing I liked about DS's college when we toured it was that students were supporting different candidates in the 2016 elections with no one attempting the censor anyone else.

I have two friends who have lived in Texas for 20 + years . Both married to Texan men and have kids .
They live in a constant state of anxiety due to the gun laws there . One said that a guy came into Starbucks one day openly carrying a gun. She didn’t know if he was just carrying it for protection or because he wanted to shoot every dead .
I couldn’t live like that for any money

@MissConductUS ha!

He had no interest at all. He says everyone at his school had to do it at the time!

MissConductUSA that's ma girl. (I am an alumna.)

Hopefully the law suit against Oberlin will encourage many colleges to take stock and think about the repercussions of overly enthusiastic students who are not informed of the whole situation. Unfortunately I think with the advent of social media it's very easy to have a pile-on with no reflection, discussion or due diligence to discover the facts. This is definitely NOT a good preparation for the working world and is also bad education if everyone just acts on feelz and outrage.

They live in a constant state of anxiety due to the gun laws there . One said that a guy came into Starbucks one day openly carrying a gun. She didn’t know if he was just carrying it for protection or because he wanted to shoot every dead

How odd - Starbucks is not a chain that allows open carry. I'd have expected that in Dunkin Donuts but not Starbucks.

I occasionally see people with guns on their hips. It's not something that worries me particularly, unless I'm actually somewhere with a high gun crime rate such as neighbourhoods of Chicago, DC, LA, etc. Not places I usually go.

If I saw someone with an assault rifle I'd be more worried, but I've yet to do so in 12 years of living in a state with very loose gun laws.

@OVienna - we loved Bryn Mawr! We had a great tour there and it's one of her top picks. Her college counselor is pretty sure she'll get in there. Hopefully they'll find a bit of merit aid for her too.

I'd be delighted if she went to Bryn Mawr. It's also not that far from us compared to some others she's applying to.

@IdaBWells - I agree, it's a good lesson for Oberlin and others that there are limits. The kids are supposed to be in class or studying or doing college club things, not shoplifting and protesting when they get caught. And the administration just threw petrol on the fire.

Evergreen College is the poster child for losing grip on reality. I think enrollment declined by 20% after students shut the campus down in 2017.

A young man was arrested in a Walmart in Missouri of all places for entering and walking around with an assault rifle strapped to his chest. His intention was to test his rights under the Second Amendment, apparently. Maybe he's a legal genius hoping to illuminate by means of his upcoming criminal case and possible appeal to the Supreme Court the limits of open carry, or maybe he is the utter dolt his sister and his wife thought he was, but anyway, he was arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat in the second degree.
www.npr.org/2019/08/09/749763786/rifle-carrying-man-arrested-after-causing-panic-at-walmart-in-missouri

Missouri is an open-carry state. But its laws do prohibit gun owners from displaying their weapons in a threatening way.

For instance, even someone who holds a valid conceal-carry endorsement and is openly carrying a gun can run afoul of the law "if the firearm is intentionally displayed in an angry or threatening manner, not in necessary self-defense."

"Missouri protects the right of people to open carry a firearm, but that does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens," Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Patterson said in a statement. Patterson compared the man's actions to "falsely shouting fire in a theater causing a panic."

"As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously explained, 'the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre causing a panic,'" he added.

This will be an interesting case.

YYY wrt Reed, and Oberlin isn't far behind.

You'd think that they would have learned from the Missouri U debacle in 2015.

www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/university-of-missouri-enrollment-protests-fallout.html

Things have gotten worse since the 2017 article. They're now laying off faculty and closing dorms. You cannot allow a group of students to shut down campus and walk around threaten others with baseball bats. It's just not on.

I hadn’t heard about Missouri. In all these cases the big problem seems a total lack of leadership. Young people are at times going to be activist and protest around certain issues. It just seems the leadership was completely unprepared and had no strategy whatsoever to bring people together and find a way through, instead it was allowed to get chaotic and on some campuses bodily harm was threatened or professors were physically prevented from leaving (Evergreen). Whatever people feel about the issues involved and the ways students choose to protest, this is nothing new, students have been protesting since the 1960s at least, the inability for the administration to lead a large community of thousands in times of crisis is the worst PR possible. Who wants to send their kids to a campus where the leadership goes AWOL?