Douchiest US College Poll

no stanford, no cred

I should have added Stanford, you're right. Probably UC Berkeley, too, to be fair.

ha, friend just got a teaching job at Trinity. what a douche.

this works backwards: I wind up reading it in an effort to triangulate their working definition of "douche" rather than to learn which colleges fit mine

goin with Yale

Probably UC Berkeley, too, to be fair.

berkeley is too big and socially fragmented to be consistently douchey. I don't think there's a 'berkeley' type, but there are some subgroups that are super douchey.

xp nabisco: it seemed like the list was partly obvious douche stereotypes: Bob Jones (which I omitted), Duke, U of Chicago, USC ... definitely shows a greater focus on the East Coast than the rest of the country. It would be pretty easy to make a case for UC Santa Cruz and Stanford, for example.

iatee: but U of Texas is pretty huge as well.

of course that's more or less true for all of these colleges - but for some of them the douchey subgroup is a plurality/majority?

I agree about UT and because of that I don't think it should be included tbh.

It would be pretty easy to make a case for UC Santa Cruz

!!

them's fightin words

haha i was :D my schools not on the list then ppl started posting :(

usc is my first instinct tbh but i mean i dont really no what this means

many of the douchiest people i've ever encountered went to notre dame so i pick notre dame

yeah see UChicago is the one that requires me to stretch my personal idea of "douche" in a whole new direction -- not because I don't see what they're mocking about the type, but just because I always thought of it as outside my personal connotations of douchery

ucsc kids are (stereotypically) harmless middle class stoners. stanford and usc get the douche factor from the $$$$.

iatee: Well U of Texas has what, tens of thousands of students; Vassar, Amherst, Brown, and probably a good number of others are well under 10k.

Shakey: half of my best friends in high school went to UC Santa Cruz. The thing is, there are some pretty common stereotypes about the place that would lend it to be included on the douche list.

like the mockable UChicago type strikes me as too neurotic for this particular word, somehow

I think they're tarring U Chicago by association with asshole economists.

yes, I read the blurb

Bought this issue at the airport yesterday and was glad to see Reed get at least a passing mention but I am biased against that school on account of sharing a neighborhood w/it i guess.

nabisco, to me it looks like they wanted to come up with an example of every college stereotype to label douchey in its own way for the greatest variety, rather than working from an actual idea of douchiness. (not sure how to spell douchey. that's probably because it's not a real word, right?)

i picked yale because my roommate's boyfriend goes there and the conversations my roommate repeats sound very, very pretentious. not a good reason, but does there have to be one?

iatee: Well U of Texas has what, tens of thousands of students; Vassar, Amherst, Brown, and probably a good number of others are well under 10k.

I guess an important question is whether we're talking about total quantity of douches or % of school that is a douche

hah ... I almost went to Reed.

ohio state has over 50k iirc which makes for a lot of douches

re Reed: But one of the reasons I decided against it (besides financial reasons) was the feeling that Oregon has a special loathing for Californians that move there.

ha, well, i am def ex-cali

Oregon ID now tho

only people who don't live in cali say cali

unless they're talking about that one song.

i didn't go to a school on the list, but my school's stereotype was hit pretty spot-on.

fwiw ive always really liked everyone ive met that went to duke and yale solid bros the trinity and brown blurbs seemed the most accurate in terms off ppl i have known also i dont know anyone that went to most of these schools tbh

trinity seemed pretty accurate from my experience. I don't think I know any "limousine liberals" from Brown ... most of the folks I was friends with or lived with are adjunct professors or have computer jobs. The only friend that might be wealthy is definitely not a liberal.

Voting Colorado for the crunchy trusties. Fuck that shit.

I'm currently leaning towards Vassar ...

I've had just about enough of your Vassar-bashing, sarahel.

i have met some super-rad ppl from vassar but i have also met some humongous douchebuckets from there too, so i'm leaning towards them

If douchebag status can only be attained by heterosexual males (as would seem to be the case), there really aren't that many possible douches at Vassar to begin with.

but yeah i don't actually know anyone at most of these schools

okay, I shouldn't pick Vassar just because I know one douchey person that went there. This douchey person is female.

i'm defining it as "ppl i've met and don't like", regardless of gender

^^ me too, obviously.

Where's Oberlin?

Torn between voting for my alma mater (Colorado) and my home state's flagship (OSU).

xp kate: isn't it in the same state as the notorious Antioch College?

my cousin's starting at vassar this year (just moved into his dorm). when i asked what the male-female ratio is like these days, he just grinned.

I don't think I know any "limousine liberals" from Brown ... most of the folks I was friends with or lived with are adjunct professors or have computer jobs. The only friend that might be wealthy is definitely not a liberal.

is that what they do or what their parents do? i meant the "in ten years" + the zing abt hegemony the only person that went to brown that i know well always wanted to be a farmer and quit her job to open a pet grooming business. she was totally rad but def fit the vague stereotype in that blurb.

I graduated 13 years ago.

the interesting thing about a large enough school (like Colorado) is that you can get a situation where like a majority of its own students totally acknowledge and chafe at the douchiness of some central douchey core.

I voted NYU, because I wish I'd have gone there and I'm a douche.

I think the "best" answer is gonna have to be a smaller school.

I voted usc cause I don't think the 'douche' is as natural to the west coast as it is to east coast (vs. california bro culture - related, lotsa overlap, but still its own thing)

and usc seems like an institution built specifically to spread the douche gospel to the west coast

more so than Stanford?

http://www.pe.com/imagesdaily/2006/04-18/ucla_usc1_300.jpg

game set match

ime Notre Dame folks are doooouuuchey

my opinion about Stanford might be kinda skewed, because that's where the academic douches from my high school wanted to go.

can we just all think abt abandoning the word "douche" - its really not holding up well - think abt and get back to me - thx

more so than Stanford?

stanford people are more boring than douchey

lol

considering So Cal is douchier than Nor Cal, I'm perfectly happy to accept USC as the douchampion.

its pretty hard to judge douchentages for a school u went to vs. a school u didnt but i think theres a stronger stereotype of a dick usc student than a dick stanford student mo

haha I'm with ice on this one, although this thread actually makes me feel good, because surely the word's use as the basis for this kind of GQ article is a sign of its petering out toward unfashionable mainstream use

xp - probably true, during the dot-com boom in the late 90s, stanford definitely had stronger dick stereotypes.

need to read my schools blurb

ours didn't even mention our douchey college radio station ...

douche has been mainstream for a while now the new word is smeg

it didn't get one but it's on yr list. What gives u douche

this thread actually makes me feel good, because surely the word's use as the basis for this kind of GQ article is a sign of its petering out toward unfashionable mainstream use

pretty sure this has already happened - cant wait to read gq's 25 most gaytarded highballs list tbh

umm I think its use in this GQ article is pretty good evidence that it's currently at a point of mainstream fashion and not tipped over into mainstream-passe yet

haha I'm with ice on this one, although this thread actually makes me feel good, because surely the word's use as the basis for this kind of GQ article is a sign of its petering out toward unfashionable mainstream use

whether or not it's a popular word seems sorta irrelevant - the word (in my head at least) describes a really specific attitude/style among some american males. overused, sure, but there isn't another word that can replace it. the problem with the GQ (lol GQ calling people douches...) article is mostly that they seem to be waivering from the generally accepted definition and just listing lots dislikeable things about these colleges.

xp gbx: I felt that both Yale and Dartmouth should be considered here: Yale, out of fairness ... if Harvard makes the list, then we should consider Yale; Dartmouth because someone else commented that it had a "rapey reputation".

^ yes, that is what I meant about reading through it trying to settle on their working definition of "douche"

I do sort of cling to the more-useful sense of the word as pinning down some specific (if vague and hard-to-articulate) type

like, that's better than it just being used to mean "anything I don't like," which is both aesthetically unpleasant AND low-meaning

the problem w/douche is people are using it w/way too much gusto - im ready to move on

I agree that the word in its proper sense describes a certain type, and definitely the types cited as rationales for some of the schools don't really mesh with what I see as the douche type.

haha nabs i think that douche passing from a word that had a v. specific slang meaning to just another word ppl use to describe other ppl they think are lame makes it "passe". but i dont really know what im arguing here - i think u kind of agree - and i certainly agree w/jho about needing to give it a rest

willing to except smeg as a useful variant fwiw

I'm trying to remember the process of "tool" becoming passé....

gq 25 tooliest suit fabrics list had a lot to do w/it iirc. oh how they zinged poor gaberdine

I like how they didn't give any explanation for #14 and just put Lycra

did they have anything to say about tulle?

it's sad that tool is passe cause tool describes people who wear ed hardy stuff a lot better than douche does imo. we need a 2009-tool.

I like how they didn't give any explanation for #14 and just put Lycra

:( still well done

imo "dick" applied w/a dismissive tone can work - maybe it doesnt have quite the specificity of "douche" - but on the other hand maybe you just cant be bothered to elucidate the qualities of some "dick"

I think "prick" is closer to the specificity of "douche" ...

i miss the heyday back in the 70s of "dickweed" tbh

prick could be a grower def

as in, "You killed Ted, you medieval dickweed!" ?

what about wanker

sounds too British

using british slang is pretty dickish

unless you're british, I guess

yeah Americans using British slang often come across as douchey.

lol, read some of the ilm posts circa 2001 for widespread britishisms use by americans

another anecdote related to the article -- one of my housemates took the Vampires in lit class mentioned ... pretty sure he hooked up with at least two of the chicks in that class ... basically, he was a relatively attractive D&D nerd with social skills, whereas few guys have all three attributes.

xp velko - I said often, not always.

got lucky w/ his dice rolls

"wanker" is pretty great but at least in the us suffers from the same problem as "douche" in that most people cant say it casually enough to be effective - it ends up in a unconvincing three year old swearing on the playground naughty satisfaction type vibe

xp iatee: that guy had a lot of luck. I think he's into circus stuff and steampunk now.

where do cumlords go to school?

UNLV

haha I worked on the UNLV campus for a few months and have lots of friends there because of that. horrible, horrible, horrible place.

I meant it as a joke about lucrative industries specific to the state of Nevada ...

not douchey or cumlordy tho. just sorta... oblivious.

re: ya, ya, I know

lol at you actually having an anecdote about it, though.

the student center is basically an airport food court and that is basically the best thing you can say about the school because everywhere else is worse

you can see the strip super well from campus tho, which is kinda neat/bizarre

oh they have an in-n-out right next to campus. I guess that's the real best thing.

re: "tool" I think it's actually regained its usefulness, which is to say that now if you describe someone as a tool, anyone roughly your age knows kinda specifically what you mean, and that you have chosen that word carefully. (I look forward to something similar happening with "douche," where one day you're like "I don't know how to describe that guy except that he's ... just a douche, I guess" and everyone says YES, that is precisely the word.)

initially that was the case, now it's gotten too generally used and has lost much of its initial meaning.

umm hence what I just said

I am agreeing with you.

haha I look forward to that point in the future where a timely utterance of 'douche' is a mini-celebration

in canada the have this word "keener" - it doesnt share at all the same meaning with "douche" - it describes an ocd/aspie type

so it's more like nerd?

next poll: canada's 25 keenerest colleges

are there even 25 Canadians on ilx?

I'm sure that the biggest douchebag students here would actually aspire to be included in such a list, but alas they are perpetually going to be in the shadows of others.

just about everyone i've ever known who went to Dartmouth was some kind of douchebag. so dartmouth it is.

i lived near hanover for a while and went there now and then to see a movie or eat or whatnot - dartmouth students seemed more boring than douche

I always viewed dartmouth as a place for preppies who liked to ski.

schools that also deserve strong consideration IMHO based on the "i know lots of douchebags who went there" and aren't on this list are U. Penn (actually, it would be Wharton but since it's part of Penn it can't be separated can it?), Columbia (alma mater of ILX's own beloved Gabbneb), Rutgers (my school, plus it's in New Jersey so it's kind of obvious that the place would be swarming with douchebags), and Delaware (the college of choice of Jersey douchebags who were too stupid or lazy to get into Rutgers or Penn State).

columbia seems to have a pretty low douche population ivy wise

I've met some genuinely douchey Columbia people, including this one trust fund guy that was trying to sell me and my friend on the marketing potential of pipes for women.

and noe hes a millionaire do u see how that works

if he is, it's not because he made a killing selling feminine pipes.

columbia types think very highly of themselves, but are less preppy. + more assholish.

no one has any tales of douchitude involving Princeton?

now that i think of it, i've known more NYU douchebags than Columbia douchebags. but the Columbia douches that i've known were so colossal that they could be characters on either "entourage" or "the hills."

sarahel: i think that it's pretty obvious that a school that calls its frats "eating clubs" would certainly be in the upper stratosphere of douchebaggery. OTOH, i grew up around princeton and i know of plenty of princeton students who were NOT douchey in any sense -- so maybe my perspective is a bit skewed about PU.

i would much rather belong to an eating club than a frat

are they different things or just a different name for the same thing?

this is not a frat its an EATING CLUB dont u see

i.e., douchier

are they different things or just a different name for the same thing?

yes and no -- no, in that way back when Princeton banned fraternities but also didn't provide upper-classmen w/ anywhere to eat or live. so the eating clubs sprang up off campus, and basically served the same purpose as fraternities.

ice cream eating motherfuckers club ...

the answer is Duke

tell us more about Duke douchery.

ive heard the answer is indeed duke

so have I, but I want to know more ...

because it contains all of the douchiest aspects of the ivy league without the intellectual caliber?

(wow, it's surprisingly easy to be nasty in this thread!)

KIU

because it contains all of the douchiest aspects of the ivy league plus bonus southern ones?

I didn't have much exposure to undergrads when I was there. I was in the med school, which was full of what you guys might call tools.

I think my cousin almost went to Duke Medical School ... I think he ended up at some place in Texas, because the tool quotient wasn't as high.

lolz

medicine seems a particularly poor career choice for a tool

GUYS

GQ: America's 25 Douchiest Colleges
Home of: The Excessive-School-Pride Douche
Affectations: Dressing for class each morning as if you were the offensive-line coach; writing prison letters to Maurice Clarett.
Overheard at Buckeye career-building workshop: "You can put 'Won a national championship' on a résumé, right?"
Most likely to: Suffocate a hapless Boilermakers fan with a giant foam Number One after offhand comment about how the marching band's "Script Ohio" wasn't all that impressive.
Honorable-mention excessive-school-pride institutions: Duke, Michigan, Texas, Penn State, Yeshiva University.

YU! My undergrad institute! Woo!

Yeah ... his dad who is also a doctor didn't want him to go to Texas, but then after looking at Duke, decided that Texas wasn't that bad.

maybe we have different definitions of the word. as far as I can see, medicine is full of tools, i.e. those who may be bright but are nerdy and have amazingly large blind spots

xpost

also unapologetically interested in having "the good things in life"

another anecdote related to the article -- one of my housemates took the Vampires in lit class mentioned ... pretty sure he hooked up with at least two of the chicks in that class ... basically, he was a relatively attractive D&D nerd with social skills, whereas few guys have all three attributes.

― what happened? i am confused. (sarahel), Saturday, 29 August 2009 00:33 (1 hour ago)

That's a perfect description of one of my housemates, who actually happens to be out playing D&D right now! (Whereas I, the uncool roommate, am at home borrowing his season 5 Buffy DVDs and posting on ILX....) He also happens to be a grad student at Brown, but not in a field involving vampire lit!

xpost - not sure what the generally accepted definition of tool is, I think of it as someone who projects the image of wanting to be The Man. No idea whether this is

this guy had an unerring sense for the latest trends in that culture ... in college he did SCA and some live action vampire role playing thing ...now it's circus stuff and steampunk ...plenty of other housemates had the same nerd interests and would make vague attempts to garner the attention of the numerous women he'd bring home, but I think only one was ever successful. They had some odd mating rituals.

w/r/t Duke -- top-notch grad departments tho, right?

maria, i agree with definition with key modifier, which is that a tool is somebody who gets used and doesn't know it.

sarahel i agree with you too, although most doctors I know don't really have any concept about the real "good things in life" are

"steampunk", wow what a great word...

actually, one of my favorite professors from Brown ended up going to Duke because they offered her tenure.

"good things in life" = nice house, foreign sportscar, expensive athletic equipment ...

Damn, you really need to add Tulane to this list.

I can't edit poll options, can I?

lol GQ calling people douches

mordy, I think Duke's med school was actually very good. I don't know about their other grad schools

alpha nerd is probably getting ready for Burning Man right now.

Their English Lit. dpt is world famous.

duke law and fuqua business school are also quite good. though prob. not worth paying for if you are from NC and can get into UNC law or business school.

duke is top notch academically all around, no shame there

a number of the schools on the list are too, but that doesn't preclude douchiness.

amherst def seems the worst of the small NE elite colleges ime

i think they're all pretty much the same really

I know one douchey guy that went to Bard, not sure if I know anyone from Amherst.

omg there are so many tho how do u choose

which of the seven sisters is the worst??

xpost - you can just pick one to symbolize all of them and amherst has the biggest name i guess (i was surprised trinity got separate treatment in the article, i didn't know it had a distinct reputation)

mount holyoke can suck it

my awesome little cousin went to Smith, so any of them but that one.

which of the seven sisters is the worst??

has to be Radcliffe, since we all know that Harvard is the douchiest school of all time and Radcliffe is now part of Harvard.

smith has its own rep: lesbians

how many radcliffe girls does it take to change a lightbulb?

yea smith! one of my favorite coworkers went there.

i love the name "Bryn Mawr"

xpost - i know 4 people who went to smith, one introduced me to lots of scandinavian metal bands and another is into queer fat activist burlesque (living up to the reputation right there!).

ok, how many?

i love the name "Bryn Mawr"

― velko, Friday, August 28, 2009 10:38 PM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

totally what does it even mean its so awesome

I was kinda surprised my cousin went there, because she is straight. I think all the other Smith alumnae I know are queer.

xp That's Harvard. That's Women. and That's not funny!

large hill in welsh

that joke can easily be made about a variety of women's colleges that have become part of posh formerly all-male colleges, however.

http://rlv.zcache.com/lesbians_at_bryn_mawr_college_tshirt-p235332476228224457u2o7_400.jpg

Although "large hill" is the literal translation it's actually a colloquial Welsh phrase meaning "big ole' ass"

though if you were to make that joke about Pembroke ... it would probably be: That's Brown. That's womyn. etc...

my other favorite coworker went to Pembroke, but only for a year before transferring to Wisconsin. this was back in the 70's when Pembroke still existed.

xp - one of my english teachers in HS went to Bryn Mawr ... and she did have a large hill.

too bad a women's college didn't merge with Dartmouth...would have made it much more civilized

in terms of the undiluted definition of douche ... I think I can only think of about 10 people I knew from Brown that fit that description, including this one guy who lived across the hall from me freshman year (not Tracer, btw) who was from Providence and whose mom did his laundry every week.

brown is prob the least douche ivy

everyone in my law school that went to cornell majored in industrial and labor relations. is that like the fine art of union busting? sounds super douchey

i dunno ... could be the opposite.

i would have guessed that at first but all of them seem to go to big firms to do labor/employment law so probably not

you're probably right ...

if we're sticking to colleges along the main line, then clearly villanova would be the douchiest (if we're defining douchebaggery to mean "obliviously acting in a loud and obnoxious manner"). it's where well-off families from the philly area send their kids if they don't have the grades or SAT scores to get into haverford, swarthmore, or bryn mawr (let alone Penn or Princeton) but also can't stand the thought of sending their underachieving kids to penn state, delaware, rutgers or any other state school (unless the state school is virginia or michigan).

(nb: i also went to villanova)

afaik, cornell is a pretty non-douchey ivy. i grew up nearby and it had no local reputation whatsoever for being snotty or elitist, unlike what i've heard about most of the others. also, it has some less liberal artsy and more vocational colleges like the ag school and the hotel school, which are both cheaper (land grant, originally) and easier to get into.

(of course ithaca itself has a reputation for being communist aaaaaaaah! because it's a really liberal city in the middle of a really conservative region, but i'm not sure that's cornell's fault.)

Princeton and Yale are the only two that seem particularly douchey to me ...

No Bennington or Bard?

I think Amherst is the chosen signifier for the douchiness of Bennington and Bard.

xpost relating to ivies - i went hiking with the harvard outdoor club once (a friend invited me when i lived in boston) and they were sort of weird about it, thinking of stories to make up if people asked where they were from so they wouldn't have to say harvard, but then at the end of the hike singing their alma mater very loudly in public so everybody knew. it was very odd. not sure it rates as douchey, because they were nice people, but self-conscious for sure.

singing their alma mater very loudly in public so everybody knew

+ not sure it rates as douchey

???????

Amherst doesn't seem to approach the douchiness of those two to me.

While I appreciate GQ trying to be equal opportunity about the whole thing I don't really thing that this list should include much besides than old east coast private schools.

Alex, you don't think that there are any douchey colleges in the West?

I don't think they approach the level of douchiness of Bard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, et all, no.

Sarah Lawrence is another noteworthy omission ...

i think that amherst gets tagged as being douchebaggy b/c it's notoriously difficult to get into (e.g., the year i applied 90% of the applicants were rejected [including myself!]). i suspect that there's some bitter grapes action going on w/ that selection.

also, i only know one amherst grad -- and he is perfectly OK and not at all douchey. how can i (or anyone else) hate on a school if you don't know anybody who actually went there?!?

imo huge state schools have a lot of douchebags. i don't even think of places like vassar, bard, etc. as particularly douchey, but something else. maybe i don't even know what douchey means but i thought i did.

bard is really not that douche tbh - its more "alt"

"singing their alma mater very loudly in public so everybody knew"

yes, this seems like the definition of douchey to me.

the one school on the GQ list I was intrigued by was Deep Springs. I remember hearing about it when I was applying to college. It definitely had a mystique, and was so small (only 26 students) that you had to really search to find out about it. I've never actually met anyone from there. I still wonder what it is like.

Is Amherst really that hard to get into? Anyway you can always go to one of the four other schools in Amherst and take classes there, right?

I'm not hating on Amherst, I'm suggesting that the GQ people picked Amherst to cover the type of stereotypical douchiness found at Sarah Lawrence, Bard, Bennington, etc.

state schools have a lot of douchebags but they're (generally) not as wealthy douchebags and that puts an upper limit to their douchebaggery

amherst is like one of the hardest isn't it?

Didn't Bard used to be the most expensive school in the country? That's a pretty douche-y fact right there.

imo huge state schools have a lot of douchebags. i don't even think of places like vassar, bard, etc. as particularly douchey, but something else. maybe i don't even know what douchey means but i thought i did.

exactly -- a douchebag who went to rutgers or delaware but wouldn't be considered an extreme douchebag at either school would be the King of All Douchebags if they transferred to somewhere like, i dunno, vassar or wesleyan.

Bennington was the most expensive school in the country at one point when I was in college.

Yeah I'm pretty sure they're constantly trying to out-expensive the other.

for expensive schools when i think douchebag i think duke or vanderbilt, not the small liberal arts ones

the fact that they were more expensive than any ivy was pretty wtf. I mean, what do people who go to Bard and Bennington do with their lives?

Vanderbilt!!! Another omission!

Yeah I don't think there is any questions that a) colleges are filled w/ douchebags and b) douchebags can come from all walks of life. I think the question is more what institutions are inherently douche-y. That's the kind douche edge that Bard and Bennington are going to make their future alumns pay a premium for.

"I mean, what do people who go to Bard and Bennington do with their lives?"

Edit women's style mags, probably.

I thought that's what you did with a degree from Sarah Lawrence?

xpost - haha, i went to a school similar to amherst and half the people were there because they got rejected from harvard and yale! those are probably the only places where nobody has sour grapes.

i'm not sure how much of a metric expensiveness is. elmira college, near where my family lives, has been in the top 10 most expensive schools for a while, but it's not particularly outstanding in any other positive or negative ways.

the thing w/these most expensive schools is they also tend to give tons financial assistance - its one of the things they spend all that money on so

its particularly true w/liberal arts schools like bard and bennington that dont have huge expensive graduate programs to dump their money into

i didn't mean to imply that the size of a school makes it more douchey fwiw

xxxp there are a lot of women's style mags.

without douchebags there would be no women's style mags

"the thing w/these most expensive schools is they also tend to give tons financial assistance - its one of the things they spend all that money on so"

This argument makes them sound more douche-y not less.

Reed was pretty crap for financial assistance ...I got waitlisted for financial aid there when the tuition was over half of what my family made in a year.

Should have gone to Bard then.

I didn't apply, it seemed kinda douchey.

so what are the least douchey schools? at least of the schools ranked highly on us news?

nomination: ucsd

it really depends how big the school's endowment is...the richer the school, the more scholarships, so that varies a lot, even though the tuition prices are pretty constant because they all charge about the same. (this made a big difference to me when i was applying to colleges, and i wound up with less debt than a lot of my friends who went to supposedly much cheaper schools. but even discussing it seems a bit douchey.)

"the thing w/these most expensive schools is they also tend to give tons financial assistance - its one of the things they spend all that money on so"

This argument makes them sound more douche-y not less.

― Alex in SF, Friday, August 28, 2009 11:38 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no its just like are u super rich fine then gives us tons of money so we can help other non rich kids go to our school - its pretty much the opposite of douche - certainly much less so than the big private university approach which is give us tons of money so we can give it our graduate schools while you sit through lecture classes taught by assistants w/400 other rubes

haha well at least the big private universities can pay their grad students more then

universities don't traditionally fund graduate research w/ the money they make from poor lil undergrads

that is completely untrue

"no its just like are u super rich fine then gives us tons of money so we can help other non rich kids go to our school"

Do non-rich kids really go to Bennington/Bard? Color me dubious.

dunno about those but amherst, swarthmore etc. all have about half the students on financial aid and half not.

I'll admit my experience with their grads is pretty limited, but I never got the impression that these schools were filled with anything other than rich motherfuckers. Being on financial aid /= I AM POOR AND STRUGGLING btw.

sure - i mean theres def tons of rich kids - but ive known non rich kids that went to those places and other comparable liberal arts schools

actually i only ever knew one person that went to bennington and she was rich - but generally

Here's where I admit that a relative of mine is going to Bennington on Scholarship and her family is definitely not rich so haha.

lol

Of course my immediate reaction was "why would you want to go there that school sounds so douche-y"

xpost - that's true, but there's also a lot of middle ground between "rich kid" and "poor and struggling"! i don't think most people who go to those schools are poor and struggling, but neither are most of the kids who go to less pretentious places like suny geneseo. (i'll admit, i only know one person who's gone to bennington, no clue whether her family was rich, and nobody who went to bard!)

the one person I knew who went to Bard is douchey, and family is pretty well-off.

no one has any tales of douchitude involving Princeton?

― what happened? i am confused. (sarahel), Saturday, August 29, 2009 9:32 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

of the top three, Princeton seems the most douchey to me

they have done the least to separate themselves from their blue blood heritage

Is Amherst really that hard to get into? Anyway you can always go to one of the four other schools in Amherst and take classes there, right?

ok, it looks like i overstated how selective Amherst was during the year i applied because this story says that this past year was when amherst's admission rate was at its lowest (though an admission rate of 14% is still pretty damn selective). and yes, students at one of the four local schools can take classes @ amherst college if they want to.

speaking of amherst, MA schools -- where do we reckon Hampshire College would rank on the douchebag scale?!?

schools this list needs: Wesleyan, Wharton undergrad

I think Hampshire students are too dysfunctional to be douchey.

How does a thread started on a Friday night already have more than 250 responses?

and it isn't even about Radiohead either!

also the thing about college tuition is that at these big expensive schools, even when the students are paying full sticker the school is still losing anywhere from a couple of thousand to ten thousand on operating costs; they are basically just counting on making it all back when these guys graduate and get their i-banker jobs and donate massively down the line

the one person I knew who went to Bard is douchey,

Also: didn't know you knew Hstencil.

how do endowments factor in?

endowments are also sort of a joke; schools like Amherst brag that they have the biggest "endowment-to-student" ratio of all the elite schools, but you really only see that money going towards supplying your study breaks with gourmet burgers. oh, and maybe a ski trip

universities don't traditionally fund graduate research w/ the money they make from poor lil undergrads

― iatee, Saturday, August 29, 2009 3:46 AM

that is completely untrue

― ice cr?m, Saturday, August 29, 2009 3:47 AM

Unlike businesses that charge more than the cost of the product in order to make a profit (i.e., cost is less than price), not-for-profit colleges and universities typically charge students less in tuition than what they spend per student in education and related expenses. A general institutional subsidy provides the difference between E&R costs and revenue from tuition.

Public institutions receive much of their subsidy from state and local appropriations, whereas private institutions receive subsidies from all other non-tuition revenues — primarily private gifts, investment and endowment earnings.

http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/trends_in_spending-report.pdf

im not buying these accounting tricks no

Bunch of accounting douches.

where do y'all reckon an undeniable douche like this guy would have gone to college, then?!?

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y123/Eisbaer29/kingofalldouchebags.jpg

caltech

xp I don't know where you went to school, Tad.

guessing some douche-magnet college in Jersey or near Philadelphia.

rutgers

jers all the way no doubt

this thread makes me wanna watch PCU again

I'm going to guess Sarah Lawrence, but with no conviction. It could just as easily be Bennington or Bard.

why is he holding a toy horse? is that some jersey douche symbol I don't understand?

g's up, horses's down

its a douche applicator

pepperdine is for douches who like to play volleyball

think I'll go with Harvard for being filled with a bunch of "alright, I made it...what's next? time to start thinking about that Rhodes" types

whole school of vollyball douches eh

ya but at least they're not gettin any

pepperdine xp

havard students ime tend to lack the true douche bravado

The Princeton Review ranked Pepperdine on the list of colleges with "Dorms Like Palaces" in 2004 and 2007 and #1 under "Most Beautiful Campus" in 2006 and 2007. Pepperdine also appeared on other lists including "Students Pray on a Regular Basis," and "High Quality of Life." Because of its Christian affiliation, some contend that the student body breeds a religious and politically conservative atmosphere. Princeton Review also ranked Pepperdine University #13 in its list "Alternative Lifestyles not an Alternative". In 2007 Pepperdine was named as "One of the Top Producing Colleges and Universities" by the Peace Corps of America. The 2005 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges has also noted Pepperdine as being one of the nation's largest conservative colleges

I feel like the king of all douches is gonna have some sort of inferiority complex thrown in and unfortunately harvard students don't have that

xp

I guess Yale used to hold that spot but surprisingly Yale's sort of turning into...the Stanford of the East?

Penn would be a good choice in that respect, moreso than Cornell

penn students mention their us news ranking wayyyy more than any other student body (ime)

my high school was a feeder for Penn; one of my classmates who went there after about a month changed his fb profile pic to a picture of himself naked, with a cowboy hat and a sock over his junk RHCP style

i voted for USC but there's a pretty good ratio of non-douches to douches there. and there are probably just as many douches at UCLA (who only go there cuz it's on the uber-douchey west side and they're racists from the suburbs who would never set foot in south l.a.).

caltech

caltech students seem really impressed with themselves for going to caltech.

that is probably the only school in the country (or one of a handful) where that attitude is semi-justified tho

congrats, aspies.

it's not like they get to touch girls or anything, so let them have their thing

i'm gonna vote for occidental as least douchey l.a. school. eagle rock is awesome, and the people i know that went there (hi max!) are pretty stand-up folks. and our president went there for a year!

I voted for USC because I went to UCLA for undergrad, and I would feel wrong voting otherwise. I know many solid people from USC and would love to match there for residency but still, rivalry is rivalry. (The westside does suck a lot, though.)

I am kind of shocked that neither Georgetown nor GW made the list at all. I go to Gtown now and I am just saying, unironic pastel-colored polo shirts with popped collars are usually not a good sign.

now see indulging in school rivalries is sorta douche - so thats more of a vote for ucla

if your school's rival is as douchey as usc, it's bad form to not indulge

they're not douches, they're trojans.

http://graphics.fansonly.com/photos/schools/usc/galleries/usc_orangebowl/11-lg.jpg

my waterproof argument is:

a. matt leinart is the biggest douche of our generation
b. matt leinart went to usc

Oh man, no Michigan, MSU, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc? The whole thing's fundamentally flawed, you people don't know how good you have it.

As an alum of big state schools: it has to be one of the big state schools! The students I met while working at UChicago were more just lazy as fuck, not douchey. Arizona State gets my vote here.

(who only go there cuz it's on the uber-douchey west side and they're racists from the suburbs who would never set foot in south l.a.)

i have no dog in the usc vs ucla fight but this sounds rong. diversity stats don't bear it out for one thing, also cost is probably the biggest factor by a wide margin

altho maybe i read that wrong, i'm sure there are a few douches like that there, but it's a weird school to go to if you're a racist

wait, it's 'watertight argument' isn't it

and velko otm w/ ucla, has more pell grant students than all of the ivy league schools combined.

asians can be racists/douches. also ucla is institutionally racist because its student body is only like 1 percent black.

the UCs are tiny% black because california is racist and passed an anti-affirmative action proposition. despite this, they still try and sneak in AA-esque admits and get in shit for it.

california is racist

can't argue with this. also, homophobic!

and people w/o trust funds can be racists too. yay america!

this thread has taken a turn for the depressing.

asians can be racists

most asian-asians are, haha

what is a pell grant

federal financial aid for low income students

u know where there aren't any racists?

BRYN MAWR!!

yeah but most Ivys are need-blind and also cover financial need 100% - of course their definition of what your financial need can be suspect

also, I remember Harvard and Yale getting into an arms race about this - I think if your family makes under 80k a year or something like that your tuition is basically waived, you just take out about $4k a year in loans or do work-study or something like that

of course this was all pre-recession and back when Ivy endowments were regularly posting 10% returns, instead of 30% losses

yeah but 'pell grant' is mostly just an easy way to say family makes 40k or less and the number of those students at UCLA > all the ivy leagues. I don't know for sure, but I imagine even when schools give full scholarships to poor kids, they let the gov't grants be a part of that.

basically harvard and yale are basically only capable of being so generous because poor kids are such a small % of the student body to begin with. if they had UCLA's demographic, it'd be pretty damn expensive.

Oberlin is lousy with douches at any given moment, yet I could never call it a douchy college. Irony!

Can't speak for Yale but the last time I talked stats with friends who work Harvard admissions, 70% of the students received some form of financial aid; don't remember the income breakdown but I do remember it was significantly lower than I expected.

Also the answer to this is Princeton.

(AZ State does makes compelling argument tho)

sarahel mentioned it above but really Antioch College is pretty darn douche-y.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/d780ed5d45f2660e3f7be27ff2cfa3d7.png

Bicker

The five selective eating clubs pick new members in a process called "bicker."

Bicker begins each spring semester during the week following intersession break, when interested sophomores come to the club they would like to join. The bicker process varies widely by club, ranging from staid interviews conducted by club members to raucous games designed to foster competition among potential inductees. Following two or three evenings of bicker activities, the club membership selects new members in closed sessions, the conduct of which varies from club to club. The clubs initiate their new members the following weekend.

Additionally, some bicker clubs conduct a smaller "Fall Bicker" for third and fourth year students. Admission numbers during fall bicker are typically much lower than those of spring bicker, as fall bicker is a chance for clubs to adjust their membership numbers to account for members who may have dropped club membership during the spring semester or over the summer.

Bicker clubs hold parties with restricted admission more frequently than their sign-in counterparts. Such events often require that non-members present a pass, a colored card bearing the club's insignia, in order to enter. Non-members may also gain entry to parties at some bicker clubs by entering with a member, or through membership in the Inter-Club Council.

dan: yeah that's mostly cause families making 200k are eligible for financial aid at harvard.

Duke, by such a large margin.

the UCs are tiny% black because california is racist and passed an anti-affirmative action proposition. despite this, they still try and sneak in AA-esque admits and get in shit for it.

Yeah, the underrepresented minority admissions rate at UCLA and UCB fell like 40% the year after Prop 209 got passed, and they've spent the past ten or fifteen years trying to figure out how to get that number back. I graduated just before the year that only like 100 African-American students were accepted into the freshman class of like 5,000, and I think about half of those were scholarship athletes. Pretty much everybody's reaction was "That is not acceptable, Fuck Prop 209". They managed to increase the number a bit within a few years, but then I think they got sued.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/09/04/style/20090906-harvard-slideshow_index.html

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/04/style/29913022.JPG

is that an acappella group?

Dorkiest US College Poll more like

dorkiest would have to include MIT and CalTech ...

dude on far left is wearing a hand-me-down?

does dude in the middle realize what a faux pas black pants with brown shoes are?

http://homepage.mac.com/hellbind/.Public/Pleats.jpg

also faux pas: being a douche

tho maybe not at harvard, I guess it's relative

I dated a guy at Brown that dressed like the dude in the green checkmark picture ...

but why

it was actually kinda cute in a West Side Story/Eddie and Sheena kinda way ... I remember one of the first times I went to his room, and he opened his closet and was embarrassed because his wardrobe consisted almost entirely of light blue shirts and beige pants (he was a product of boarding school). I told him he shouldn't be embarrassed around me that his clothes all look the same, considering I pretty much wore black all the time.

http://vanilla-gorilla.tripod.com/tattoo.jpg

you coulda had a goth preppy baby

he wanted at least 7.

7 more things to sacrifice to the goth gods

his dream was to be the father of a large brood of broad-shouldered, blue-eyed offspring that were brilliant at math.

ugh, pleated pants

Okay, is there a school on the list's purported douchery that we haven't discussed yet?

uga

http://api.ning.com/files/mQcPTlxX5Zz4W0meC2mb-1g-9LHqSz3MTTgO41AdW05SXD--4Ee683yi0qVHCHx2MByFWKtjuXV0qGwHoY2CcboPqLnieefS/uga5.jpg

I voted for Duke but to be honest Vanderbilt is the doucheist place I ever visited, and this was when I was in high school and still had a fairly underdeveloped sense of douche.

Oh and I gotta go with Emory for deep south douches.

I really should have included Vanderbilt ...

<3 u quincie

i remember visiting suny binghamton in hs. there should be something on this list representing the special breed of long island douches who go to school there

what is special about this breed?

it's hard to describe

how do they compare to the ones from Jersey?

i guess they are pretty similar now that i think about it
http://www.missbehavemag.com/wp-content/uploads/17t.jpg

long island

even though I spent four years there, there are a lot of things about east coast cultures that I don't understand. It's like there's this separate class system.

Class on the coasts is so much more developed than where I come from, too.

I'm from the West Coast, and class is a lot less developed there than on the east coast. I remember when we were reading Great Gatsby in Honors English in high school, and our teacher (who was from Connecticut and went to Bryn Mawr), had to explain common East Coast class signifiers to us.

I dunno about 'coasts' - it's a lot different on the west coast. I am nottttt rich but I'm from a v. rich CA city and the difference between my rich friends and poor friends is pretty inconsequential - they dress and act basically the same.

xp

yeahhhh

like, there were various people at my (public) hs who I had known for like 5 years before learning that they were (quite) rich

I'm from a small CA town where most people were working class or middle class. The wealthy people in town were either rich from agribusiness or real estate/construction.

do accents vary at all on the west coast?

in theory they do a little bit and there's some sf native accent and people in bakersfield talk a little differently. but realistically, no, they don't. the differences are reallllly slight.

I did a linguistics paper on it once.

Hell yes - though a lot of the differences are ethnic. One of the things about the west coast, though, is that there are so many people from other places - other parts of the country, other countries - that accents aren't as distinctive as other parts of the country.

But considering natives, Kurt Cobain vs. valley girl

well they vary in that people talk differently, but they're not geographically based - like, a ditzy girl in norcal is gonna talk more like a valley girl than some geeky girl in socal.

Washington State accents are fairly different from So Cal ... some of the former sound close to the way people talk in the Dakotas.

no you're right, the pacific northwest has its own accent - I was basically referring to CA/NV/AZ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_English
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_English

california vowel shift is really interesting

well, to me

I don't think I have a typical CA accent, even though I was born and raised here, and my mom's family has been here since the late 1800s.

I notice a very slight PNW accent but it almost feels like a total lack of accent more than anything else. That plus pronouncing words in ways you would never expect, like Couch, Sequim, etc.

The class thing feels really different here to, compared to the Midwest. I remember going back to Chicago after moving to WA and it just felt like there was a lot more social signifier stuff going on, people dressing to let people know that they were important that felt like vestiges of some sort of east coast old money hierarchy. In the NW you could be a Microsoft millionaire and still go out to eat wearing the same Patagonia jacket as everyone else.

when i was out in California a year ago, for some reason the topic of guidos came up. the people i was talking w/ (all from the San Joaquin Valley, in their 20s or 30s) had either never heard of guidos, or even if they had they don't remember ever seeing any anywhere in California. and now that i think of it, i don't remember seeing anyone like that out there like that either.

and while there's little-to-no difference b/w douchebags from long island and douchebags from north jersey (the waiting sections for both the LIRR and Jersey Transit during the wee hours of the morning on weekends are no-go zones if you don't want to be surrounded by them), i should also note that long island is the place that new jerseyans love to make fun of.

(the waiting sections for both the LIRR and Jersey Transit at PENN STATION, i meant)

the Long Island accent is near the top of my favorite American accents

fuck the stanford haters upthread you just jealous

voting harvard cause that's where my sister goes and she's developed a fake new england accent since she started. ok she's been there ten years or something but still you don't develop an upper-class new england accent after growing up 18 years in san diego.

the list of my favorite American accents, I should say... I can't let my English atrophy any further from living abroad xp

i hate the LI accent. my grandma has it. it only comes in one volume: loud. ughhhhh

mjtb, you can develop that accent if you migrate to Boston from Rancho Santa Fe.

funny you mention that but we're not from rancho santa fe we're from solana beach. that 3 miles makes a huge difference. went to school with TONS of people from rancho, though!

that was a pretty douchey exchange, wasn't it?

Not when the POV here on RSF is 'that place is INSANE'.

It really comes down to Dartmouth v. Princeton. The others are strictly also-rans in the douche department.

eisbaer try westwood just sayin'

I chose to take the term "douchiest" literally and therefore voted Vassar.

good thing Smith wasn't on the list

Well, he was probably a closet homosexual who did a lot of cocaine. That whole Yale thing.

I don't know anyone from any of these schools, so just voted Duke because why not

Well, he was probably a closet homosexual who did a lot of cocaine. That whole Yale thing.

Who???

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Dang. My brother turned a double-play here - Princeton undergrad, Duke biz. He managed to not be too douchy at all.

if you can walk with douches and never lose the common touch ...

sarahel - that was an American Psycho quote

i missed an American Psycho quote?

voted duke. I went to UNC for grad school, so I had no choice.

though I lived near New Haven for many years, and there are plenty of douchey yalies

I got kicked out of a yale party with some UNC grads ... the yalie douches did not appreciate my UNC friend's powder blue tux.

i'm sure the douches of penn state feel slighted, but we can comfort ourselves with being the #1 party school in america for the first time EVURRR

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

notre dame a surprise top 3

are any ilxors Duke alumni?

hopefullly not

btw, I think I do some of the California vowel shift things, and some of them I definitely don't do.

aww, i tied with that little school in connecticut.

0 votes for me! How comforting ...

i remember visiting suny binghamton in hs. there should be something on this list representing the special breed of long island douches who go to school there

binghamton was my undergrad. i do remember a lot of long island douches, but really suny stonybrook was ground zero for the long island douche. binghamton was pretty geographically/ethnically mixed, and a pretty geeky school overall (ithaca is nearby so we got the cornell runoff).

I will always remember Binghampton for being the school that produced Tony Kornheiser

I will also always remember Binghamton for not actually being spelled with a 'p'

it was named for someone named bingham. it's not in any of the hamptons.

ha I didn't even realize that the Hamptons are in Long Island

Princeton all the way. everyone i've ever known there has been a self-assured, self-righteous piece of shit. always intelligent, but book-smart, not street- or people-smart.

new rankings are out

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201108/douchiest-colleges-america-2011

bennington and MIT otm

the picture of the bennington guy confirms everything i think abt. that school

this list seems more accurate than the other one, despite the lack of dartmouth and usc

holy lol

dartmouth had some douches to be sure, but i didn't really know that many

and while there's little-to-no difference b/w douchebags from long island and douchebags from north jersey (the waiting sections for both the LIRR and Jersey Transit during the wee hours of the morning on weekends are no-go zones if you don't want to be surrounded by them), i should also note that long island is the place that new jerseyans love to make fun of.

― Mein bester Freund, die Kackwurst, wird bis zu einem Meter groß. (Eisbaer), Monday, September 7, 2009 8:54 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

lol me before "jersey shore" hit the airwaves.

Didn't they use that exact Mormon photo for the 'worst dressed cities' SLC entry barely a week ago? Lazy.

also ... WHERE RUTGERS AT? how can the State University of Guido Central NOT be in a top-10 douchiest college list?!?

(nb: i'm a Rutgers alum)

trick question: all colleges are douchey

that said, U Delaware has ALWAYS been the repository of NJers too douchey even for the Garden State.

i went to USC and it was pretty damn douchy at times, but given its size and lack of uniform doughiness i guess i see the rationale behind its non-inclusion

Never been prouder of my alma mater.

me either

i didn't know cornell was douchey

cornell people the least douchey ivy-leagues I've met other than maybe columbia people

leaguers

I think they're just happy to be in the club

i think their alleged douchiness lies in not being taken seriously by other Ivies or the world-at-large.

my Ivy douche vote would've been U. Penn, mainly b/c of Wharton and the army of douchebags it spits out into the world each year.

nobody gonna argue w/ penn

also, let's face it if Cornell weren't Ivy it would just be another Colgate or Hamilton (both of which also had kinda douchey reputations when i was still in college). i.e., just another overpriced undergrad school in the middle of upstate NY.

i went to the cornell safety school/nearby public university for kids who couldn't afford cornell. i've only ever met one cornell grad i'd consider a douche; they're mostly pretty chill.

most of the known graduates of my school are undoubtedly douches, sadly

I went to undergrad long enough ago that I have no idea how accurate its douche rating actually is. Also I was really drunk so.

cornell really ain't that bad, princeton always had the worst ivy-ites ime

otm

us douche and world report:

1. penn
2. princeton
3. dartmouth
4. harvard
5. yale
6. brown
7. columbia
8. cornell

yalies were way douchier than harvardians!

yalies' false humility ups the douchery

harvard being in a 2nd tier of douche just seems inexplicable