Most beautiful college campus (including the surrounding town.)

Alden University, Corinth

Princeton, easily.

Cambridge. In US, the prettiest campuses aren’t necessarily the prettiest towns. I like UVA and Cornell but not “most beautiful”

Of course r2. It’s really the obvious answer and only answer, since nowhere else in the US has an equally idyllic campus and town.

UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles.

St. Louis University

Trump University.

Isn't this a very subjective thread?

Washington University in St Louis.

"St. Louis University."

Thanks for your opinion, Father Biondi. You never do pass up a chance to pat yourself on the back. We all knew you were deeply closeted anyway. No straight man has his own personal tanning bed.

While your campuses are OK, the very fact that you destroyed the surrounding neighborhoods by buying buildings at dirt cheap prices, tearing them down, then planting grass seed so they look like no man's land is unforgivable.

Getting rid of adjacent blacks, browns and poors neighborhoods just so wealthy, white Catholic kids (or their parents) from Des Moines, Omaha and Wichita won't feel threatened is really a travesty.

Brown ...I swoon whenever I walk through that campus. And Providence is a fabulous smaller city.

Bloomington, IN

Another vote for Princeton. The town is beautiful because it's old, and rich enough to afford the upkeep. But the campus is worth a tourist excursion for its own sake. It's gorgeous.

Southern Methodist University - as long as you are White, beautiful, expensive, and safe.

College of William & Mary - Colonial Williamsburg is at its doorstep:

College of Charleston - nothing like an esplanade of Live Oaks dripping with Spanish Moss set in a gorgeous city.

University of Colorado, Boulder:

Ithaca is Gorges!

r18, that's true... and Cornell has some interesting architecture on campus.

The University of Miami's campus is tropical and magnificent. It is within the City of Coral Gables, just southwest of the Miami City Limits. Coral Gables is a beautiful community.

R9 I had no business whatsoever going to Washington U but chose it because of the campus architecture and my older sister was already there. I flunked out in 1.5 years!

Transylvania University In Lexington, Ky.

I love Williams College and its location in western Massachusetts.

I don't like universities like Yale, Princeton, and Duke that have fake gothic architecture.

There is something Disney about those campuses. It's like being on a movie set.

R23 I’ve seen their dorms...they look like state school dorms.

Once vote for Pepperdine.

University of California Santa Barbara

University of Michigan

I'll second the votes for Pepperdine and UC-Boulder

Colgate U usually wins most beautiful campus contests.

The University of the South, Sewanee, TN

UNC. Chapel Hill is a lovely town.

R31 a cold, rural upstate NY town? Meh. That doesn’t scream “charming” to me.

If we’re gonna go cold, then Hanover is a much nicer more charming town, and Dartmouth is quite a pretty campus.

R33 yeah but the school looks like, well, what it is...a state school.

It’s probably the idea collage town I agree with that, but we’re taking about schools that have “both” and UNC buildings and dorms are absolutely nothing special, there’s a very institutional feel many of the buildings/areas.

The University of Montana, Missoula

Princeton U. yes, but anyone who's been there knows the attractive part of "the town" is Nassau Street and a few small side streets with boutiques. I visit every Christmas season, when the charm is maximized.

Flagler College: St. Augustine, Florida

R28 - nah - outside of being on the coast, there's nothing special about UCSB campus. And it's too remote for my taste. It's in Goleta for crying out loud - which is nothing to write about.

UC San Diego is much better.

Bryn Mawr and Haverford are beautiful campuses in beautiful, wealthy towns. And a 20 minute train ride to center city Philly and the gayborhood.

R37 it’s also RICH. Which most of these college towns aren’t.

When stores like J McLaughlin, Hamilton Jewelers , etc opened up shops, they were in: Greenwich, Southampton, Palm Beach, and yes, Princeton.

Students don’t really “hang out” in the town, though. Even something like Greenwich Ave is much more of “hangout” with all its fun restaurants etc. Social life is 100 percent on campus.

Antioch, Yellow Springs, OH

Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches, LA

Montevallo University, Montevallo, AL

Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

I'm going with UCLA since it's been in so many movies and has a nice blend of old and new. I just love that campus.

Dartmouth is quite picturesque .

Cornell has waterfalls, gorges, and is huge.

I think Harvard is pretty lovely. And so is the town.

Salve Regina in Newport RI occupies a string of former mansions along the coast

Amherst

Drew University

R32, agree.

Sewanee is the most beautiful university campus I have ever been on.

Its buildings are built from local stone. And there is nothing like it in the Fall, Winter and Spring.

It also has the Gown thing in the British tradition. And it’s isolated on a mountaintop. (If you’re into that sort of thing.)

For locales, UC Santa Barbara is pretty stupendous. Surfing Right out the back door. Also, the University of WA (Western Australia). Have seen dolphins from the campus (in the Swan).

Yale is okay. As is UCLA. Don’t believe either is worth writing home about. (Perhaps that’s what happens when you attend them.)

Mississippi Beauty College! Only the best and brightest get to attend this stately institution!

Some of these are ludicrous. IU has some nice old buildings and the struggling downtown of Bloomington is nice, but most of the campus is dull and unremarkable with the use of local limestone. Michigan State probably has the nicest Big 10 campus, although it’s not a competitor to Princeton or Cornell.

UCSD also has a very bland campus.

UCLA is lush and beautiful, although the new Conference center seems like a shopping mall and creates a poor gateway.

Chapel Hill is boring and the UNC campus is nothing special.

Yale is a mishmash, with some ugly modern buildings. Harvard has more character.

University of Kansas (KU) situated on top of Camponile Hill above Lawrence. I’ve been to several campuses across the country including Stanford, Sarah Lawrence, UMaine, etc. and KU is my favorite.

Thank you, R53, for mentioning KU! I grew up in Lawrence and graduated from KU. And while it is frequently cited as the prettiest in the Big 12, I wasn't expecting to see it in this post, so it was a nice surprise.

That said, my top choices would be Cornell, Princeton, Elon University in Elon, NC and the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

Princeton in NJ and UVA in Charlottesville, VA. In my opinion. But there are several.

Pepperdine’s views are unreal.

Stanford/Palo Alto

[quote]Ithaca is Gorges!

And they have remedial courses in elementary spelling, R18!

R58, you're showing your ignorance.

For R58...

Perhaps remedial shopping will help?

Poor R58! Really showing a lack of knowledge!

Totally agree with R24 about the fake Disney gothic of Princeton. The town itself is nothing special except for townies from less prosperous areas of central and south jersey for whom it’s a destination. The traffic is horrendous and there is nowhere to hang out as a student. Most of the campus’ newer buildings are unremarkable husks for the booming science and engineering programs.

Middlebury College

Got rejected, huh, r62?

Wellesley. Campus and town.

Dartmouth.

How's Brandeis. My friend April went there. She's pushy.

+1 for pepperdine and salve regina.

University of Chicago.

Architecture was based on Oxford.

R69 but it’s such a miserable school.

U of Chicago is beautiful indeed. I was there for my nephew's graduation. Lovely.

Dartmouth is nice, whatever happened to those Hovey murals?

Princeton

R67 Waltham? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. April had nothing to push against.

There used to be a tranny boutique downtown on Moody Street, but then the neighborhood went to hell.

Northwestern. I live near it. It’s beautiful. Right on Lake Michigan.

My alma mater Emory Univ. in Atlanta. Beautiful campus.

Another Emory view from above.

Washington and Lee

The West Point campus is great. Beautiful views of the Hudson

Darmouth

University of Richmond, Rhodes College and Lehigh University.

Penn State has some nice views of the mountains

1636, bitches. 1636.

University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The university is seriously unbelievable, and Charlottesville is stunning - right near the Blue Ridge mountains. My sister lives there, and every time I go, i keep thinking I want to move there.

La Sorbonne

Cambridge

University of Bologna

[quote] Totally agree with [R24] about the fake Disney gothic of Princeton. The town itself is nothing special except for townies from less prosperous areas of central and south jersey for whom it’s a destination. The traffic is horrendous and there is nowhere to hang out as a student. Most of the campus’ newer buildings are unremarkable husks for the booming science and engineering programs.

This is the bitterest post I've seen in a long time.

Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.

Another vote for Amherst.

There's a LOT of beautiful college campuses. A lot of those small Ohio colleges have really beautiful campuses.

Trump University.

[quote]Darmouth

Oh, dear.

Ohio University

When I was applying to colleges I visited Brown, Princeton, Harvard, but Cornell was by far the best campus and area. The buildings and quads are beautiful and it sits on a hill overlooking a beautiful lake, there's also a lot to do off campus, a lot of nice restaurants, for ex., unlike Hanover.

University of California at Santa Cruz

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

More hate for Princeton here. The campus feels like a bunch of random buildings dropped into a field, with no real effort to create a sense of space in the landscape. It only looks its best when driving by or through it at 28 mph; most of the buildings don't stand up to close examination. Firestone Library is a particularly egregious example -- a dreary 1940s/50s institutional building with some half-hearted gothic decoration pasted on the exterior. The Cram buildings (chapel, Rockefeller College, and the old Graduate college) are the only genuinely good gothic revival bits.

The town itself is really just an outdoor mall (mostly national chains) surrounded by depressing suburban sprawl. The handful of genuinely nifty old WASPy folks are vastly outnumbered by hordes of godawful new rich boomers who are full of themselves because their vinyl-clad tract mansions have a Princeton mailing address.

Vassar is gorgeous but shitty town. Like Yale. Cornell is a gorgeous campus, WITH views, and dramatic landscape, and a good town. Brown? No, I went to Brown. Its an elegant LITTLE campus, not much green, few quads. Providence has some elegant old wooden mansions. There are a dozen of small gorgeous colleges all over. From old New England to places like Santa Cruz.

U of Chicago does have a nice campus, although it's lacking a certain spark.

Emory? you've got to be kidding. Nothing special. Plus the fanciest clad buildings have the cheapest interiors.

Pepperdine has a beautiful setting but a non-descript campus.

Ohio U has some nice old buildings a nd a cute downtown. they redid the ancient mental hospital as part of the campus.

U of Chicago is in an awful part of town. Carry a gun.

I've never been to Sewanee but it does look cozy and pretty. My cousin went to Salve Regina. The setting is nice. Newport isn't much of a college town. Salve Regina kind of feels like a prep school, not a college. I went to Sorbonne. I thought we weren't including cities? Obviously medieval and renaissance universities in gorgeous European cities have atmosphere. Universidad de Salamanca is beyond fabulous as are parts of Oxford and Cambridge.

Emory does not have a particularly beautiful campus. It's a hodgepodge of unremarkable buildings.

Emory is in a nice area, but agreed, the buildings are fairly unremarkable.

Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Smith in Northampton and Amherst College in Amherst,

That Pioneer Valley setting is just gorgeous, R102 - and all those schools benefit because of it. Even UMass is a nice place to be, even if nearly all the buildings themselves are nothing special at all

Berry College in Rome, Georgia is regarded by many as the most beautiful college campus in the nation.

It is very nice, R104. I don't particularly like that stone/brick style. But, it all looks lovely.

R104 and yet 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Berry College. Was it founded by Count Franken Berry?

I believe the question was "most beautiful college campus", not "most beautiful well known college campus".

regarded by many = ?

I dated two people who went to Berry. I don't remember the Duke-wannabee-Cambridge-wannabee architecture.

It is a lovely, bucolic setting.

Middlebury College in Vermont

So many beautiful locations. I got a job offer in Princeton after college and I was very tempted to relocate from Washington. Ah the path not taken. I thought I'd get bored at that age.

My addition:

Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

[quote] regarded by many = ?

Yes, in the academic world, and in the rest of society who actually get out once in a while and see things and places that aren't what they consider "A list", Berry College is regarded as the most beautiful college campus in America.

The architecture at Stanford U is also quite beautiful.

I don’t understand the obsession with Princeton. Lots of horrid non-Gothic “modern” dated architecture - in New Jersey. The PA Main Line colleges have prettier campuses and nicer towns. The smaller older liberal arts colleges are always nicer than the large universities that are too big with too many mosh-mash buildings to be homogenously beautiful and have inserted horrid “modern for the time” architecture throughout their campuses.

Another vote for Smith-Mt Holyoke-Amherst in the Pioneer Valley, for the epitome of classic New England college towns/campuses. Umass, nearby, has some ugly brutalist architecture, but the town of Amherst is fantastic, and some of the buildings on the outskirts of campus are lovely.

Rice University in Houston

Beautiful campus in a beautiful part of Houston.

[quote]Yale is a mishmash, with some ugly modern buildings.

Fuck you, R52!

Boston College. The campus and the architecture are stunning and of course it’s near and a part of the beautiful suburban of Newton Massachusetts.

I think some of the top schools are very overrated in terms of their campuses/location including Stanford, which is big, sprawling, has a lot of trees, but the surrounding area isn’t that remarkable. Some of the prettiest campuses are lesser-known places.

Bucknell. The U is ok but Lewisburg is outstanding.

I thought my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz was beautiful.

I also like UC Berkeley, which is nice because it's right across the street and I have lovely views of it.

I also attended a summer program at Caltech. There are some old buildings that are often filmed for tv and movies, but the campus kind of reminds me of an industrial park.

The surrounding neighborhood was nice.

While they're nice, I don't think schools with a completely consistent architectural theme are the very best - and if the order and layout is too strict, that takes away from it. Rice would be my first example of this. Don't get me wrong, it's nice; it's lovely. But, it's almost too ordered.

Take a gander at Principia by Bernard Maybeck R122

UBC Vancouver (pictured). Has a nude beach, a Japanese garden, etc.

UC San Diego in La Jolla has a gorgeous location, although the buildings themselves are kind of ugly.

That Vancouver campus looks great. Principia looks like a school for Hobbits and Fairies.

R27 looks like a suburb.

USC wins most beautiful campus and town by a mile.

UC Blockeley

Principia's grounds are really nice.