The ultimate college experience is social and Southern.Right now, millions of high school seniors are finalizing their college applications and anticipating where they’ll spend the next four years studying and sleeping on bunk beds. If the most hashtagged universities on TikTok are any indication, a lot of them will be headed below the Mason-Dixon line.You’ve probably heard about #RushTok, the corner of TikTok where young women at mostly Southern schools post their way through sorority rush season. The University of Alabama’s sorority selection process, commonly known as Bama Rush, brought the phenomenon to the mainstream with an eponymous Netflix documentary and seemingly turned into a recruitment tool for the school itself. The draw of Southern campus life has spread well beyond the sorority set, however.Northerners are flocking to big Southern campuses in large numbers. From 2014 to 2023, the number of undergraduate students from the Northeast rose 91 percent at schools belonging to the Southeastern Conference (SEC), according to a recent Sunday Times report. That includes Alabama as well as the University of Tennessee and Ole Miss, which have all seen the number of Northeastern students grow by more than 500 percent from 2002 to 2022. Meanwhile, their recruitment offices are making more of an effort to target these students, as these publicly funded schools become more dependent on out-of-state dollars.
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33 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 6h
Anecdotally and observationally, I see this at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where the parking lots are a quarter full with cars from northern and western states. So much that I've asked a few students. They tell me it's the scholarships being offered.
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