You realize I never claimed you will not find someone outside the B12 in your neighborhood right? I will give you a personal example. My graduating class in HS was around 500. I can tell you for sure that not a single person went to college in the SEC from my graduating class. Zero. There were an army who went to the SWC. I'm old. So for me, I grew up with someone who went to just about every old SWC school. This is how we are culturally connected in a way that I could never be with someone who grew up in the old SEC. I'm not saying this because I think we need to go back or I am sad about it it's just a fact.

Cinco Ranch Aggie said:

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Just look at where your friends and neighbors went to school

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Here in my little neck of Cinco Ranch (Katy), I have a t-sip, a Red Raider, two families of Swamp Kitties, a Pittsburgh grad, an OU family, and I believe a family with ties to the northeast, perhaps Boston U, in addition to the two Aggie families on my street. In my overall neighborhood, I've seen three Alabama yard signs, one UT, some pig people, several more Swamp Kitties, several more t-sips (one of which the dad went to UK/grad in Austin, the mom went to the Naval Academy, the oldest is currently at A&M, the middle child is about to start at Texas State, and the youngest is just starting high school but loves her dad's burned orange stuff). Of course we're going to have a lot of Big 12 types, being in Texas, but I'm not seeing any Jayhawks or Wildcats around here.

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I'm in Cinco too...always wondered where you lived. I'm in Greenway Village

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SEC 2012 said:

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A&M has more in common with UCLA than LSU. My goodness LSU is a community college with a football program. UCLA is a world class university.

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Yeah, but A&M and Auburn were separated at birth. Couldn't be two schools more alike.

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Auburn is a little A&M. The character of the people and the campuses is very similar.

Auburn has good people. One of my backup schools.

Also for those of you that think A&M or college station is conservative boy do I have some ocean from property in Arizona to sell to you

Texas A & M said:

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TAMU bball fan said:

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Texas A&M is probably not as suburban and conservative as some of you remember. Today the student body is roughly 50% white and nearly 25% hispanic. Only point being that's it's a much more diverse university than it was only a few years ago, mostly due to Sharp and Young's efforts to recruit inner city schools as described below to fulfill A&M's land grant mission.

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When you are recruiting first-generation students, and in particular blacks and Hispanics, you are also recruiting their families," said Christine Stanley, A&M's vice president for diversity.

A&M has also stepped up its financial aid. It created a new scholarship for low-income, first generation students. It now offers additional aid to National Hispanic Scholars and recipients of the National Achievement Scholarships, which are awarded to black students. And it expanded its Century Scholars Program, which was created in 1996 to recruit students from 40 specific minority-majority schools in Dallas and Houston. Now, the program has been expanded to more than 100 schools and has increased its annual recipients from fewer than 50 students per year to about 400.

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The engineering academies were part of the push for diversity and low income students as well. A&M will be a minority majority campus by 2020.

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It certainly helps that most of those students get full rides for a factor over which they had no control. Some of those students were mine --- as I am a professor who sees how things from the parent-student-counselor-community college perspective. Fortunately (and SO FAR), the students I have seen "recruited" are stellar students who will perpetuate A&M's good reputation.

azulAg said:

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Auburn has good people. One of my backup schools.

Also for those of you that think A&M or college station is conservative boy do I have some ocean from property in Arizona to sell to you

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This. I graduated over a decade ago and moved back to CS for a few years recently. It is a radically different school than many of y'all went to. Radically different enough that I will no longer be upset if my kids choose a different institution (although there aren't many conservative schools left). If this current presidential election was left up to only the student body of A&M, I would bet my life savings trump wouldn't see a second term.

That being said, I still love Aggie football, and love the SEC because culture means a lot more than just your academic prowess. Most academic powerhouses lost all semblance of common sense decades ago. I really could give a damn less where you rank academically if all of your students come out I'll prepared for real life.

In my 38 + yrs in the Oil and Gas Industry my observation is that the closest analog to A & M grads are LSU grads both professionally and culturally. Admittedly that is Majorly biased towards Engineering types.

Good, bad, or indifferent that is what I have seen.

2 of the 3 best bosses I have had were LSU grads. The best was a La Tech grad.

we really shouldn't talk about academic ranking since we been tanking ever since the past 30 years...

we were ranked highest was maybe 48th when I was there in the mid-1980s to the 1990's and since been dropping like a rock...

Personally I blame Manziel and the sec move

Texas A & M said:

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The athletics over academics culture is specific to LSU, not the SEC.

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Of the nine schools in the Southeastern Conference with separate foundations for athletics and academics, LSU is the only one where athletic fundraising outpaces academic fundraising, according to the newspaper's analysis of four years of tax documents.

"If you look at the buildings of LSU, all of the newest and most spectacular buildings belong to athletics," said Kevin Cope, president of the Faculty Senate. "Meanwhile, there are faculty, students and community members who work in buildings where the plumbing doesn't work, walls are falling down and the facilities are generally in a state of Third World disrepair."

Not only do LSU's peer schools take in more money for academics than for sports it isn't even close for most of them. The University of Florida, Mississippi State, the University of Georgia, Auburn and the University of South Carolina all raise more than twice as much money for the classroom as for the locker room.

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This is actually starting to change. The new engineering buildings and honors college building along with student dorms are very impressive. There is a ways to go but it is on the upswing. Unfortunately much of the states budget is tied to the price of crude oil and politicians have never been good at moderation so everytime there is a big swing education is one of the areas that get hit first.

Had a high school senior that toured every college within about 1,000 miles. When he returned from LSU he said with amazement, Tarleton state has a nicer engineering building being built than LSU had at the time.

I have no clue what those buildings look like and he could have been a little dramatic in saying that. He ended up penn state, somehow.

BaileyAg said:

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I'm in Cinco too...always wondered where you lived. I'm in Greenway Village

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Meadow Green, right across Highland Knolls from you.

TAMU bball fan said:

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Wabs said:

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Most, if not all, cajuns don't look at LSU as a school. They look at it as a football program. In short, they couldn't care less about academic facilities.

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Which made me apprehensive about A&M joining the SEC. It's not a cultural fit. I would rather associate with UCLA, Stanford, et al.

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Hell fuggin NO to this.

OrygunAg said:

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Libraries are relics. I dont think I stepped foot in sterling my entire time as a student and that was 20 years ago.

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Yep. I think I went into Evans 2, maybe 3 times total.

And honestly, if it were imploded (not Cushing, Evans only) and a building that wasn't the child of a butthole and an ugly butthole built in it's place, we'd all be better off.

It's a tight race between Evans and Langford for the ugliest building on campus. Some of the newer buildings are catching up as well too. Why we can't go Greek revival (hell, rebuild Guion Hall!) and stick with a classic good looking architectural style is beyond me. Instead we consistently choose the ugliest designs we can, then go build them.

schmellba99 said:

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OrygunAg said:

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Libraries are relics. I dont think I stepped foot in sterling my entire time as a student and that was 20 years ago.

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Yep. I think I went into Evans 2, maybe 3 times total.

And honestly, if it were imploded (not Cushing, Evans only) and a building that wasn't the child of a butthole and an ugly butthole built in it's place, we'd all be better off.

It's a tight race between Evans and Langford for the ugliest building on campus. Some of the newer buildings are catching up as well too. Why we can't go Greek revival (hell, rebuild Guion Hall!) and stick with a classic good looking architectural style is beyond me. Instead we consistently choose the ugliest designs we can, then go build them.

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I agree. We went from ugly, old concrete to the ugliest version of modern buildings I've seen. Even something like Oklahoma state would be nice. At least there's uniformity and a style that won't age out. Our campus design team has absolutely no identity and it shows.

But at least they're LSU!