Auburn University - Auburn, Alabama

Auburn University often competes with the University of Alabama for students, and although students at each school claim their school’s superiority, the two have a considerable amount in common. Both schools are known for their pre-professional and professional programs in majors such as Business, Marketing, and Engineering, and both are devoted to their football teams. Although UA’s honors program is perhaps better known, Auburn nonetheless admits outstanding students (GPA 3.5, ACT 29) into its Honors Curriculum. The program offers students the opportunity to participate in small, seminar-style classes that make use of the Socratic method, and also pair underclassmen with upperclass honors mentors. Students take the majority of honors classes in their junior and senior years and must complete a certain number of credit hours from honors core courses. Whenever students are given the opportunity to sign up for honors courses, they are expected to do so. The university also seeks to identify potential Rhodes, Mellon, Fulbright and Marshall scholars from the students in this program.

Aside from outstanding science programs, Auburn offers one of the strongest athletic programs in the South. The Tigers compete in the Division I Conference, and football is a perennial powerhouse. Auburn students are devoted followers of the Tigers, and football games are inevitably well attended. In addition, the university offers seven other men’s sports and eleven women’s. The university offers extensive support services to student athletes, including counseling and tutoring. Social life tends to revolve around the sorority and fraternity scene, but the university also offers more than three hundred clubs and other organizations, and students are always welcome to start new ones. Auburn also has a reputation as being somewhat more tolerant a campus than AU, although nowhere near to the extent of more open southern schools such as the University of Georgia or the University of North Carolina. Many of the out-of-state students come from Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs, which lends Auburn a more cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Students at Auburn enroll expecting to work hard and play hard. Like many other land grant institutions founded in the 19th century, Auburn has retained its focus on Agriculture and the natural sciences – Computer Science and related majors such as Information Technology and Software Engineering are among the strongest programs the university offers. Admission to Auburn is moderately difficult: in 2008, 12,000 out of 17,000 applicants were admitted, and most scored between 550 and 620 on both the Math and Critical Reading portions of the SAT. The average GPA for admitted students, however, was nearly 3.7. Although Auburn is quite large, with a total student population of over 20,000, the vast majority of these students (about 18,000) are undergraduates, with nearly all of those attending full time. Men outnumber women slightly, and the campus is predominantly white. About two-thirds of the students come from Alabama, while the remainder come mostly from the South; international enrollment is negligible, giving the school a strong Southern character.