Why do you make so many assumptions in your posts?
The only thing I'm assuming, and that's only after teaching at the university level for a decade is that along the lines of Bob Seger singing 'wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then' that few single decisions will impact the rest of your life the way your choice of college (and how well you do there) does, and few people make that choice for any of the right reasons. Where the college actually is physically located is a pretty negative value to factor in. And I'll tell you why, the more you like where you are, the more exciting the place and all that, the harder it's going to be to do good work. My parents set down two rules for me picking a college, nether of them seemed to make sense to me then, but seem absolutely brilliant now. One: it had to be at least 500 miles from home.* Two: I had to wait (and work) for one year after high school before I went.
Waiting and working for a year gave me two good things. First of all, after a year of working at Jack-in-the-Box there was no amount of work I wasn't willing to do in order to insure that I'd never have to work in that kind of job ever again. Second, though I did big pile of college tours my senior year they were sales jobs. That off year I got to go visit a lot of my friends at their colleges, and watch people I knew well do their first year hither, dither, and yon. and that gave me a lot more information to base my decision on. One thing I noticed is that the people I knew who went to real cool exciting places like University of Colorado at Boulder, or UCLA, or Columbia all flunked out by the end of the first year because they were having too much fun skiing, or hanging on the beach, or living in NYC to study. The more time you spend off-campus, the less school work you're doing.
I had a lot of help from my high school teachers in choosing the kind of school I wanted to go to, and then finding it. I really wanted a hard-core, classical education which was fast-disappearing even then (1974) and is all but non-existent today. I wanted a place with real academic requirements. Like having to take English Comp first semester freshmen year. We had one writing assignment every week (so 15 or so), if you had five mistakes (grammar, usage, spelling) on a paper (and not even 'more than five' they stopped reading at that point, because why bother, you obviously didn't) you got an 'F', and 3 'F's and you failed the course, and if you failed that course you failed out of school. I'm not sure it taught me crap about writing, other courses would do that. But it made everyone on my dorm floor first rate proofreaders for ourselves and each other in very rapid order and it set a base standard for our work that continued through the 4 years. I also wanted small classes, not huge lectures. I wanted teachers teaching me and grading my papers who were full professors with the PhD and all, and not some disgruntled grad/ex-grad ABD student. And I wanted a campus small enough that I didn't need to take a bus between classes. Small enough, and close enough that I could go to class in my bathrobe and slippers if I wanted to. (and I did). And I wanted them to have a first rate fine arts program. And I wanted a place where I could be an adult, not a place acting in loco parentis which is how lots of places were then.
And, I knew that in order for me to do well I needed a pretty boring place. So I wound up getting accepted at 4 places, Notre Dame University, Bowdoin College, St. John's College (the Annapolis one, not the NYC one), and Drake University. I cut ND and St Johns off the list because I was pretty much over Catholic school by then (12 years), and wanted a more secular education, and though I was wrong about St. Johns, I wasn't about ND. So, Bowdoin College or Drake? The weather in both places sucks big time, so that was about equal, but Bowdoin was next to a Navy base and that seemed a huge negative, and the area is absolute beautiful and that scared me too.
But Drake, Drake is in Des Moines Iowa. You know how Kurt Vonnegut described how boring Indianapolis was by saying a year there was "the 500-mile Speedway Race, and then 364 days of miniature golf?" Well Des Moines didn't have a race, or miniature golf. There was absolutely nothing to do. Nothing. Ever. Studying never looked more interesting and exciting than it does in Des Moines. I didn't care about what the cultural/political/social climate in Des Moines was, I wasn't going to really be associating with Des Moines at all, hell I barely ever left the little neighborhood the school was in. And out of the 4 Drake's College of Fine Arts was world-class, much, much better than the others.
Which is the second point. Colleges and Universities are like vehicles and they range from Ferraris in full race tuning to tricycles without wheels. It makes a huge difference in how far you go and how fast you get there. And it's a program by program deal, not an overall thing. So what you want to study - and how well people from there do after they get out - should be the most important factor in choosing between options. Lots of colleges have film programs. I'm sure lots of them are just swell. But if your serrious about working in the movie industry there are really only three, USC School of Cinematic Arts, American Film Institute Conservatory in LA, and The Tisch School of the Arts for Film and Television at New York University. Everything else is just something less. And out of those something less ones, about 4 more are OK, and the rest are more or less a joke. UC (Berkeley) here in the SF Bay Area is one of the most prestigious universities in the world and in the history of higher education. In areas like Physics, Math, and applied sciences it's pretty much second to none. But for things like English Lit, or History, or Political Science it's not even in the running. Harvard and Yale are both world renowned. In law, political science and history they are about the best ever. But in something like acting, well Yale is awesome, Harvard a joke. And so it goes. which is why it's so important to choose by the excellence of the program of study you want, not where it is.
Besides - and this is important - just because the place is liberal or conservative does not mean the college is. Des Moines is about as 'Heartland-Christian-Insurance Capitol-Republican' as it gets. But Drake was one of the first colleges that had co-ed dorms, and the year before I got there had completely abolished it's Student Code of Conduct for everything except academic conduct stuff like cheating and plagiarism. And that was done by all honor code in the first place. Never once in 4 years had any professor or proctor monitor any test I took. I had to write on the cover of the blue book "I promise not to give or receive aid during the taking of this test" and that was it. BTW, never heard of anyone cheating either. In state schools, it's rampant. And without all the other personal conduct rules the campus atmosphere was anything but 'Heartland-Christian-Insurance Capitol-Republican' - in fact, it was more liberal than the San Francisco I had come there from.
* - That was to encourage me to grow up and learn to live on my own, and not be in a position to drag my laundry home every weekend so mom could do it while I hung out with my 'home town honey' and all the low-lives who weren't doing dick with their lives. The result was that I deeply and truly became part of the student academic community, and not just someone who showed up and took classes. It was the most important difference in terms of really learning.
