25 Hottest Schools

Hottest Small State School
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, N.Y.

Alicia Mejias chose SUNY New Paltz because it was just 90 minutes from her family in Brooklyn, didn't cost too much and had a step team. Her only concern was she'd be one of the few Hispanics on the rural campus of 6,400 undergrads. That worry was allayed by a rush of festivities that included Jam Asia, Carribash and Latino Week. "Since I was the first in my family to attend college," she says, "I didn't know what to expect." She concluded New Paltz was a place "where anyone should be able to grow." More first-generation college students are enrolling. The school recently opened a 57,000-square-foot Athletic and Wellness Center with an indoor track.

Hottest for Liberal Arts
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

Max Staller chose Princeton in 2004 because it met both his professional and his artistic needs. He wanted a career in scientific research, and the biology courses were perfect. But he's also pursued his interest in the arts by picking minors in theater and dance. Many of his classmates have, like him, both careerist and intellectual leanings. Junior Sarah Dajani loves it that "lampposts overflow with fliers advertising the next lecture by a Nobel laureate or performance by the French theater troupe." The emphasis lately is to make sure such opportunities are not confined to rich students who can afford them. The university has recently become one of very few to offer grants, not loans, to those who qualify for financial aid, with 54 percent of the incoming freshman class receiving on average $31,000 in grants apiece.

Hottest for First-Generation Students
Queens College (City University of New York), Queens, N.Y.

Although its families are becoming more affluent, Queens College remains a likely choice for students whose parents never went to college (38 percent of the student body). Its most celebrated recent fictional graduate is Ugly Betty—Betty Suarez—the working-class character played by America Ferrera on the ABC comedy. The school's biggest claim to fame is the several generations of lawyers, doctors and other professionals who could not afford the Ivies and say Queens changed their lives. It's still a bargain with tuition of $4,000. It looks nothing like the big city campuses of Manhattan. It has 77 acres of rolling lawns and a tree-lined Quad.

Hottest for Loving the Great Outdoors
St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's, Md.

This state school on the southern shores of Maryland has all the advantages of a small liberal-arts college without budget-breaking tuition. The academically rigorous school also has deep ties to nature. St. Mary's 1,900 undergrads take advantage of being on the St. Mary's River. "From sailing, swimming, fishing, beach bonfires, kayaking and crabbing to polar-bear swims, windsurfing, using a seine net for a bio class or just playing with the bioluminescent algae, the river is the single greatest stress reliever on campus," says junior Shane Hall. The sailing team won two national championships this year, and the May Day festivities were as raucous as usual. "Who wouldn't want to strip naked, paint themselves in psychedelic designs and colors, and bike through a crowd of several hundred people at high noon?" asks Hall.

Hottest Women's College
Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

With 2,800 students, Smith is the nation's largest women's college, and the first to start an engineering program. It is part of the Five Colleges consortium with nearby Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire and UMass Amherst. The facilities, particularly the cottage-style houses where students live in groups of 13 to 80, are so attractive that visitors originally preferring a coed college often change their minds. "Smith kind of won me over," says Katie Green, who thought she would go to a school with men. "When else in your life can you get the experience of being surrounded by smart, motivated young women who really care about what they're doing?"

Hottest Music School
Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y.

Eastman is heaven for instrumentalists, but students also get to study at the University of Rochester, of which it is a part. It's perfect for aspiring musicians who don't want to sacrifice academics. That's why bassist Erin McPeck of Aurora, Colo., chose Eastman; she's now planning a scholarly career in music research while working as a physics teaching intern at Rochester and participating in Eastman's Institute for Music Leadership. Applications were up 10 percent this year, more than the national average.