Colleges For Houston Preps

It should be said at the beginning that many, many Houston Preps leave the state of Texas for great colleges all over the country. However, for just as many, if not more Houston preps, that intense Texas pride overrides their high GPAs and SAT scores, and while they may not be able to stay in Houston, they just can’t bring themselves to leave the Great State of Texas. So this article is a review of choices for Houston Preps in Texas. There are a lot of excellent colleges in Texas, but not that many choices for Preppy colleges. One might think Rice University to be one of those colleges, after all, it has a stellar academic reputation and a beautiful campus in one of the preppiest neighborhoods in Houston. But Rice has a couple of things against it. First, it has such a stellar academic reputation, it is pretty much the Harvard of Texas. Remember what The Official Preppy Handbook says about the Ivy League on page 86. Like Harvard, students at Rice are selected largely for academic achievement. This gives Rice a more studious character. Second, whether a contributor or an effect of this studious character, Rice has no Greek system, no fraternities or sororities. Instead, Rice students are sorted into coed “houses” their freshman year, much like being sorted into Griffindor or Slytherin at Hogwarts, and they stay a member of that house all four years. It’s an interesting system, and Rice has an interesting social life all its own, but it’s really not Prep in character.

Without a doubt, the most Preppy college in Texas is Southern Methodist University (SMU), which straddles University Park and Highland Park, two wealthy, very Preppy autonomous municipalities surrounded by the City of Dallas. SMU has everything: beautiful, leafy campus with Georgian brick buildings, a raucous Greek system, wealthy, attractive students, and a great tailgating culture around a mediocre football team. Sadly, though, the once regionally-decent sailing team has lapsed into inactivity, waiting for some enterprising young Houston Prep who spent his summers at Texas Corinthian Yacht Club to reactivate it.

SMU’s crosstown rival Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth is a fairly close second for Preppiest Texas College. Incidentally, the 102 year old TCU-SMU football rivalry, which TCU has dominated over the last 30 years, is called “The Iron Skillet Battle”, and the trophy is an actual iron skillet. TCU pretty much has everything SMU has in preppy credentials, just to a slightly lesser degree.

One might not think that the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s premiere public research university, would have Preppy cred, but the truth is, socially, there is not one, but two UTs. One UT is that of the pot-smoking anthropology majors and international students studying chemical engineering and biochemistry, and the other is the UT of the fraternities and sororities, the Cowboys, and a student body that was perfecting the preppy look at least 5 years before the OPH was telling everyone else in the country how to do it.

Note that while there are groups of preppies at every school, even University of Houston, most Texas schools don’t qualify as preppy for one reason or another, for instance, Baylor is still a little too religious despite allowing dancing for 25+ years now, and Texas A&M, well, it’s just too Aggie, a quality that combines redneck pride with the fervor of an apocalyptic cult.