LOL. I was actually waiting for oldguyfc to jump on this, but since you've brought it up, UIC would qualify as a fine place for the guy. It's not the elite institution that Futbol0020 would demand, but it's a Top 25 caliber college soccer program currently, is every bit as academically sound as St. John's, and is well suited for the ethnic background at issue here.
The guy asked for top soccer colleges in America, I guess my idea of the "top" is far narrower than others, and thats probably where most of the disagreement comes from. For me top means elite, and I like the letter the one guy wrote, because as we all know, what is considered the list of the best soccer colleges is not necessarily the list of the best fits for Icius (the original poster).
And if you include Penn State, then you definitely need to include PSU as the 3rd and another high-level academic and recently successful B10 school as the 2nd...
send von steeg at ucsb some of your info. he's receptive to open tryouts and loves international players. plus ucsb is the NATIONAL CHAMPS, plus the best party/intellectual school in the nation, plus our girls are always top ten in playboy, plus we are literally on the beach, plus we are way better than everyone else. yeah! gauchos!
Most?! It's where all of the disagreement comes from. You're the only poster on this board to have ever attempted to define the phrase "top soccer college" as being exclusively limited to "elite" academic institutions. If I didn't know better, I'd say that your space ship crash landed at Vanderbilt, and that you were held hostage as a desk ornament in Gordon Gee's office for a couple of semesters (an elite institution that dropped men's soccer, BTW). You'd have been better off by simply posting "...in the US, everyone knows that the pursuit of intellectual and career advancement is limited to a scant number of institutions of higher learning. At least, that's what they told me in prep school. So, if it's soccer you want to play, and elite you want to be, I strongly suggest that you limit your inquiries to (...list appropriate elite institutions that sponsor men's soccer). Good luck to you, and I hope that you enjoy the voyage here, as well as the steerage class accomodations."
You do not have to get so dramatic about it. When there are 200 D1 soccer programs, and the guys asks for TOP, I assume he's shooting for somewhere in the TOP 5-10 percent. That leaves 10-20 soccer teams, and whether he's looking for the top 10-20 academic colleges with soccer or the 10-20 best soccer programs in the US, either way its going to be a short list. If he had said, what are the top 50 or 100 soccer colleges or asked what are your average, ordinary, run of the mill good but not great soccer programs, then I wouldn't have drawn such stern restrictions on what schools should be included. Ease up.
Thanks for thinking of me. My grandmother was from Lith., and there is a large Lugan contingent in Chicago. The Lith's have been in the Metro League in the Chicago area for a long time and play at the Lith. Grounds in Lemont, which is actually the center of the Lugan world in Chicago. Good luck to the kid, if he really exists. UIC certainly has one of the largest foreign contingents in Div 1 soccer; let's see, 4 Serbs, 2 Bosnians, 1 from Mali, 1 from England, 1 from Poland, Zambrano's parents are from Mexico, I may have missed someone. Hey, what's one more.
Oh yea, Alexi Korol, the 2nd assistant, is from the Ukraine. What many people don't realize around the country is that Chicago is the most diverse European city in America. Poles, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Lith's, Ukrainians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Irish, Germans, Albanians, Italians, you name it, you've got a soccer club for it. Some of these ethnics are the largest contingents outside of their native capitals in the world. This city runs on it's ethnicity. Not to mention the Hispanic population that participates in two huge Hispanic Leagues. It's a great city for soccer, too bad the Fire hasn't figured this out yet.
Oldguy knows his stuff, I am pretty sure Chicago contains the 2nd largest Polish population in the world. Chicago holds 1.5 million Poles within its metropolitan area. Warsaw (the capital of Poland) is the largest population of Poles, as it is a roughly 3 million person city.
Of course, if they'd have known what was good for them, they'd be playing at Northwestern, Duke or Virginia.
final point on wvu.... team is only successful right now because of illegal recruting that was done... now about the academics...i dont care who you are and what your profession may be, WVU is among the easiest universities in the country to get into. its border lined with a community college that provides housing in my eyes..school is a fallback school for everyone who didnt get into the school they wanted
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, I suppose. But you might consider the Washington Monthly national rankings, which ranks US universities relative to educational performance, and across a more student oriented spectrum that includes research, community service, actual graduation rates, and committment to low income education, among other things. Things like endowment size and alumni base aren't major factors, as they are in the USNWR rankings. Using that measure, WVU was among the top 75 public universities, and basically in the 50th percentile of the 245 universities in the WM rankings. They were ranked higher than 21 schools in the USNWR top 125 (where only 1/2 are public institutions anyway). www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.national.html
Thank you for a different perspective, but let's be honest these rankings are ridiculous: Penn State is the # 3 school in the country? Texas A&M is the #5? SOUTH CAROLINA STATE #9? I have never even heard of it.... Alabama A&M #24? University of Illinois #16 vs. Northwestern University #42??? Penn State #3 vs. Penn #30???? Harvard #28???? Princeton #43????? I mean Dsocc, let's be honest, common sense tells you these rankings are in no way credible. I understand you want us to get a different perspective than USNWR, but this makes me like USNWR that much more knowing that the alternative rankings that we should be considering are as outrageous as this. And even still, West Virginia sits at 139. Please tell me you don't actually agree with these rankings.
Well, when someone whose posts establish him as being in no way credible says that someone else is "in no way credible," I guess we have to grant a degree of credibility on this particular issue. I mean, when it comes to being in no way credible, you've established yourself as an expert.
No Joe Paterno, no Happy Valley cheerleaders, West Philly crime, 3x the tuition, and 27 rankings the worse. Christ Almighty, I sure chose the wrong Penn.
What evidence do you have of recruiting violations besides the Stevens case? Since Stevens did not play for WVU in 2006 how did they benefit from this violation?
They actually went to the trouble of re-ranking the USNWR schools by eliminating the USNWR weighting factors (especially the peer assessment, where the greatest weight - 25% - is allocated to how each school rates other schools - plenty of fluff there). They also factor graduation rates much more highly than USNWR (where it's only 5% of the score), as well as discount financial resources and alumni giving (15% of the USNWR score). Seems reasonable enough to create a list that describes institutions more in accordance with their academic records, accessibility to low income students, and committment to community service and research, than it is to what they think about each other and how much money they can raise. Frankly, it's the uninformed perpetuation of the nonsense in those USWNR rankings that's helped make a collegiate education almost completely unaffordable for the majority of the US adult population. Of course, the good news is, those who can afford college will enjoy a lifetime of benefits at the expense of the 70% of the population who weren't as fortunate. Eliteness is, as eliteness does, I suppose.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.methodology.html Did you read their criteria? They actually take into account things that are not obvious and that don't fit quite so easily on glossy brochures. For example... We settled on two primary goals in our methodology. First, we considered no single category to be more important than any other. Second, the final rankings needed to reflect excellence across the full breadth of our measures, rather than reward an exceptionally high focus on, say, research. For those who don't know, they're talking about faculty research, which can benefit the education of undergraduates, but more typically, it just forces professors to spend more time on research and publication than on teaching. Another interesting criteria was community service: We determined the Community Service score by measuring each school's performance in three different areas: the percentage of its students enrolled in the Army and Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps; the percentage of its alumni who are currently serving in the Peace Corps; and the percentage of its federal work-study grants devoted to community service projects. Most interesting of all (and this could account for South Carolina State scoring so well) is the "social mobility score." The Social Mobility score is more complicated. We have data that tells us the percentage of a school's students on Pell Grants, which is a good measure of a school's commitment to educating lower-income kids. But, while we'd also like to know how many of these students graduate, schools aren't required to track those figures. Still, because lower-income students at any school are less likely to graduate than wealthier ones, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients is a meaningful indicator in and of itself. If a campus has a large percentage of Pell Grant students—that is to say, if its student body is disproportionately poor—it will tend to diminish the school's overall graduation rate. Last year, using data from all of our schools, we constructed a formula (using a technique called regressional analysis) that predicted a school's likely graduation rate given its percentage of students on Pell. Because this formula disproportionately rewarded more academically exclusive schools (whose students were high achievers and inherently more likely to graduate), however, our formula this year has been altered to predict a school's likely graduation rate given its percentage of Pell students and its average SAT score. (Since most schools only provide the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of scores, we took the mean of the two.) Schools that outperform their forecasted rate score better than schools that match or, worse, undershoot the mark.In addition, we added a second metric to our Social Mobility score by running a regression that predicted the percentage of students on Pell Grants based on SAT scores. This indicated which selective universities (since selectivity is highly correlated with SAT scores) are making the effort to enroll low-income students. The two formulas were weighted equally So if your parents are already wealthy, you probably won't want to go to South Carolina State. But if you're from a low-income family and went to a not particularly good secondary school, then the education you receive at South Carolina State might do more good things for you than going to Yale or Duke, where you'd likely be socially marginalized and academically behind those who went to better-funded schools (if not actual prep schools). But after four years, if the Washington Monthly studies are to be believed, the student might have made up for the lost time his or her less-privileged background bestowed upon them. Which gets to the main point: there are really no absolute rankings of colleges. Pretending there are is misleading. However, there are ways to assess colleges, and the methods employed by Washington Monthly are a lot more practical and useful than USN&WR. That doesn't mean they're absolute, either, but they do measure un-prestigious things that give credit some un-prestigious universities for doing the grunt-work of higher education. Which comes back to my point the whole time... it is much easier to figure out which colleges have the better soccer teams: you just put them on the field and have them play for 90 minutes, and you'll have a rough idea of how they stack up. But education is much more complex than any game, and impossible to measure in any absolute way.
Are you in the States temporarily or a resident? If a resident and your son is pretty good you might want to hook up with a club team. My son's club has a 100% placement rate for high schoolers to the college of their choice. It can cost you a couple of thousand dollars for one year of dues and travel to games but if he is accepted and plays for a good club the investment is well worth the money. It doesn't cost anything to try out anyway. If he is good enough a scholarship may be offered....