Totally agree - Westwood could be fun, I guess but even that place isn't great a few blocks away from campus. USC is in a pretty rough area with nothing too redeeming close by. It's just stuck in an ugly part of LA. Pepperdine's campus is beyond amazing but the rules at the school make Providence look like a liberal melting pot commune like place. UC Santa Cruz and SDSU would be way better than any of the above.
But for the entire argument of pretty girls on campus as a draw, can you really find any D1 campus where, if you were the local rock star, you couldn't pull from a large enough pool of talent to be happy for 2 or 3 years?
Haha not to get off track, but as a Pepperdine grad, I can tell you that the rules are pretty routinely ignored and aren't crazy stringent anymore anyway. Besides, while kids looking to party like its Wisconsin-Madison might be turned off, having a dry campus doesn't keep as many students or recruits away when it is freely available off campus where most kids live anyway. Besides, the campus itself really does make up for short-comings in terms of wild night life. The problem with recruits is that the games are still played in a high school gym. Until the new arena gets built, the program will be stuck in neutral.
USC is in an awful section of the city, and actually competed with Pepperdine to get the land in Malibu back in the day. But while the area is a pit, the campus itself is great and has made itself a self-sustaining bubble within the city. Not much reason to leave campus when you go to USC and I never heard any complaints among USC kids. Westwood is great and I can't blame anyone for wanting to go to school at UCLA for that vibe. Certainly better than Storrs, but I know that's not necessarily the comparison being made.
And the overwhelming quality of the girls at either of those schools would certainly be a difference maker for those who care about such things when making their college decision, at least when compared to their northeastern counterparts. I say that from personal experience
