best anarchist colleges

I've heard Evergreen in Washington has quite an anarchist presence. Also UCLA.

If you're looking to come to the UK...

Montreal, any of them except perhaps McGill, but you might want to pack some decent snow boots.

Evergreen students have the shittest politics--try to imagine the most ridiculous combination of primitivism, identity politics and individualism. It's worse than that.

Prescott College is probably the southwest's Evergreen. Complete with totally shit politics.

If your in the game of looking for colleges and are allowing politics be a factor, consider valuing fighting student unions over "anarchist presence". Naturally they are not mutually exclusive, but honestly, since you seem to firmly in the class-struggle libertarian left, you may lose your head at Evergreen.

Yeah, I'd heard that as well.

iexist, I think most major cities will have an anarchist presence which you can plug into as a university student. However, if I were to pick a city purely based on getting involved politically, I'd probably go with the Twin Cities (although that's mostly because I have a crush on the IWW branch there). Chicago, too, or even New York.

Oh, and you should see if you can do an exchange program for a term. At many university, you only pay the same fees you would for a term at home, you just have to pay the cost to get to the other country (and, even then, sometimes grants are available).

What the deuce? Am I the only one who feels that looking for an anarchist college is a bad, bad idea for going to college?

Anarchy101: As a young learning and growing teenage Anarchist, is investing the time and the work worth it to go to a university?

Do not go to university so you can get involved.

Madlib, that link is f*cking terrible. (Webby, if you're reading this, that's what we mean by lifestylism: thinking of ways to survive with creating a new world outside of a system.)

However, I think your larger point is probably correct: a search for an anarchist scene is probably not a very good criteria for choosing a university. Most unis are going to have some sort of an anarchist presence and even if there's not, they'll be something you can support as an anarchist--be it outside labor disputes or fights against fees on campus, etc, etc. Besides, most student politics (anarcho or otherwise) are pretty frustrating at the best of times.

EDIT: Perhaps I came on a bit strong. An political scene would be a bad main criteria for choosing a university, but all other factors being equal, it's a fair enough consideration.

There was only one answer that met your criteria of lifestylism. No, trying to live on less than a dollar a day is not a good idea. On the other hand, neither is practically paying your way into political involvement and meeting like minds.

Anyways… Give it a look, iexist.

Maybe you can go to Chile where you can find organised anarchists in every college. In some, there're even politically hegemonic

http://fel-chile.org/

iexist, studying in Canada might be cheaper. Quebec certainly will be in terms of tuition.

And you can always try to create an anarchist presence. My uni had none, still is an extremely conservative school, but after over 4 years of organizing somethings are starting to happen.

Quebec is certainly cheaper than studying in the US, thanks to our amazing, badass, take no shit student population, as well as a number of other factors, but putting my boring parent hat on, which incidentally I hate to do to my own kids, as they seem perfectly capable of working things out for themselves, I agree with the other poster who are saying that picking a college for it's anarchist presence is a terrible idea. For one thing, the transient nature of student populations means that a radical presence a couple of years back may not even be there now, people graduate and move on. But more importantly, pick something to study that you feel really passionate about. Don't chose a course because you think there might be other radicals about on campus. You've got 3-4 years of studying and if it's spent on something you don't enjoy it's going to be a miserable experience. Also, it's a sad fact that wherever you go these days you're going to incur some debt, it'll be a real shame to do that for something you're not fired up about.
As Khawaga said, if there's no anarchist presence at your college, you can try organizing one, but if you pick a fairly large urban metropolitan area, if you can't find it on campus then you will probably find it elsewhere. There's no reason why if you're a student that you have to spend those years ring-fenced into associating only with other students. Personally, when I was at college I spent very little time outside of lectures and tutorials on campus and most of my friends weren't students. Get out and get involved in the wider community.

Depends on the school and program you apply for. Getting a student visa is easy, especially for US and EU citizens.