No need to PM IMO. Not to speak for Lax, but ND is basically conservative enough that professors lecture you about the subject of the class rather than their political beliefs. Students feel comfortable in small seminars to express their opinions without fear of retribution. Students don't have safe spaces they can crawl into when they feel upset about some PC bullcrap.
I think it is a great place to get an actual education.
Pretty much nailed it. Look, I did the whole Ivy vs Notre Dame thing. I got into every school I applied to... Dartmouth, Cornell, Notre Dame, University of Virginia, and Georgia Tech. Every school had positives and negatives, and this was before the safe space/trigger warning/social media shaming revolution on college campuses. Things have certainly escalated since I graduated.
I will say that knowing what I know now I am extremely glad I didn't go to any Ivy League school. I have
many friends that did, and a lot of them have very bad things to say. I don't think I would have had as much personal growth or as much fun at any of them. It was a very tough choice at the time, especially because of how good Cornell's engineering is, but if I had to do it over again it'd be a comically easy decision. Reading what I read about Ivy League schools and Cal Berkeley and their ilk... I don't see how anyone who wants to grow would choose one of those places.
At Notre Dame, I made a diverse group of lifelong friends. Some very religious, some atheist. Some liberal, some conservative, some moderate. Some white, some Latino, some Asian, some African American (though African Americans are definitely a bit underrepresented on campus outside of athletics). No topic was taboo, and moreover Notre Dame's emphasis on philosophy classes for all students was incredible for me in terms of grasping how to logically approach discussion of a topic, form arguments, and evaluate their merit.
Furthermore, I look at my job and financial situation and I don't see how I could be better off having gone anywhere else except maybe Stanford. You said your daughter is interested in being a doctor... well, I have a core group of friends who vacations together and plays in the same fantasy football league and such and literally half are doctors. The others are a finance guy, a Ph.D., and another engineer. And of my wife's friends from her dorm she is extremely close with another three doctors. And that's not counting the dozens of peripheral friends who are doctors. Notre Dame has one of the best pre-professional science programs in existence and they put a ton of people in med school.
In short, unless you're planning on moving abroad I don't think having an Ivy League degree does much more for you than one from Duke or Vandy or Notre Dame or the like. Especially not if headed to medical school. And there are a LOT of cultural drawbacks.
