Edited sentence: Colleges and universities which may once have been preppy include Brown University, Wesleyan University, Smith College, Bates College and Vassar College; they are now better known as hippie or activist schools.Note that "preppy" is not synonymous with "elite" or "expensive" -- private schools like Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Swarthmore College and Pomona College are all highly selective, but none has ever been particularly preppy.Some of the schools on this list -- Amherst, Harvard and Wellesley come to mind -- may also be moving in that direction.Thanks to the introduction of meritocratic admissions in the 1960s, which dramatically increased the number of Jewish, Catholic and Asian-American students at Northeastern private schools, and the emergence of ethnic diversity as an important social value in the 1970s-1990s, inspiring affirmative action programs, the WASP aristocracy in the Ivy League universities and the old New England liberal arts colleges is largely a thing of the past