Start Dates

I wrote yesterday about the nonsense early starts of UGA. In Fall 2016 (this coming fall) it'll be August 11th. As if that wasn't early enough, in Fall 2017 it's proposed we start on August 10th. Both are, stupidly, Thursdays. Both are records.

OK, what about other schools? Looking at just the 2016-2017 academic year, here are some comparisons of start dates:

University of Florida: 8/22 (a Monday, reasonable)
University of North Carolina: 8/23 (a friggin Tuesday?)
University of South Carolina (8/18, an ... ugh ... Thursday)
University of Tennessee (8/17, a Wednesday?)
University of Alabama (8/17, sigh, another Wednesday)
Auburn University (8/16, a Tuesday)
LSU (8/22 (another reasonable start, a Monday)

I could spend more time on this, but we can see there isn't a single school above that starts anywhere near our August 11th start for Fall 2016. A few have reasonable days as well (UF and LSU on Mondays). No one has a Thursday start. I could do a bigger search and look at UGA's aspirational schools, but some are not in the South and other regions have different traditions, so I used nearby universities to keep it more of an apples-to-apples, oranges-to-oranges comparison.