I think I can help you a little bit. I live right near New Paltz, and am also currently looking at schools as well. My parents went to New Paltz. I probably will not go to it (I’m looking at schools closer to NYC), but it is a decent school, and it's fairly inexpensive. It’s a good place to go for hippies or just people who don't see the world the same way as everyone else. It's in a very cool neighborhood, too, and it's right in between Albany and New York City, about an hour and a half away, so it's in a great location. There are a lot of schools around Albany. RPI is an outstanding tech school and is in Troy. SUNY Albany is, like New Paltz, a public liberal arts school that's pretty inexpensive and has a very good reputation. My mother currently goes there for her masters in library science. Albany Medical College is supposed to be very, very good, but I don’t know much about it. There’s also St. Rose, which is as good as SUNY Albany, but because it is a private school, it is significantly more expensive. The advantage to St. Rose, though, is that it’s much smaller than SUNY Albany, so if a lot of individualized attention is important to you and you have the money, you should really consider it. I don’t know much about schools in Ithaca, though. Sorry. If you go to USnews.com, there is a listing of all the colleges in the country that gives some pretty good information.
