Having only done a quick pass the last few days on this site I just read this entire thread and am a little suprised that such a simple question could turn into a psuedo yelling match....oh wait, this is Airwarriors....nevermind..... :icon_tong
First, thanks to Zab for doing his moderator duties and trying to keep th discussion on track. Trashing other schools and their methods is not nice and has no place here. Getting into yet another food fight about whose school is better is tiresome and will never be settled, and it makes the posters look a little stupid. One of the great things about the American educational system is that it provides people the widest variety of schools in the world, you jsut have to have the money. Why do you think we get students from all over the world?
The Citadel is one of those institutions that is unique to this country. I graduated from the Citadel alomost ten years ago (AAHHHHHH
, I am getting old!) Military colleges/academies in other countries have only one purpose, to produce military officers. The majority of grads from the Citadel do not even go in the military, it is a state college that happens to be a military one.
There are several other 4-year military colleges (not including the Academies) in the country. Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and Norwich all have corps of cadets, but they have civilian students as well (the vast majority of students at A&M and VTech are civilian). These schools are all worth looking at if you are looking at going to a school that has a military aspect, and all of them have ROTC programs that will allow you to become an officer.
The only other school like the Citadel is VMI, a traditional southern military college where the student bodies are all cadets (the Citadel does have Marine and Navy College Program students, former enlisted who are not cadets, who attend day classes and are in NROTC). While the Citadel does have a sizable night school, which is considered a different college, as a cadet you never have contact with the night school students. They do not take any classes with the cadets and have no social interaction with them, they also have a different diploma design and ring. There is a big difference between the all military enviroment at the Citadel and VMI and the civilian/military combination at Texas A&M/Norwich/VTech. That does not necessarily mean that one or the other is better, but it is something to keep in mind when you look at schools.
One thing that I can say for certain is that the school is nothing like
The Lords of Discipline. Pat Conroy, the author, is a graduate and based it on his experiences when he went to the Citadel in the late 60's. There was severe hazing back then, but that was
40 years ago. There are occasionally isolated incidents but anyone involved in hazing nowadays is usually kicked out (by the time I graduated, if you touched a cadet you were kicked out). The school rightfully recognized that physical abuse has no place in todays military or education. I am not a great fan of Pat Conroy, he has said and done some really stupid things about the Citadel.
Charleston is a very nice city, if you ran out of things to do you were not looking very hard. A little small for my tastes, but I am from DC so my view is a bit skewed.
The education at the Citadel is first rate, including the history program. To say that the school teaches a biased view of history is flat out wrong. If your opinion is based on one book and/or 'what you heard', then you would make a poor historian/scholar/researcher and sound pretty biased yourself. I was a history major at the school and took a class called 'The War for Southern Independence', about the Civil War. The professor, a retired USNR CAPT, was quite the character but he was a good teacher and taught a balanced course. I am a Yankee and I don't buy the whole states right argument and think the apologists for the South's cause are
usually idiots, but I recieved a quality education from great professors a the Citadel (yes, there were a handful that I would have liked to have thrown out the window) who showed no serious historical biases that impeded my edumacation.
So what can you take from the above? The Citadel can provide you a quality education and gives you an opportunity receive a commision in the military. ROTC is run a little differently than a normal unit but when I was there the staff worked hard to get you what you wanted and it was a good unit. If you are looking for a quality military college education, it is a great place to go. VMI is another option, I am very good friends with some grads from there and they are good guys. As I said before though, there are several other schools that have military components, including the state maritime colleges (Maine, Mass., California and NY). They are well worth the researching, you might find they are better fit.
I'm fairly certain that VMI is cadets only, no night students. 
