I’m going to Emmanuel College in Boston next year and think it would be really wonderful if we could have a forum like a lot of the other colleges do. How could that be brought about?
Same suggestion for Evergreen State College.
I was actually looking for Emmanuel today and couldn’t find it…would be nice to have it added.
Are you going to Emmanuel?
I second the suggestion for Evergreen State College.
I would like to see Roanoke College, Hood College, and Queens University of Charlotte added.
As a blanket reply to this particular subject, we just need to see that there is ongoing discussion about the school that would warrant the creation of its own forum.
…and let me follow up that last note by clarifying that we are looking for dedicated threads about these schools (i.e. the name of the school is mentioned in the thread title, such as, “What do you think about Evergreen?”, or similar).
I did find that Emmanuel has 10 posts going back to 2004, so I don’t think we’ll be able to create a forum for this school. Evergreen State has a bit more, though I am only seeing 6 since October 2008 and 26 since 2005.
Unfortunately, you will find some schools, such as my alma mater (Valparaiso University), that have their own forum, but show very minute activity. I have not been involved with CC since its inception, but no doubt some of these forums were created years ago and we haven’t had the resources to maintain the growing list of schools. Therefore, we’ve had to adopt a more selective process when it comes to adding school forums going forward.
Lenitus, thank you for explaining this. I began to believe that some schools were listed if they paid to be listed on cc (as an advertisement), especially when Etown got its own listing. I guess that is not at all the case. I never thought that Elizabethtown had more interest on CC than Evergreen, Queens U of Charlotte, or Roanoke, so I found this to be a bit a puzzling.
I have gotten several requests in the past few months for new school forums. A few of those requests were honored because there was decent ongoing discussion about the schools. However, the other day I checked up on those particular forums and found little or no new activity 
The person who initially requested the additions has not contributed a single post to either forum. These experiences also impact our willingness to add new forums, as you can imagine.
Why does Oklahoma State University not have a forum? OU does, and we’re bigger than them. In fact, OSU is the largest school in the state, and almost all of its programs are considered better than OU’s. Except football, which is close.
Oscucowboys, that’s interesting. A very small school like UNC-Asheville has its own listing. In NJ we have Rutgers and TCNJ listed. Ramapo seems similar to UNC-Asheville (Ramapo might be a bit larger), yet that school is not listed. Of course we have other public schools in NJ that are also not listed. The SUNYs have a dedicated listing for all of their schools. I guess one cannot have a listing for every university or college. It must be hard to choose which ones to list. That’s why when Etown came up I thought there was a fee involved to be listed. I have seen the school discussed on cc, but rarely, and I do think that Roanoke College (just to mention one school that comes up that is not listed) has been discussed more although I am not a bean counter. Lenitus, I do understand. I can see not listing a school if just a couple of people are intersted in reading about it and then they move on. There are a couple of schools that have not seen a post in 2 years. I am not sure if Antioch is even open. Old Dominion is another school that has not gotten a post in nearly 2 years, although I did see someone asking about it on another section of CC very recently. I haven’t clicked on all of the schools, but I guess there are some that don’t get many posters.
I noticed that many posters would rather talk about a certain college in general posts they start than in the designated post for it. Maybe they think it will get more views (in many cases that is true) For instance if you were interested in Simmons, Assumption, Juniata, or other smaller non first-tier colleges, you would do much better asking parents in the “parent section” or “college search” rather than putting it in the college name area. I found that with Stonehill, their forum is okay but you get more feedback sometimes taking another route.
debruns, that is absolutely true. For an example, I recently asked some questions on Drew’s board. I don’t know if you noticed the post. I did not get too many replies. If I had posed the question elsewhere on CC I would have probably gotten better feedback. Sometimes people post under the list of schools, but the yellow circle is not there, so nobody notices that someone posted a comment or question.
That is true, when I found out anything about Drew 4 years ago, I had quite a few posters tell me things, one wrote a great trip review (before we had that site) others told me about scholarship offers their children had gotten, etc. But the forum itself was not that active. I’ve been surprised to see that there were new posts there and other college sites because, as you said, there isn’t a “new post” signal.
Unfortunately, although there were a few excited students last year going to Drew, I think they fade away when they get busy with school. Maybe a search for older posts will help. I’ve had some luck with that, parents will sometimes write back about their child’s experience even though they are a junior now, not a freshman. The fastest replies come from posters that have the “automatic emails” that tell them someone wrote…others tell me they hadn’t checked in for 3 months and apoligize although they are doing you a favor.
I meant to say that the yellow signal is there, but it doesn’t alway light up.
Thanks for the good discussion on this topic. I will also agree that people will tend to post about a particular school in a more general forum, even if that school has a dedicated discussion area. Sometimes, they are not even aware that a forum for that school exists. If I wanted to ask a question about Valparaiso University, for instance, one look at the lack of activity in that school’s forum would likely deter me from posting there. I would probably post in the College Admissions or College Search sections instead, but the high traffic in those forums could quickly push my inquiry down the list and on to the second page if none of the users cares or has knowledge of Valparaiso. I think one of the main motivations for the school sub-forums, therefore, is to keep questions from getting lost in the monsoon of more general questions. Of course, if members can’t find these sub-forums, or don’t even know they exist, the value is lost.
We do tend to get a few requests for school forums every week. I don’t know if those are motivated more by school pride than perceived usefulness to the entire community, however 
@osucowboys…I would have expected to find numerous discussions on OSU, but I am only seeing University of Oklahoma threads. If you can find 2 or 3 dedicated OSU threads in the past few months we can certainly plan to create a new forum.
Mary Washington College was renamed University of Mary Washington back in 2004. Could you please change the name of the forum?
Thanks for the heads up. The forum has been updated accordingly:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-mary-washington/[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-mary-washington/</a>