Regarding dorms. A lot can be gleaned from college websites. Also, some schools have more than a dozen different dorm styles (UW-Madison) while others seem to have all of them built in the same decade (many other UW schools).
Just tried to look up UNH based on the glowing report and the College Board search engine appears to be down. You can find stuff through the “college search” tool but just using the search box at the top right of the page yields no results. I thought I couldn’t spell Hampshire or something, but I just searched, like easy schools, and nope, no results for anything. Just thought I’d mentioned it. (It’s Saturday at about 3:30 edt)
When visiting URichmond, be sure to visit the Carytown area of Richmond which is a couple of miles from the UR campus. It has cute little shops, cafes, and restaurants. Richmond is a city for foodies, with an artsy vibe.
My oldest D, who graduated from UR last year, preferred rural and small town campuses. She also liked and applied to Lafayette, Bucknell, Franklin and Marshall, Muhlenberg. Ursinus, Gettysburg, and Dickinson, which she felt had a similar vibe, attractive campuses, small classes, lots of research opportunities, and appealing clubs and activities.
She visited Lehigh, but she did not like that science buildings she would spend most of her time in were up a big hill away from the center of campus. She also had a rainy , dreary visit to Swarthmore, which left her with an impression that the campus was way too quiet. She also thought tbe students looked unhappy and stressed (probably just cold and wet from the rain). If at all possible, I definitely recommend trying not to visit colleges on rainy days.
She really liked that UR is located in the suburbs with a couple of shopping centers nearby, but is only 10 minutes from downtown Richmond, with lots of great restaurants, activities, parks, etc. close at hand.
"I think he will get to the point where he wants an LAC near a hopping town and that doesn’t really exist! "
Sure, it exists.
Amherst - great college town
Bowdoin - to some extent. Cute town, easy access to Portland which is one of America’s great small cities.
Colorado College - walking distance to downtown C Springs, an hour to Denver, plus access to great outdoors activities.
Haverford - super easy access to all Philly has to offer, which is a lot in terms of culture, music scene, dining, etc.
Macalaster - great neighborhood in St. Paul
Swarthmore - ditto Haverford
Plus some of the southern LACs and California/PNW LACs that I am less familiar with. They are out there. Your son is young. What he might want at 15 might seem really stifling at 18. My kids final choices were schools in my list above for just that reason - they wanted a small school but when they made their final choices, location factored into their decisions.
" I keep thinking if he likes smaller then why would I show him bigger? That just muddles the decision making! "
Sorry but I think it is wrong to cull out schools from the search and just not expose your son. He’s only a sophomore, right? Plenty of time to look around and explore what is out there. If he likes the idea of UVM on paper, he should have a chance to look at it. It’s a great school and location and they do give merit aid. Let hime explore it - or other larger schools - to see if it might be a fit.
WRT over enrolled schools adding extra kids to doubles and triples, At my daughter’s university, where she is a freshman this year, she was placed in a triple that was “flexed” into a quad. She was given a 25 % discount which we were pretty happy with. They also gave her and her roommates an Amazon Echo as an offer of appeasement. The way they set up the quad actually gives them more space than the triple would, but more importantly, D did not seem to mind and has adjusted very well.
I’m sorry. I will be furious if our son’s double was turned into a triple or a triple turned into a quad. If we are paying $65,000, I would expect the college to figure out its numbers correctly. 25% off of maybe $8000 for housing would not appease me. I’ve seen some photos are rooms where an extra bed was squeezed in and it’s SO tight. I think I’ll be adding this question to the list of things we ask about on tours.
Bowdoin is certainly much less remote than many LAC’s. It has a thriving college town large and hip enough to be a tourist destination in its own right in the summer. And compared to the remoteness of many LAC’s – Williams, Colgate, Kenyon, etc., no contest. Even Davidson’s town is much smaller. And a lot of the kids there are from the Northeast states so it’s not far for them. But speaking as someone from NJ, it’s just far and inconvenient enough to be annoying. Unlike some of their sister LAC’s, Bowdoin offers no buses to any urban area or even the nearest airport. So kids have to share Uber for the most part to Portland or grab a fairly unreliable bus to Portland or Boston. There’s oddly no public transportation in Portland between the bus and train depot to the airport, so even if you do those you need to Uber it to the airport from the ground transportation hub. And Portland’s airport is super unreliable half the year. We were constantly dealing with canceled or substantially delayed and rerouted flights, both in and out. It’s so unreliable some kids just skip it and get to Boston, but that’s 2.5 hours away. There is an Amtrak station right next to the campus, but in order to get to NJ you have to take one train to Boston – and there’s only a couple options a day – then another to NY then a third to NJ. So you’re looking at 14-16 hours of travel for a distance covered by car in less than half that, and at a cost not much less than a plane. And traffic between NJ and Maine always sucks. Doesn’t matter when we go. We have left as early as 5am, as late as 11am and on the weekend to try and beat some of it and still gotten caught in at least half-a-dozen traffic jams per trip. Getting across to NY, through Westchester County and through CT is always bad. CT is just a mecca of bad traffic. On paper you should be able to make it in 6hr, 15min but in practice it typically takes 7hr, 45min not counting rest stops… Anyway, happy with the school but their transportation options are weak. A school that rich should easily be able to organize buses to Portland and Boston, and possibly even NYC. So many others do.
@doschicos Son is a junior now. I’m sure we will still take him to Wisconsin for a look. It’s close and big and a favorite of his cousins and our neighbors. Thanks for your additional suggestions on LACs near towns/cities! I think I’ve dismissed Haverford, Swathmore, and Amherst because only 1-2 kids apply to those schools from the 700+ in our graduating classes. And they never get in. Kids get into Stanford, Harvard…those types of schools but never the small, super selective east coast LACs. There must be a reason that they don’t appeal to kids from our high school and maybe those schools know a suburban Chicago kid won’t fit well. Not sure. I’ll ask our GC.
As for UVM, he met with the rep last week at school and he said nothing special jumped out at him from the presentation. He loved the Richmond rep, though, and had a laundry list of what he liked about that school.
He took his SAT and did well (740 EW 800 Math) but will take it one more time in Oct just to see if he can increase EW. Now that we have an SAT score in hand and we’re pretty sure of his GPA (we know what it will be at a minimum and it will probably go up over the next three semesters), we can be serious about a list.
@homerdog I’m with you on that the tripled rooms. They do seem to be more common among the schools with the $65K price tag - I wonder if that’s because a lot of the small LACs have fewer students moving off campus? (and I guess some are residential for all four years). If they want to grow their enrollment, they need to build more dorms first!
Most doubles are too small as it is - I can’t imagine one filled with three 18 year old boys - at least one boy would be lost under an avalanche of sneakers! D16 had a tiny double in a two-room suite, but the shared private bath compensated for it.
@homerdog we aren’t paying $65K and I was pretty annoyed at first. However, when I saw the room and how it was laid out compared to it being a triple, it was much more spacious. They had lofted 2 of the beds (with safety rails), and had the furniture underneath. The triple had all the furniture on the floor taking up every ounce of wall space and beds jutting out into the center of the room. there was very little open space. But D is easy going, and it seems her roommates are too, and they all get along so no point me being angry about it. I was surprised the school gave us a discount. I should add, that she was given the option of putting her name on a list to get moved to a different room (triple or double) but she chose not to.
@homerdog I haven’t made my way through all 174 pages of this thread, so forgive me if i’ve missed a few responses. I am a huge fan of the LAC, esp. those in consortiums as they offer both the small school experience as well as opportunites for a wider academic and social experience. Not sure if the Claremont Colleges are too far away, but one can’t get too much more hopping than LA about 30 miles away. I had not so secretly hoped my DS would apply to Pomona, but he applied ED and happily landed at Haverford. He is across the country, but the distance is really not a big issue. It certainly helps having direct, non-stop flights.
@2mrmagoo Claremont Colleges too far for S19 but D21 loves California and we have family out that way so they could make her list eventually!
@homerdog Is San Antonio too far away? There are likely direct flights from Chicago on Southwest. Given what you’ve said here about your S possibly wanting a less remote setting and opportunities for outdoor pursuits, Trinity U might sound interesting to him. Read what Fiske Guide says about it. We visited this summer: great facilities, large endowment, busy, bright, and cheerful students. San Antonio is a beautiful, fun, friendly city.
A town nearby means walking distance to me. Needing to travel out of town is a major trip, not just a last minute 'let’s go now" and being there. homerdog- UW-Madison may be large and there is plenty of action adjacent to the campus, the lakeshore, academics… Definitely make the trip. He could find his niche there.
“And traffic between NJ and Maine always sucks.”
True but thats mainly the traffic between NJ and Boston/Northern MA, the worst being in the tristate area of CT/NJ/NY. Certainly the stretch into Maine is the easiest part. My guess is the school doesn’t arrange busses because Amtrak Station is right there in town. LACs arranging busses are those without public transportation options to major hubs.
“There must be a reason that they don’t appeal to kids from our high school and maybe those schools know a suburban Chicago kid won’t fit well.”
I would think a suburban Chicago kid would be an excellent fit into suburban Philly. My guess is your school has few LAC applicants and many who do apply have passed on accepting offers from Haverford/Swarthmore in the past so why make offers if they yield zero. It is a good question to ask your college counseling office.
McGill - Very diverse, international student body. My son’s “crew” is from Australia, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Paris…plus a couple from the U.S. (My oldest just started his Freshman year there in August.)
Campus is gorgeous though some of the facilities are tired. The setting is spectacular: right on the edge of downtown Montreal and you back up to Mt. Royal which is gorgeous. Montreal as a city is simply awesome…definitely a hybrid of North America and Europe. Drinking age is 18…very European that way. Kids go to bars and clubs…there is a pub in the middle of campus. (But there isn’t pressure to drink…so don’t worry about that at all.)
Excellent academics; the workload is pretty intense. Intro classes can be really large. Kids live in the dorms for one year and then everyone moves off campus to apartments. The kids like this.
The big big difference is that they expect the kids to step up and be adults (“our role is to help your kids transition to adulthood”). There is no handholding and help and opportunities are there…but the kids have to see them out on their own This is really important to think through if this is right for your kids and for you…it is the biggest difference I see versus most U.S. schools.
I hope this helps.
Regarding schools who provide buses; it’s really not the school doing so- they just make arrangements with a private carrier who offers the service to students and picks up and drops off the students right on campus. So it should be very easy for the school to do. Schools that I know that have this type of bus service to the NY Metro area are Dartmouth, Colgate, Holy Cross and Midd. Those schools are all a bit bigger than Bowdoin, so perhaps it has something to do with having enough kids who would want the ride to make it worth their while?
@doschicos We were excited in concept by the Amtrak station right next door but in practice is has been useless. There are usually only a couple trains a day, none late enough to be able to have a morning final and still make a flight (after Uber’ing from the train station). And since it doesn’t go to any airport or to any destination where there is a shuttle to the airport, it’s not really a fully realized substitute for the school arranging a bus. Honestly the vast majority of NE LAC’s we toured mentioned their bus options. From what my S says, he knows no one who actually uses the Amtrak to get to/from home and school. I’m sure there are some, but it’s not prevalent…
Yeah, the Maine traffic is usually fine. But New Hampshire can get backed up. Still, in ranked order Westchester County is the worst followed by CT. Even most of MA isn’t bad except for road construction.
@2mrmagoo Can you comment on how your S finds the size at Haverford? Big LAC fan here and Haverford looks great in so many ways, but D2 is concerned about the student population being too small, as it is smaller than the typical LAC
The only school out of those ^ four with Amtrak service in town is Holy Cross (Worcester) to my knowledge.
Here’s info from Bowdoin’s website:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/archives/1bowdoincampus/007738.shtml
Concord Coach Lines is well utilized throughout northern New England for reliable service.
@wisteria100 My family has fist hand experience with Haverford. Given it was twice as large as my kid’s high school, kiddo did not find it an issue. Plus, the Bi-College and Quaker Consortium expands offerings. My kid did utilize the opportunity to explore Philly regularly as well. But, it’s really a personal decision which will vary from student to student. Has your daughter visited?