@MNgurl101 Just curious. W&L is actually more expensive than W&M (OOS). W&L’s campus, is very nice. The town of Lexington is really charming and sits right outside the W&L gates (VMI also sits right next door) which gives the town a really nice feel. Having said that, ND’s beauty is really hard to beat (though South Bend is nothing like Lexington).
We were very impressed by SUNY Delhi.
Yep, in the middle of nowhere. But their Hospitality program is so very Hands On!!! Really a terrific program!
The school did drop the ball by not having a spare dorm room available to show. I know I wouldn’t rent an apartment I hadn’t seen, so I don’t blame my daughter for wanting to see the dorms. But the Hospitality Prof we spoke to really, really sold her program and her school.
We’ll see where the chips fall, but we left there very happy we had visited.
^^ At a number of schools we visited, we did not see a dorm room. In fact, at most we did not!
But after the one that was shown to us with two sleeping girls in it - yes, the whole group filed into the room anyway - we were okay with that.
Being at the other end of the process, we also realize there are so many different types of rooms on most campuses.
Wow, my daughter is child #2, and we’ve never NOT seen a dorm.
Not a deal breaker by any means, but just something that she commented on.
I have toured numerous schools where they don’t allow visitors to see a dorm. Always disappointing.
Wash U dropped quite a bit when they didn’t show us a dorm room. For unclear reasons to me, they don’t show them on tours in the summer. S kept it on his list to apply, but it moved way down
I find that bizarre @booajo, as they have fabulous dorms. ??
We visited WashU last July and we were shown one of the dorms. Maybe there was a specific reason they were not shown at the time you visited.
WashU is known for their nice dorms, ranking #4 in Niche’s list of best college dorms and receiving an A+ rating. It seems strange that they wouldn’t show them off. I agree there must have been some reason they couldn’t show them that day. FYI - they are another school with dorms that are cleaned bi-weekly.
So interesting! This would never have swayed DS one way or the other. Not sure if it’s a gender thing, coming from a BS, or just being a slob and generally impervious to his living space!
@lastone03 our EFC is nowhere near full pay and W&M’s NPC result wasn’t even in the ballpark of being affordable without 80k-100k in loans while W&L meets full need.
I like to see the dorms, ad find that LACS are more apt to show them vs bigger schools. But you do have to take what you see with a big grain of salt as there is so much variety within the same school. A freshmen dorm might look dingy, but you may not see how housing progresses throughout the years.
I can only think of one school where we did not see a dorm room - Loyola Marymount. OTOH, we toured College of Charleston during one of their admitted students weekends. They had all the freshman dorms open for tours and the dorm rooms ended up being a big negative for dd. Despite being a sunny day, all the rooms and dorms we saw were dark and depressing. It just seemed as if the way they were designed led to a gloomy feel - the suite style dorm rooms had very small living rooms on the interior of the building with no windows and all the common areas, like study lounges, seemed to be interior spaces with no windows. There was only one dorm we saw (I think it was the most expensive housing for freshmen) that had a common/lounge area with large windows. While this might not be an issue for some, it can be problematic for those who need some sunlight in order to remain energized, something dd definitely prefers. While she doesn’t suffer from this, my own roommate in college had undiagnosed Seasonal Affective Disorder. In late fall, she could not get out of bed - she stayed in bed for a week, missing all of her classes. Thankfully she saw a doctor when she went home and the following year she showed up at school with this huge light, the size of a door. She had to sit in front of it several hours a day while studying. We joked about it then but then I realized later it really is a “thing” tho now they have much better light therapy that don’t take up half a dorm room LOL. But anyway, the dark dorm rooms and common areas were definitely noted by my dd and caused CoC to drop down on her list despite Charleston being our favorite location of all the schools she visited.
@TheGreyKing , great reviews. In retrospect, I wish my daughter had looked into Brandeis more. We did a drive through during our first summer of looking, and it put us off. The campus was totally dead for the summer, and even the admissions office wasn’t open. There were weeds growing and it felt creepy. Off the list.
Two years later, she overnighted at Brandeis during a debate tournament, when she was a freshman at her current college. She really liked it and toyed with the idea of putting in a transfer app. Nice vibe, friendly people. She liked the lack of party atmosphere, but it wasn’t borng. First impressions sometimes need to be disregarded.
Re dorms, I have now visited 30 colleges, not all on official tours. Many of the tours we had didn’t include dorms. Colleges that didn’t show dorm rooms on our tours included Dickinson, Brown, Vassar, Tufts, Trinity College, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins. I think for the most part, a dorm is a dorm is a dorm. Except at Haverford, where the new dorms are like a luxury boutique hotel. Lucky Haverfordians!
@Lindagaf Sigh…one more reason I think we should add Haverford to S19’s list…
It was not a big deal to see dorms on tours for my kids, at least in the preliminary stages. I wonder what accounts for the variations in tours, as unlike @Lindagaf, we did see dorms at Dickinson. Broadly, I found it interesting to see the different approaches to housing freshman, whether freshman dorms were clustered together on one part of campus (Kenyon, Dickinson, Denison), whether freshman were integrated into dorms with upper class students, and how coed worked, by hall, by floor, random etc.
Don’t get too excited @homerdog . I have heard the old dorms are terrible! Haha! For the most part, most dorms are nothing to get excited about.
@MNgurl101 Good for you if W&L takes care of full need. That is the beauty of a private school - they have a lot more flexibility than a public school when it comes to aid (merit or need). The folks I know that have kids at W&L always grumble about having to write big fat checks. Haha. I have to say, I always find our EFC numbers to be a bit of mystery. I have know idea where they think we are stashing all that extra cash. 
As an aside, take a peek at University of RIchmond. Great school, great merit aid, stunning campus, and guaranteed paid internships.
On our tour of Pomona College several years ago, we saw one dorm that looked like a luxury hotel and the tour guide’s (freshman) room that was decidedly not.
@Lindagaf Regarding BC, we did not see a dorm on the first visit but they included an extensive tour of two (adjoining dorms) at accepted student day. I think it could be that the whole upper campus/lower campus dorms can be a big deal for some kids so maybe they prefer to hit it head on once the kids are already admitted and they need to sell them on dorm life at BC?