CNU Christopher Newport U
HPU High Point U
and they both were fully spelled out up thread.
@sahmkc I guess it was TL;DR :))
@OHMomof2 - That’s too funny! 
Swarthmore: went with high hope but left with some disappointment. We want a small/intimate learning environment but 1,600 kids never feels this small. S liked the AO who gave more substantive info than the friendlier lady from UPenn. Student tour was not impressive considering Swatmore’s high interllectual reputation, her non-stop complaining of not having good tacos on campus and the ever-present “like” in multiple places in one sentence just rubbed me in the wrong way. S still likes it though. Campus is compact and true to its arboretum fame, with many beautiful trees. Commuter rail is pretty much right on campus and trip to Philly is very convenient. Truly don’t need a car to get around and about. A plus I guess.
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Swarthmore has 425 acres - larger than the UCLA campus people keep describing as huge - but I believe the buildings are in a fairly small area.
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We visited Plymouth State in NH just to see.
And fell in love.
While in LA recently we toured Oxy (Occidental). I too was non-plussed. It was hilly. Described as one of the prettiest campuses, it might have been on their website, but in person, it was hilly and I thought lack luster. I also didn’t like Eagle Rock surrounding area. It was disappointing but a good middle of the road LAC for those who want to be in sunny LA and close to the city.
Moved off the list: Smith
Moved to the top: Wesleyan
OXy has a very interesting type of courses, quite socially relevant. I’ve known several people who attended OXy and all were happy with the curriculum.
@meredithfp Care to share more detail? Both of those are on my daughter’s (longish) list.
It was probably partly because of the experience my daughter had with her hosts at the two schools. But her general impression of Smith was that the girls were very introverted, into their own thing, and it was difficult to connect with people. She said, “Mom, it’s like all of the socially awkward girls from high school went there.”
Sounds harsh, but there you have it.
She LOVED Wesleyan and would pass up the scholarship she got at UofO in a heartbeat to go there. She went to an environmental science study session and she got to participate and connect with other kids over academics. Her biggest complaint about high school is that nobody cares about learning, so this was just what she wanted to see. It’s also beautiful, nice size town, good prestige. Checks all the boxes for her (though it’s a long shot for sure.)
In general I find those overnight stays with a host a double edged sword. There’s just way too much chance that if your son/daughter are mismatched with someone very different than themselves that it will scare them off the whole school, sometimes based on skewed impressions. That definitely happened with my son who went to an accepted student overnight at a school that at the time was one of his two top contenders. I went two the parent events and thought all was great. He went to a couple classes and events and all was fine until the overnight where he was placed in a suite with a group of athletes and some other potential accepted students. The centerpiece of the suite was a permanent ping pong table setup for nightly beer pong and the current and prospective students all traded stories about their favorite drugs, etc. And he picked up on all this talk about “Bros vs.” (I think it was NARP, but I could be wrong – in any event it stood for “Non-athlete Regular Person” or some such thing). I picked him up the next morning and the school was off the list, right from the start of our 5.5 hour drive home…
@civitas – yes, that is one reason my kid did overnights at some middle of the pack schools, but not the ones we were hoping would be in the final mix. We wanted him to develop the confidence that he was “ready” for this next stage (he could be a bit of a homebody) by having the experience of staying in the dorm, but not at the expense of developing a negative impression of a preferred school based on a particular host.
Overnights are a bad idea
My self-described awkward potato child, on the other hand, probably would have enjoyed that visit. 
So I’m glad I asked!
We found overnight visits helpful in removing schools off the list.
I’m afraid that S19 will eliminate all schools he overnights at! What could be good about going out at night with kids you don’t know and then sleeping on a dorm floor? Hopefully, he can get a full visit experience spending the day with a student or two.
Overnights were crucial in my college choice 30 years ago, and are proving crucial to D18. I always “assumed” I would go to UVA, and I visited a very good friend over a long weekend. She had special housing, great friends, and I had a heck of a good time that weekend. I also realized that UVA was too big for me, and I went looking for a smaller school, and found it.
My D18 visited a school twice overnight on a music honors trip, and then for a scholarship competition, staying with strangers all three times. Last weekend she visited another top contender overnight with a “friend of a friend” so that she could, in her words, “compare apples to apples.” Those experiences have led to deep conversations about pros and cons and what to expect. I think she feels anxiety about finally choosing between these two schools, but she also feels like she has enough information to make a choice without buyer’s remorse.
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@homerdog-“What could be good about going out at night with kids you don’t know and then sleeping on a dorm floor?”
Nix the dorm floor part, and you have the first weekend of college. My D18 is not especially introverted or extroverted, but being paired with someone of similar interests (say, music, or an extra-curricular) is not the worst way to go.
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