Colleges we crossed off our list after visiting:
Holy Cross - Visited BC first, which in retrospect was not fair to HC. We are very familiar with Worcester (DH did his master’s there), so we expected it to be grim and dreary - just not as grim and dreary as it seemed that day. The tour guide was meh, the info session was also meh. The buildings were nice, but not nice enough after visiting BC. It didn’t go OFF the list right away, but it moved to the bottom and eventually fell off.
Marist - the best thing my son could say after our visit was that he loved the groundhogs (apparently, the campus is overrun with them!). The school was ok - really pretty campus and buildings. But the lack of his intended major and the fact that it does not offer enough aid and their top merit scholarships aren’t enough to make it affordable made it leave the list altogether.
UPenn - YIKES! That was a toughie! REALLY wanted S18 to like it as his rowing coaches were both alums and were asked specifically for any qualified rowers they could nominate for recruitment. But it was a disaster from start to finish. The three people behind the desk at the admissions office were busy in a personal conversation with each other, turned to us as if we were an intrusion in their day, barked at us to wait “over there” for the tour, and then went right back to their conversation. So much for the “City of Brotherly Love!!!” The tour guide never showed up, so we ended up grabbing maps and doing a self-guided tour. The campus was beautiful, but what was beyond the walls was appalling. Boarded-up, abandoned, or sketchy buildings surround the walls. We saw multiple people passed out, either drunk or on drugs, on the steps of various buildings. And there was a man either drunk or ODd literally next to our car in front of the Wharton School of Business building. According to campus security, this is a big problem there. And to boot, literalyl two weeks later was the shooting of the UPenn and Philly police officers a few blocks from where we were parked. NO thank you! We were done at that point!
Colgate/Cornell - I’ll put them in the same category as we toured them on the same day. They were both just fine, but they weren’t nice enough to knock anything off the Top 10 list, so we crossed them off. Colgate’s tour guide spent too much time talking about all the things students do to “game the system” on campus, which left both S18 and I with a very distasteful feeling of the character of students there (I’m sure stuff like that happens everywhere, but to brag about it during an admissions tour is just in poor taste). And the info session was underwhelming for many reasons. Again, Cornell was OK, but S18 already had picked the two Ivies he was going to apply to as his reach schools, and he didn’t like it more than the other two.
Villanova - Drove in, the whole campus was a mess with construction and road closures, S18 asked us to keep driving. Off the list.
Bowdoin - Nothing wrong - campus was beautiful, great school. But S18 said the science building was too small, and being a STEM major, that was a turn-off.