If a college, especially an urban college, were to allow visitors to roam through dorms unescorted that would be a deal breaker: the campus has lax security!
1 Like
Of the schools we toured that were in session, I can only think of one (University of Rochester) where they took you into a dorm and showed you a room. As someone mentioned above, different people value different things. Personally, I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in seeing the inside of a dorm since the odds are very much against your kid living in that dorm if he/she ends up matriculating at that school. Although it’s not always possible, we did try to tour schools that were in session since it gives you a sense of what the student body is like.
Every time dorms were included in a tour, they were freshman dorms and/or honors college dorms in our experience. Once we were shown a theme house.
@eb23282 Yes, it must be different types of schools. We concentrated on large publics and a few medium sized privates (Fordham, Tulane, American, Univ of Richmond, St. Josephs in Phily). I guess maybe at LACs or more selective schools you would find students collaborating on projects in the dorms at 10 am on a Monday. Not on any of the tours we were on.
There were two schools we visited that my daughter was excited about but then cooled on for very different reasons. One was Marquette - she just didn’t like the urban university vibe and didn’t care that much for Milwaukee. And then Kansas State - because even though it’s a decent sized university, it had kind of a rural feel to it and didn’t have much diversity.
There’s one characteristic that is one of the highest on my priority list. Bathrooms! I looked at bathrooms and showers in almost every building on every campus that we toured. I was actually really impressed with the new buildings/bathrooms that we saw at Cal Poly SLO.
There was only one thing that bothered me about the UMich tour and that was the tour of Law Quad. It’s absolutely beautiful, but 99.9999% of the students that take a UMich tour will never see the inside of these buildings ever again, except possibly the Law Library.
2 Likes
My D19 was offered some spectacular money to go to Alabama Huntsville, so we flew her down to tour the place. (We’re based in Alaska, so touring schools before applying isn’t always an option.) She liked the school well enough…but the showers in the (suite-style) housing? Not appealing—they’re kind of insanely narrow, and her tall self would have had to duck to get her chin under the spray, let alone wash her hair. She couldn’t imagine that every morning—and so took the slightly lower but still very appealing financial offer to go elsewhere.
So yeah, little details about the dorms can be a big, meaningful deal for some people.
1 Like
Crossed off: Vassar. The grounds were poorly maintained, the campus clearly hasn’t been updated since the 1800s, the official tour refused to show us a dorm room (never a good sign), and the info session had a very haughty tone.
Moved up: UConn. If you’re not interested in a rural school, you won’t like it, but UConn has done a lot to revamp their campus and make it less empty space. They’ve essentially brought in a lot of businesses to start up on campus. Now there’s restaurants, shops, a supermarket, a CVS, and my favorite - Insomnia Cookies, which will deliver warm cookies to students’ dorms up until 3 AM
Harvard dropped way down the list from a recent tour. Just not very impressive and they didn’t seem to make much of an effort - maybe they can just live on reputation.
MIT moved up from 2 to 1, but its position was greatly strengthened by the presentation/program. We were there for a competition with hundreds of top candidates so they probably pulled out all the stops. It worked.
Fwiw, Yale was solid.
1 Like
Add me to the chorus of people who like to see a dorm room, a dining hall and a classroom on every tour. Kids are looking for a good fit - a place they can “see themselves being happy”, so for my kids that meant getting a sense of where they might sleep and eat and sit in class. People watching in the dining hall and reading the message boards all over campus always help us get a sense of the place.
Best tour so far was St. Lawrence (the personal tour for every visitor probably had something to do with it) and worst on that score was Yale (no dorm tour, no dining halls, and no classrooms! But gave us ten minutes to walk around by ourselves in the rare book library where everything was behind glass - huh?). Really good info session, though.
1 Like
Remember that, if the tour does not include something you want to see, you can go see it yourself, at least during the school year when students are around to open doors for you.
Dining halls are easy to see. They pretty much always will let you buy lunch and eat there, and sometimes they won’t even charge you. It is a great time to people watch, too. Sit where you have a good view of the students.
For dorms, you just need a little chutzpah. Stand near a door until someone opens it and then catch it. You’ll be in the building. Then, you usually can find someone around whom you can ask if they would mind letting you see their room; be considerate, though, and pick someone who doesn’t look like they are in a hurry to get somewhere. Most people seem excited to welcome a potential student and will start talking to you. Again, obviously be considerate and keep it short, and respect their privacy— a quick glance around is sufficient to give you an idea of the dorm room’s size and condition.
I totally disagree with trying to do this. That’s how to get students complacent about letting people in and then having burglaries.
If a dorm tour is so important, ask admissions to get in legitimately. Not fair to put students on the spot or try to skirt security.
6 Likes
They’re trying to attract students. They’re hoping to get my likely full pay student. If we’re driving 100+ miles, or worse, flying in to have them sell their school, they probably shouldn’t do such a crappy job that it requires chutzpah to see a place kids will spend 30%-40% of their time on campus.
1 Like
We like to see a dorm room as well. And on summer visits, the cafeteria wasn’t always open so we wanted to at least see it on the tour.
When we went to Gettysburg College both the dorm room and the cafeteria were under construction. Not sure why they couldn’t show us a dorm room in another building, they couldn’t all be under construction. The info session was great but the tour guide was an international freshman student who didn’t know much of anything and then had very little to show us. I think we saw the science bldg and maybe the athletic center. But my D did keep it on her list.
And sexual assault too. I assume it’s the same almost everywhere nowadays, but at my kid’s school, you have to swipe a card to get into both the dorm and the individual rooms. Also, the dining hall.
And having spent time moving in, moving out and visiting over the course of a school year, I would never feel comfortable not having my kid there to let me into the dorm. And from what I witnessed, I highly doubt a student would let any non-student adult or anyone suspicious knowingly into the dorm. Those are the rules.
My son has had very different living situations over 4 years - modern, old, spacious, cramped, etc. Seeing any one of those dorm rooms would have misrepresented the other 3. I know that accepted students can see several dorms during accepted student revisits but am quite sure we didn’t see any during the tour.
My favorite dorm visit involved a room with a sleeping, pajama-clad girl in it and about 12 people on a tour crowding in next to her bed as the tour guide announced “she doesn’t mind!” The awkward intersection of horrifying and hysterical.
I toured 15 colleges with my first child and 12 with the second. We toured a dorm room on almost every college visit with the first, and only saw a dorm room on one campus with my second. Older child applied to smaller schools, and younger visited a couple of state schools and then ten selective Ivy/research universities. Oddly, Columbia included the dorm tour, which required shuttling small groups up in a tiny elevator.
At first, I loved the dorm tours, but by the tenth school, I really did not care to squeeze the entire tour group into a model double bedroom. The tours provide a slight of life perspective, but housing options vary so much across one campus that we weren’t touring the dorm that my child would end up living in. Older one never toured a dorm at his school until he moved into his room freshman year.
I made a point of eating in a dining hall, student union, or coffee shop whenever possible. Younger child attended classes during every college visit during the school year, and I passed the time walking around campus or watching the students. Highly recommend that if time permits.
Re: Yale housing tour. While it wouldn’t be impossible to tour a room, the residential college system means that families would be climbing winding staircases and then potentially interrupting several suite mates who share a common room. There aren’t any typical dormitories with bedrooms off a hall. Suites of four to eight share a common room with some configuration of bedrooms off the common room. Dining rooms are within each residential college, inaccessible without a swipe of the student ID. I had to settle for walking around a lot since I couldn’t eat in a dining room.
I read this over and over again on CC. I wonder if they assume most touring the campus aren’t viable candidates.
1 Like
Thinking over the college tours I went on with D17, I would say that whether a dorm was shown or not didn’t necessarily change how she felt about a school overall but she was glad to see some examples of student housing as a general concept because she’d never been away from home before, so seeing concrete (or maybe I should say cinder block haha) evidence of kids actually having 24 hour lives made the whole idea of college seem more real.
Ok, I guess in hindsight, seeing a dorm didn’t do RPI or Stony Brook any favors, whereas Smith’s houses made the living situation there seem very approachable. Every place else that showed a dorm fell somewhere in between (including Hamilton - where she is a junior now - home of the legendarily messy/honest tour room 
)
1 Like
So unsettling to read a suggestion like this, presumably coming from a parent. Really, use “chutzpah” to bully a kid into opening a door for someone they don’t know? I have invested so much time telling my kids to do the exact opposite - NEVER let someone come in with you when you swipe into the dorm, no matter how they look or what they say. Are you aware that Rutgers University is dealing with a spate of burglaries and sexual assaults this semester and all are attributed to students having let an unknown person into the dorm when they swiped in? This was just in the press several days ago. School officials are tearing their hair out in an attempt to convince students to never let anyone walk in with them despite the pressure they may feel to do so. Very sad to read this. I hope you never try this maneuver at any dorm that is occupied by somebody I care about. I understand the curiosity of prospective parents and students about the quality of dormitory space, but it is greatly outweighed by the need to safeguard the occupants of the dorms.
3 Likes