@Lindagaf I hear you, especially after perusing this site at length. Good news is, D is already through the process – and happily settled at BC. She was rejected from all her reaches, many listed above, but had a nice array of choices from her matches. We are approaching sr year with S, who has tippy top stats, so GC told him to “focus on the Ivies.” Aargh! He will apply to all of the UCs (he’s only visited UCLA), so I’m pretty confident he’ll get into at least one (we are in state). I’m trying to get him to apply to Cal Poly SLO as well, which daughter liked, but I realize that’s not a safety by your definition. He’s a summer birthday, young, so in the back of my mind I’m thinking he might benefit from a gap year if he doesn’t get into a school he’s really excited about.
@lkg4answers visiting Claremont in the summer means hot weather just like visiting the Northeast in Jan/Feb means cold weather. The difference is that most students don’t attend in the summer, and the Sept/May weather in Claremont is pretty awesome. My D basically lives year round in shorts and flip flops (actually Birkenstocks, lol). Also D says that most of the students who do stay on campus in the summer are doing science research, rather than the humanities students, so that may explain why they maybe seemed nerdy during your summer visit.
@Curiousermama fair criticism of Pomona regarding the lack of enthusiasm for sporting events compared to other schools. But if the campus seemed “dead” on a weekday when school was in session you were probably touring while class was in session. For example, my D says almost all classes run in the same blocks of time, with 50-minute classes running 3 days/week and 75-minute classes 2 days/week:
This system pushes most of the campus activity to more concentrated blocks, so instead of having a constant stream of students milling around to go to class, there are times when the campus is quiet (although for students, it often seems “tranquil” instead of “dead” 
) and times when there are people everywhere. This has the added benefit to students of making class scheduling difficulties much less common, and pushing students together in scheduling so it’s very easy to find times that work for everyone when you want to study with friends or classmates. Also, my daughter is a big fan of this system because it forces everyone to eat lunch at approximately the same window; there are no classes from 12:15-1:15, so lots of people eat lunch then and it’s easy to bump into people and make new friends in the dining hall.
@VMT I had the same impression of RIT when we visited. Four years later I’m so glad my son went there.
He had an awesome experience, great students and professors( and a job at the end)!
Just went through this process with my S who is off to college in the fall.
Went down:
Georgetown…small, overbuilt campus. By the third time the tour guide mentioned that students of all faiths were welcome I was getting the feeling that the school is not as secular as I thought
Williams…really wanted to like this school but it was just too isolated
Colby…lovely campus but again, just too isolated. And the town was a bit shabby.
Trinity…i hate to pile on but nobody wanted to bother getting out of the car
Met expectations:
Bates, Bowdoin
Went up:
Tufts…great high-energy tour guide. I graduated in the late 80’s and the school has really grown since then.
Wesleyan…S really liked the vibe (me, not so much). Very theatrical tour guide…no surprise I suppose…who was very engaging and high energy.
Amherst…beautiful campus…seemed comparable to Williams but not as isolated. The 5 college consortium seemed interesting as well.
So where will your S enroll, @SedgwickSt? Don’t leave us hanging!
Georgetown never claimed to be secular. It is Catholic but welcoming to all.
Up: Columbia, Barnard, Santa Clara D16 loved the compactness and well tended areas of each of the campuses. She loved the NYC locations of Columbia and Barnard and the Silicon Valley location of Santa Clara. The presentations were engaging and informative.
Down - Pomona - While D16 liked Claremont, the presentation at Pomona was a real turn off. The presenter refused to answer any questions which he said “can be found on the website”. He went on and on about ballroom dancing being a favorite activity. He also emphasized that 80% of the graduates went on to graduate school - D16 has no interest in grad school. The lecture hall that the presentation was in was run down.
Down - Carnegie Mellon’s lecture hall was also quite old and run down as was the area outside campus.
Down - Penn: The presenter gave off a snooty vibe of “of course you want to come here”. The area around U Penn was deserted on a Saturday morning. Overall U Penn seemed too similar to D16’s safety - University of Toronto, just more expensive, less vibrant and snootier.
Down - UC Berkeley: Another “of course you want to come here” presentation. We had booked the presentation weeks in advance and had a plane to catch about 4 hours later. We arrived on time for the presentation - most of the seats were taken and so the 3 of us stood in the doorway for a moment, looking for seats, then were told by staff to get out of the room and wait for the next presentation in half an hour ( a little more nicely than that) Nope, not paying OOS tuition to be treated poorly.
@bouders your experience at Berkeley was very similar to our experience. We booked a tour and they sent e-mail confirmations asking us to confirm or let them know if we weren’t going so they can plan for the number of tours. When we arrived, it didn’t matter whether or not we scheduled a tour. It felt like we were a nuisance on campus and in their way. The older gentleman in the admissions office was like a DMV worker (have you seen Zootopia?). Granted this was over spring break so there were a ton of people but Davis, Stanford, Santa Cruz and the other colleges in the area didn’t have a problem welcoming the surge in people visiting campus.
They sent a follow up survey and we responded with a similar sentiment to yours. If you treat potential students like this, how are you going to treat them once they enroll?
You cannot expect the same attention at a large public university, even UC Berkeley, that you will get a private university. Private universities can add the cost of recruitment to tuition, public cannot usually.
Sorry…he ended up applying ED to Wesleyan and was accepted. I think it’s a great fit for his personality.
To clarify regarding Georgetown, it was my assumption that the school had a more secular feel. They made it very clear they were welcoming to all but it just struck me as a bit odd to mention that 3-4 times during a tour.
^^ That’s the assumption lots of people make (and you’ll read here on CC many times that a school is Catholic ‘in name only’ which I don’t think is true at any Catholic school). Maybe Georgetown is pointing out that it really is a Catholic school that welcomes everyone. The applicant needs to decide what that means and whether those terms are a good fit. For some, not a big deal, for others the feel really is religious and not secular.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
How this very innocuous comment exploded into a discussion of G’Town’s policy on birth control is beyond me. However, that discussion was getting too far tangential to the original topics, not to mention treading dangerously close, and in some cases over, the lines of ToS. Several posts deleted. Let’s stick with the topic please.
Per @dfbdfb: D16 ended up realizing she really wanted a school with significant access to student run theatre. That may or may not have correlated with a strong theater department. (She wants to DO it (mainly write and tech) but not major in it.) Not sure which schools that may have elimitated after a visit, but it definitely pruned the list. (Beloit stayed, St. Olaf didn’t. Muhlenberg got an application and post acceptance visit. No other PA LAC made the list. )
Crossed off my sister’s list: Williams, after the admissions guy was so snarky he made her cry in the info sesh.
Wow, that’s harsh. Snarky in that she felt he personally humiliated her over her question or something?
Having received my doctorate from UC Berkeley, I can tell you that it isn’t the holy grail. There is no reason why they shouldn’t be more organized and more welcoming to potential students. If they can manage a couple thousand students taking Comp Sci each semester, they should be able to manage a couple hundred visiting the campus daily over spring break.
I would not compare UCB’s visit to smaller colleges like Santa Clara or Pomona but UCSD, UCLA, UCD, UCSC and even Cal Poly SLO all figured out how to welcome and provide information to 200+ visitors without making them feel like just another number.
^^ It’s too bad that UCB was our first (and last) visit to a UC. It turned D16 off so much she wouldn’t consider the other UC’s.
^ Yeah, we toured UCB a day after Stanford, which had the best organized tour and info session in our experience (15+ campus visits). Stanford was so clean, serene, and fun. UCB was so chaotic, disheveled, and weird. A huge let down. But, hey, UCB doesn’t need to care about tours because it’s flooded with applicants every year, despite the minimal efforts of the admissions office. Why bother?
^^ I was also impressed with the Stanford presentation. They know that the vast majority of visitors are lookie loos and that statistically no one in our tour group would end up going to school there, but we were not made to feel that way during the tour or the info session with asst dean of admissions.
We visited Stanford the day after Cal and I would estimate that there were just as many visitors at both campuses. The problem is that Cal offered fewer info sessions, tours and tour guides so they had to deal with a massive crowd where Stanford spaced out their tours throughout the day.
As far as Stanford being clean and serene, I agree but also know that comes with a smaller private school. USD and Santa Clara had a similar feel.
Funny that my son was turned off by the Stanford info session after listening to the speaker use the word “plethora,” at least ten times. He also kept using the phrase “very unique.” (Son hissed at me that the smartest of the smart should know better!) Also, during the tour, we didn’t go into a single building and we were almost run over by a cyclist.
I know what you mean about Cal, though. We did run into rudeness at Berkeley during a reception meant to entice accepted students before the SIR deadline! My son is so in love with Cal, that he was able to overlook it (or perhaps didn’t even notice), and he’s thrilled about starting there in the fall.