I’m still reading! D16 launched, but started looking for S18. Ones he’s added )partly based on my suggestions from these threads) include Richmond, Trinity and Delaware.
My d was perhaps the original hill-hater! And she opted for Pitt and will be climbing an enormous hill daily.
@Booajo Have you seen Trinity? What did you think about the surrounding neighborhood. I haven’t seen it yet. The school has a lot going for it from what I’ve read.
@citymama9 I visited Trinity with my D a few years ago. That school that was taken off the list during the visit. D felt it was way too preppy. The campus didn’t seem to be in great shape (ex. lots of dirt patches on grass etc.) and we didn’t love the area. We aren’t such prudes about neighborhoods (my S went to Fordham in the Bronx) but none of us felt great about the school. I should say that based on the presentation we all thought one could get a great education at Trinity – it just wasn’t for us.
I’ve seen none of these. My D had a different list. The Trinity I’m talking about is San Antonio by the way.
We did a big road trip out east this summer to visit colleges (we live in the midwest). We ended up not taking any schools OFF the list (she was actually really happy that the list we created was such a great match for her), but some did surprise us in ways we didn’t expect. This is loooong . . . Anyhow, here are our impressions:
Vassar: Absolutely gorgeous. She loved our tour guide (and spent some time afterward talking to our guide and another). She saw the arboretum aspect of the campus as a real plus–she “recharges” by taking walks in nature. Everyone was SO friendly on campus–students, faculty, etc. Impressed. She likes that it’s only a 90 minute train right into NYC–some students even do internships in NYC on Fridays. Still on the list.
Mount Holyoke: Stunning. Probably the nicest, friendliest admissions staff we met on the whole trip. Campus is gorgeous, but town isn’t much. She absolutely loved Northampton, though, and it’s a short bus ride away, so that was a consolation, and she loved the 5 college consortium. The dorms were beautiful, but didn’t have AC and they were sweltering. She said that the campus “feels like home.” It’s pretty high on the list.
Smith: It’s a very different vibe than Mount Holyoke, but she really liked it. I’d say that Smith and Mount Holyoke were tied in her mind, though she liked different things about each one. She loved the houses at Smith and was in love with Northampton. It’s a real plus to be able to walk right into town. It’s pretty high on the list.
Tufts: This was a surprise–she really liked it a lot, and it’s a lot bigger than most of the schools she thought she liked most. Very pretty, she loved Jumbo and the elephants everywhere, and loved our tour guide. It seems very relaxed and not overly competitive once you manage to get accepted. 
It moved up on the list.
Brown: This was another surprise. It’s the only Ivy she is considering, and her comment was "I wish it wasn’t an Ivy, because it seems like a lot of people are here only BECAUSE it’s an Ivy, while she loved it because she thinks it’s actually a really good match for her. The auditorium was packed with lots of families who were clearly touring 5+ Ivys that kept bumping into each other. With that said, Brown moved UP. We were both really impressed with how “normal” and relaxed it seemed–not pretentious at all. The area near campus was great, too. It definitely moved up the list and she will apply, although it’s next to impossible to get in since she is “unhooked.”
Bryn Mawr: This campus blew us away. It’s gorgeous! Lots of construction going on, but it was still very pretty. The surrounding area is also very pretty. She loved the traditions and could really see herself there. She came away from the tour a little worried about the work/life balance–she got a sense that people study 24/7 from the tour guide. I hung further back in the tour, so I didn’t get that sense. I think if she’s accepted and it’s in the top few choices, she’ll need to do an overnight during the school year (there were obviously very few students there in the summer). The classes there are TINY, which she loved.
George Washington: This was also a very pleasant surprise. It’s the biggest school she looked at by far, but as a probably political science major the internship possibilities can’t be beat. They also bring SO many amazing speakers to campus. I would say that overall it moved up the list, but she’s still concerned about the size (especially class size in some gen ed classes). She likes the possibility of the Women’s Leadership Program or Honors Program to make a bigger campus feel a little smaller.
Wash U in Saint Louis: She liked this even though she’d prefer not to be in the midwest. Campus was pretty, and the nearby GIANT park was pretty cool. She liked her tour guide. She wasn’t sure if it was more of a pre-professional vibe than she’s looking for, and it seemed to have the most gen ed requirements of any of the schools we visited. It probably stayed the same or moved down a little.
Barnard: This wasn’t actually a stop on our road trip, but she did a summer pre-college program there this summer and absolutely fell in love with it AND New York City. This is definitely top of the list, but with no merit money as an option, we will have to see how the financial aid shakes out.
The others she visited this year were Macalester, which she really liked a lot, and Lawrence University in Wisconsin. She enjoyed the classes at Macalester, although students weren’t participating as much as she would have liked (she actually participated quite a bit in the polisci class). The Macalester dorms weren’t great, either, but she loved Saint Paul and the close proximity of the capital. Great internship opportunities! Lawrence University was a surprised and moved up a bit, although she wasn’t sure about Appleton. Might be too isolated.
Well, who doesn’t love Brown? @smcirish , that is exactly how my D felt about it. She also loved that it felt like it was totally part of the neighborhood, and didn’t feel large, despite the number of students. Too bad it was almost the first place she visited. Made the bar much too high, and of course, she didn’t get in, to no one’s surprise.
Vassar fell off the list, too close to home, but lovely campus. Tufts felt very university-ish, and she was very keen on it for a while, but as she got to know smaller LACs, she definitely started feeling that was where she was most comfortable. She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get in, and it didn’t bother her.
For new readers to this thread, I strongly suggest you avoid doing what I, and many other parents, did. Don’t spend a lot of time and money visitng a bunch of reach schools, when it’s match and safety schools that should be the main focus. We should have been much more discriminating and only visited reach schools that she was definitely interested in. We did end up visiting most of the schools she applied to, which included match and safety schools. But we wasted too much time visitng schools that were just another reach. We knew the name, we knew they were prestigious, her stats were good, so we thought “why not, maybe she will like it.” In fact, the schools she ended up applying to and getting accepted to were the ones that sounded right for her on paper (Fiske Guide) before we ever set foot on campus.
Of course visiting campus is a great idea to see if the student can actually imagine fitting in, but don’t force a round peg into a square hole. Example: my D is an intelligent, hard-working student, with a creative and arty edge. But she is not intensely academic, and would not enjoy being surrounded by students who are. So WHY did we bother visiting JHU, which is probably the last college on the planet she would go to. (JHU was wonderful, btw, but not for her.) Anyway, my S19 will benefit from my hindsight. He will be dragged to far fewer campuses than his sister was.
@citymama9
We visited Trinity relatively recently. Thought the campus was very pretty. It was a picture perfect fall NE day when we visited. Full of gothic looking buildings, fall foliage and a well laid out campus. Students we met were friendly ( agree with happy1 that they were preppy, but that did not bother us) and well spoken. But yes, the neighborhood directly surrounding the school is not a good one. One thing we did not like, was that compared to peer schools, ie; other Nescacs, it had a lower freshman retention rate, which made us concerned about student happiness
My son HATED Brown, and refused to officially apply even though his football prowess earned him a likely letter after an official visit. (I know it wasn’t his academic record and test scores, which were just okay.) According to him, there were too many “hippies” and “people who don’t care about football.” My husband and I, on the other hand, loved it and were ready to go back to college ourselves. And our daughter has been known to rail against the unfairness of a system where her smart but lazy brother was able to get into one of her dream schools “just because he’s good at knocking people down.”
@EllieMom - that’s exactly how my daughter felt about both Oberlin and Bowdoin. They both looked so great on paper, and after extensive talks with coaches she was ready to pack her bags. After spending time on campus, she isn’t applying to either of them despite getting the very positive pre-reads. They are both beautiful campuses but as we’ve heard from so many people – “culture is deliberate” – and she didn’t like the culture of either. Culture is much harder to discern on a campus tour since some of it is simply dependent on your tour guide which is why longer visits for serious options are helpful.
@Finalthree
What is ‘deliberate’ culture?
@Lindagaf , that’s good advice about not visiting too many reach schools. Brown and Tufts were the biggest reaches on our trip to visit colleges, and it was mostly because I wanted her to see some schools that were a bit bigger than the 2000-2500 student LACs she had at the top of her list. What those visits taught her is that going to a bigger school can have benefits, too.
Ultimately, I think she’ll end up at one of the women’s colleges she visited, because she truly loved them all: Barnard, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr or Scripps (which we visited when she was a sophomore and she is going to officially visit this fall for an overnight). What a journey this has been!
Brown, Brown, Brown. Mmmmm. It’s true, most people love Brown. There’s so much to like: shopping for courses (Yale has this also), being able to take a course without a grade (so you’re able to explore outside your comfort zone), no class ranking. It’s a gem. BTW, Macalester offers all its students free bagpipe lessons. That was a “pro” for me. So many good choices.
@wisteria100 – what I mean is that cultures just don’t happen – they are created by what the students, professors and coaches do and say…how they behave, how they treat each other, how they interact with the local community. It’s the “personality” of the school overall. There are entire courses that focus on is culture deliberate or do they just “happen” – I lean toward they are deliberate, and many that have offered us advice throughout the college process have echoed that as well.
@Finalthree Maybe we should start a separate thread on “personalities” of schools. I, for one, would like to have those whittled down to a few adjectives per school! (Maybe larger schools don’t have one personality…but I bet most smaller ones do!)
That would be quite an interesting thread! A lot of the comments I read on this thread (and please know I am a late joiner, so I did not read all 1000+ posts) focus on the actual physical appeal of the campus and the facilities - all important considerations. We just layered on the culture aspect, which I suspect becomes more and more prevalent the closer you are to decision day and narrowing down the choices.
The “culture” of a college is important. Northeastern University is known for experiential learning which includes coop. It is a major part of campus culture. Some students and parents complain that on campus tours, open house days and admitted students days that they were turned off by “all the talk about coop”. That is a sign that Northeastern is not a school for them.
I attended Brown back in the stone age and it is a great school. I loved the flexible curriculum and the proximity to town. I didn’t have a lot of classes that blew me away with the quality of the professors, and I did have some TAs teaching sections, but I think that they are doing a better job focusing on teaching undergrads these days. in the 80s. Although the student body is obviously a diverse mix, there was definitely a liberal bent. I actually lean quite left, but the tenor could be a bit extreme. It seemed that every week there was a rally for some new cause. So I’d say the culture was self-consciously liberal for want of a better term.
Culture is a critical decision point, but I’ve found it hard to determine with any degree of validity the culture of a campus on a 1-day visit. Maybe an overnight would help. Clearly input from current students help. But more difficult after visiting the school just on a tour. So dependent on who you talk with.
I have recommended Niche many times. It is a student review site, and they compile ratings on a variety of factors, such as academics, guys and girls, partying, professors, etc…as well as publishing reviews (with dates, unlike others) about those various topics. As far as my D was concerned, it was the most useful website to her, apart from each college’s website. She cared what kids thought about their schools, rather than what adults thought. We discovered Niche after some visits had already been done, and wish we had found it sooner. After my son comes up with a list, he will be reading Niche to refine his list further.
“would like to have those whittled down to a few adjectives per school! (Maybe larger schools don’t have one personality…but I bet most smaller ones do!)”
I’d argue that even the small schools should be summed up in a few adjectives. That would be too simplistic, IMO. Although certain schools might lean a certain way or come across with a certain vibe, even the smallest schools will have a range of personalities and student types and a range of offerings. Additionally, as is apparent from this thread, it’s in the eye of the beholder and we frame our references on our own experiences and outlooks. One person’s “very liberal” might be my “moderate”, for example.