Visit NYC to look not only at Barnard, but at Fordham-Lincoln Center and Eugene Lang College at the New School. They are three very different liberal arts colleges in Manhattan. Barnard is a small, women’s college affiliated with Columbia (don’t be turned off by the single-sex label). Fordham-LC is the Manhattan branch of the Jesuit university. It is best known for its performing arts programs, but it offers a full, traditional, liberal arts curriculum. Lang is a progressive, quirky school: imagine Bennington or Hampshire dropped onto lower Fifth Avenue. I will qualify these recommendations by saying that neither Fordham-LC nor Lang would be a good choice for a student interested in a Science major. Fordham has a Science requirement, but the options are limited and no Chemistry is offered at the LC campus due to Homeland Security regulations within midtown Manhattan. Lang simply has very little in the way of lab science. Occidental or Reed might interest her, and the University of Chicago is an obvious choice if she has the academic chops.
I haven’t read all the replies, but your D sounds exactly like mine in her sophomore year. She thought she wanted to go to an urban school, too, and couldn’t wait to get out of our small town in Maine.
Spring of sophomore year we did a very casual college tour around New England and to NYC. (She was thinking about places like BU, Northeastern, NYU and Barnard.) It wasn’t a serious trip: we didn’t take the campus tours, we just drove around and walked around campuses. We went to several places in Boston and NYC, but also went to the Amherst area and looked at the 5 colleges there. Lo and behold, she fell in love with the small, rural, beautiful LACs with gorgeous campuses and real sense of community … and a sort of quirky vibe she loved. She’s at one of those now, and it is EXACTLY the right place for her.
So my advice is to do something similar, and see how she really feels. My D realized that she really didn’t like the huge, busy, anonymous feeling of the city campuses. Maybe yours will too?
(edited to add: Funny enough, by the end of her senior year, my daughter decided she loved her hometown and wants to come back here after she gets her PhD. Just goes to show you the difference there can be between sophomore and senior year!)
Exactly. My experience is that they have a lot of ideas can’t really know what they want until they see it up close and personal. You’ll both learn from the experience.
I concur with those persons who advise to visit a wide variety (large vs. small, urban vs. suburban vs. rural, public vs. private, etc.) colleges and universities, so your daughter will be able to get a general sense of what she wants in a college; she can then narrow her focus a bit after that.
Wherever you go for a visit, I encourage you and your daughter to go while school is actually in session so that your daughter can get a campus “vibe” with actual students there, and visualize whether she could see herself as part of the student body. Of the schools that I have visited with my child, the schools that we both hated the most (or had the least satisfying visits) were the ones we visited with no students around.
We did an early and initial Boston trip and looked at BU (big, urban, no real campus), Brandeis (medium, suburban), and Amherst (small, rural.) It was very helpful to see them together in one week.
Concur with reply #16 on doing a preliminary investigation on costs, financial aid, and scholarships.
Of course, you need to evaluate your household finances so that you know what you can contribute without endangering your household finances (including for your retirement or any younger kids’ college costs). That way, you can tell her what the limit is before she makes her application list and hope to avoid the issues that many students and parents posting here in April encounter when all acceptances are too expensive.
I too (many years ago) was bored and fed up with the homogeneous suburb in which I lived. The solution turned out to be getting as far away from home as possible (i.e. LAC on the opposite coast) rather than a shift from suburban/small town to urban. So consider distance as well as size in thinking about college visits and applications.
Agree with everyone about visiting as many as you can. My daughter wanted the experience of an east coast school and being far from home. She applied to the selective LACs and large universities she felt were more match selections and of course our flagship. After her visits, her mind definitely changed as to her first choice picks. She still wanted an LAC mainly because of class size and knowing her professors however she wound up on the west coast and was really happy. She was still 1200 miles from home but she felt a connection with the school she wound up at and was really happy.
Just to reinforce this. Lafayette is no where near Philly. I know that in some parts of the country this might be “down the road a bit”, but, here in the Northeast, that distance might be something we would do 1x in four years.
If you want your daughter to have a chance to find her group, I suggest a mid-sized school, one with about 800-1000 undergrads per class. One that is in a city, but, with a nice balance of commuters and residents. With that size, you still can get the personal, liberal art/teaching-oriented feel, but, with more diversity of student body. If you want her to go to a small school, especially, where everyone is residential, a dominant culture usually prevails ,and if she’s likes to stay on the fringe, than, there isn’t going to many kids there on the fringe with her.
As far as being in the city, not all “urban” schools, feel “urban”. A good number of them are on the edge of the cities, and feel almost suburban. Others have campuses that are more or less closed to foot traffic from the community or without cross streets on the campus, so, once you are there you don’t even realize the city is around you.
A suburban school in a suburb adjacent to one of our larger cities might meet your safety concerns, while still being “urban” for her. But, a suburban campus of a tiny city, might not have the diversity you are looking for to help a quirky kid find her niche.
@IBviolamom Have her start looking at Rice. Wonderful school, nurturing environment, no greek like, an oasis in Houston by the art district. They’re big on expressed interest. Requesting information and responding to their mail is a big plus. (I think they keep a record of how much contact the prospective student has with them.)