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I do generally agree with your premise though
</p>
<p>Then the conclusion naturally follows. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Logic 101.</p>
<p>ah, fit... the emperor's new clothes of the 2000's</p>
<p>^haha, nicely and cleverly said! Much better than I've phrased it.</p>
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<p>Exactly, only I voice my disagreements more vitriolically so as to make a stronger point.</p>
<p>"Exactly, only I voice my disagreements more vitriolically so as to make a stronger point."</p>
<p>LOL, be careful how you use that vitriole in life and remember caustic properties generally "eat away" at things not make them stronger.</p>
<p>A prospective student has probably found a good "fit" if:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>He/She can see themselves in the volunteer tour guide's shoes.</p></li>
<li><p>He/She can see themselves visiting their high school during winter break to meet with juniors and seniors to extol the virtues of his/her college and the overall experience.</p></li>
<li><p>He/She can see themselves being involved in activities like the Greek System, Speakers Committee, athletics, student paper...looking forward to the involvement as an opportunity for colleagues to influence them and vice versa.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>My daughter is at Cornell. She never thought she would want to be there because it's in a middle of nowhere, it is freezing coold. She wanted to be in an urban sitting. But when we visited Cornell, we ate at one of Cornell's dining rooms, she saw groups of kids come and go and she said, "I think I could be friends with some of them." Then there was another school in an urban sitting, offered majors she would be interested in, and had the right kind of mix of kids (international, diversified, liberal...). We went to that school's cafeteria to observe its students. I asked her, "Which group of kids would you hang out with?" She couldn't find any. We sat there for 2 hours because it was going to be "the school." </p>
<p>I am a believer of hanging out at student union, cafeteria, quad, any place where you see a lot of students come and go. You get to see how those students interact with each other - do different race sit together, are students carrying sports equipments,books or laptops, do most students know each other, how are they dressed, are there a lot of geeks or jocks, preppy or jappy? </p>
<p>Yes, I think fit matters. College is more than just academic, your kid needs to live there for 4 years. It's a long time to be any place if you are a misfit.</p>
<p>"And yet you ignored the part of my post where I wrote that "fit" cannot be determined in a matter of hours or even minutes.
Oh, yeah?</p>
<p>Hey OP,
Ever read the book BLINK? It's all about "getting" something "instantly". That is what people here are talking about when they mention gut reaction. It doesn't take hours for those who are used to paying attention to their "feelings". I suggest you back off pronouncing what CAN and CANNOT be done, in what time frame, since you don't know of others' experiences.</p>
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<p>Just like I have no right to "pronounce" that Hitler was evil, since I have no idea what his experiences were. Maybe he did something as a child that justifies killing 6 million Jews, you know?</p>
<p>I already addressed your point in post #20; I suggest you go reread it.</p>
<p>???I'm not talking about black and white labels- i.e. "Hitler was evil", I'm talking about your statement of what people are capable of- i.e. deciding quickly if a college "feels" good to them.
I'll put it another way- there is a difference between How people think [or come to a conclusion], and What they think- [the conclusion itself.]
But you don't seem to want to listen, only argue. So go ahead. [You may find that no one is interested in listening to you anymore.]ta-ta</p>
<p>First off, I'm going to invoke Goodwin's law here. The argument that the idea of split decisions is justfied has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler. Or murder, or in fact any crime I can think of.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm being harsh, but in my experiences once this claim is brought up, the argument just degenerates into pure trash. </p>
<p>Not that I mean to be insulting, but it is far too emotional and extreme a point of view to be related to most debates. You are, in emotional ways, accusing the opposition of Nazi sympathies. Your statement implies that the opposition is incapable of judging such deeds as war or genocide by one of histories mass murderers, and thus complicit in it.</p>
<p>You may not mean it that way, but I guarantee that is how it feels emotionally. </p>
<p>In a twist on this thread, I'll say this: Once emotions alone rule a debate, the debate will fall apart.</p>
<p>Invocations of Hitler will do that, and very quickly.</p>
<p>(And sorry for my blatant criticism, but having run a website for some time myself, I'm incapable of standing by while threads collapse from discourse into chaos.)</p>
<p>As for the topic, I'd wager that fit does exist, but that snap judgements become less and less relevant as school size increases.</p>
<p>I'd bet I could snap judge Deep Springs by visiting. The same could not be said for Texas A&M or Rutgers. </p>
<p>I'd say 80 people is a good sample size to remain under, but I'm not a statistician, so I don't know what total size that would(in general) be. This all on some blanket concepts by capitalist philosophers. Someone else might be better suited at discussing it.</p>
<p>I apologize if my first comments seem too harsh, but as I've said, such accusations, even if unintended and implicit, will lead in almost all cases to something less than debate or argument, maybe bickering, maybe fighting, always worthless.</p>
<p>As a professor, with many academic friends, all of us having been at many schools collectively, we've talked about this quite a bit. I think the search for some kinds of fit by students are illusory only. </p>
<p>Why? </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Most campuses are very diverse! One school or deparatment on campus can be extremely different from another. Heck, even floors in a department vary culturally (eg. the engineering school has one culture, arts another, polic sci is very different from the bschool). Likewise departments like 'student services' may operate very different from 'security' and from "food services". All organizations, especially large ones, are a fabric of very many differences. No complex organization achieves a unified shared common personae. </p></li>
<li><p>Much of the purported university characteristics you'll read about in the brochures is manufactured by PR and marketing. It's branding. It's not reality, (though some schools are much more effective at getting closer to making it reality than others). It's what the school wants to be but likely may not (or at least is not consistently enough to be measurable). </p></li>
<li><p>Much of the data we get as consumers is very limited. Talking to five students on campus is not a representative sample. Visiting on a given day or two isn't living there. Throw in selective questioning, and biased memories, and not surprisingly, you will develop an impression that may be quite different from 10 other visiting students on different days, in different dorms, with different questions. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, things like weather, or size, or areas of academic strength, proximity to home, general political orientation, geographical region, are all great things to base your fit on. And yes of course visit visit visit and read read read. And go with your gut. But the idea that one's personality can be tailored to a particular school or that adcoms are hand picking particularly personal traits is just not the case.</p>
<p>Some people are more perceptive than others and can size up a situation pretty quickly and accurately. Those type of people probably do a pretty good job of determining a college's "fit" in a very short period of time. Other people are terrible at interpreting cues and projecting themselves in different environments. They may have a tougher time finding the right "fit" and end up being a transfer statistic.</p>
<p>DS, did it the old fashion way. He used books with the decision solely based on his research. "Visitations? What for," he said. I call it an adventure, Like the one that Bilbo Baggins made.</p>
<p>Our family's answer to your ?, Yes, fit is contrived.</p>
<p>Our experience contradicts this. I don't think fit is contrived. I don't think we need to be anxious about it and find "the one" but I do think fit is a valuable concept and one aspect of the decision. For some, it will be more important than for others, just as finances or location vary in importance for different students. To my mind it is not the only consideration, but it is certainly a consideraton.</p>
<p>I do think that students who believe that there is one and only one school that fits set themselves up for disappointment. But it is also easy to draw up a list of desired characteristics:location, size, social scene, access to resources in one's prospective major, and the like. So a student who dreams of attending Haverford will probably not think s/he will fit at UMich. A student who wants to be in NYC will not think Grinnell is a good fit. But within each type of schools, there are several that would qualify. If a student, having drawn a list of likely schools, visits only those schools, chances are that the student will think any of these would be a good fit. That's what happened to S1. S2 would also have been happy at most of the schools on his list; but that's because they all met his criteria.</p>
<p>I think of "fit" for college as being somewhat analogous to marriage. There are, in the world, probably many persons with whom one might have a successful marriage. But there are also others that just wouldn't work!</p>
<p>I'm an analytical sort - i like facts, number, ranking things by relative importance. But I'm unwilling to dismiss "fit" as part of the decision process.</p>
<p>So the facts part of my d's process is based on schools that had majors she was interested in, relatively small class sizes, a preference for an urban setting, or relatively easy access to a city, academic quality, etc.</p>
<p>But how did she develop this criteria? By going an looking at some colleges. For example, the first college she visited was Amherst. There were many aspects of it she liked, but she had two concerns - size and location. She goes to a big high school, and when she realized it was smaller than her high school, it helped her to recognize that she wanted a school with more students. And she looked at the surrounding area and felt like she wanted more of the ethnic restaurants, entertainment and cultural activities than were available in the area.</p>
<p>So one way to say that was that the "fit" was not good. Another way to say it is that actually being there helped her visualize herself in the setting, and assess what was positive and negative.</p>
<p>She used that information to refine her criteria - certain schools came off the list as being potentially too small or too rural. </p>
<p>She's now applied to schools that seem to have what she's looking for in a school, and there are 4 or 5 that could be "number 1". She really hasn't got a number 1. When she finds out where she's been accepted, I'll support her in visiting those she hasn't seen yet. If you want to eliminate the use of the word "fit", I'll say that I want her to verify if the other data sources she's used, such as the college's materials, CC, and books, have accurately represented what the experience at the school seems to be, based on her own experience visiting the school.</p>
<p>Is a day or two visit a limited data set? Sure. Is it better than having no direct data? Yup.</p>
<p>I think fit is contrived if families believe that there are just a handful of colleges where their child would be happy attending. However, when defined by broad characterizations, fit is certainly a reasonable and rational concept.</p>
<p>I don't know why I'm bothering to enter this thread, but I will say that I think that "fit" is overstated but not invalid. It's really just a way of saying "Is the campus culture/environment a sort that I would enjoy being in for four years?"</p>
<p>Obviously, you do not know for sure until you have actually been at the school for a while, but by that time, you have already made your decision. So people make decisions in the presence of partial information, with remaining uncertainty. As they do in all sorts of life decisions.</p>