<p>It is down to the wire, and my D is trying to decide between Muhlenberg and Wheaton. She is leaning toward Wheaton, but her one concern is that she has heard it is a suitcase school. Does anyone out there know if this is true? What percentage of kids do go home on the weekends. Thanks.</p>
<p>go visit on a Friday afternoon and take a dorm tour. If there are only a handful of out of state students there, that will help you decide.</p>
<p>My son looked at both schools. I don’t remember hearing that Wheaton was a suitcase school. We did feel that Muhlenberg had a lot more activity and “energy”. It also has 1000 more kids. When we looked, the returning freshman rate at Wheaton was only 83%. We know one freshman who transferred from Wheaton because he felt that other than sports, the campus was dead on weekends. Both are great schools (although we have a bias toward Muhlenberg).</p>
<p>I am not a student there, nor have I ever been, but I did visit a few years ago and ended up ruling it out for, amongst other reasons, its suitcase feel. Our tour guide actually said “yes” when asked if it was a suitcase school, though she then seemed to catch herself by saying that out-of-state students don’t leave (which seemed obvious).</p>
<p>I also found it really odd that I didn’t see any students wearing Wheaton apparel - which wouldn’t be too strange, except for the fact that quite literally the vast majority of students I saw were wearing sweatshirts and track pants with the names and logos of <em>other</em> area colleges. And this was on an open house day. I couldn’t help but suspect that they were all trying to send us a message…</p>