I have one kid that liked all the schools. Really, every single one was “great!” Impossible to get her to narrow down anything.
Kid #2 picks at everything. Too hot. Too cold. Too big. Too small. Ugly. Too far from a city. Too urban. He may not have a list at the end.
D24 did both…started off liking everything (maybe she just wanted to round out her hoodie collection 
), and then found something to not like about every place to the point where her list was distressingly small. I told her that getting every single thing on her wish list was something that realistically could not happen, and that she needed to focus on what was most important. Eventually she found that focus and has a decent sized list that hopefully will yield a few solid choices.
Why did she apply to college A but not B when both had some previously deal breaker characteristic? Turned out that overall vibe had a pretty high weight, moreso than any single element [all colleges were already vetted for major and a few academic standards]
We visited CofC as well and had many of the same observations. The location was beautiful and my son loved the city and beach atmosphere. Looks like a great place to go to college, but there were too many downsides that we couldn’t ignore. The housing crisis and high cost of living for the large majority of students who live off campus were the dealbreakers for us. They won’t guarantee housing beyond freshman year, and the off campus rents we looked at were eye popping! If you have a vehicle, you’re paying for a parking spot on top of your monthly rent. Coming from the Northeast (with no family even somewhat close) having a car would be a must just due to evacuation concerns on the peninsula. I think it’s probably an attractive school to in state students who get the tuition rate benefit, but way too expensive for an out of stater. We could clearly see that we’d be paying as much for room and board as we would be paying for tuition. Sadly, it came off our list as well due to these reasons.
Funny enough I know someone who couldn’t move off campus with her friends due to the cost and she was in state. She was going to sign up to live in the dorms with random roommates for sophomore year. Not sure what happened. Last I heard she had transferred elsewhere for sophomore year. This also made us hesitate to apply since she was very happy there but housing was a barrier.
Our first visit was Denison which was too big for my daughter.
It’s 930 acres.
I wonder if there’s a list of schools by acreage??
I see the largest schools but not LACs.
My d25 has the same thoughts. After visiting a few colleges with big brother, its more the acreage and walking she complains about vs number of students.
For my S23, it was that that the larger acreage made a school seem more desolate, or rather didn’t have the bustling and energy feel of the same number of kids on less acreage. It was that feel he liked more than the size of the school. He rejected University of Richmond for the no of students / acreage ratio reasoning ;-).
My sister had me look at the rental contract for my nephew living ‘On the HIll’ in Boulder (a sort of expensive area in an expensive city). The lease is for 11 1/2 months (don’t worry, you pay for all 12 months) and for a 5 bedroom ‘garden level’ (it was a basement) apartment it was $47k! There was also a $7k+ deposit, most of which would be refunded (cleaning, re-keying, and a lot of stuff I thought was illegal as it was normal wear and tear but the landlords know they can get away with it). Each kid (and parents) were jointly liable for the entire $47k, which they generously allowed you to pay in 12 installments - for an extra fee!
They signed it, he lived there for one or two years and then found a better deal closer to the engineering school.
The pain is real.
Boulder leases are ridiculous. I can’t believe what we think is a good deal now!
I can’t confirm, but I bet that 930 acres includes the Denison bioreserve, which is 350 acres and located separate from the main campus.
Talk of campus size, especially for LACs, reminds me that this sort of came up for DS as well, although we didn’t initially pick up on it as that. It had to do with how energetic a campus felt.
The campuses that were smaller – or that had many of the buildings that were frequented during the day – academic buildings, dining hall, student union with coffee house, for example, all near each other – made the campus feel more upbeat and lively.
It’s related to size, but if a lot of acreage was devoted to an arboretum or athletic fields off to one side, it didn’t make a difference. Having departments in more remote areas and more “daily use” campus, otoh, did.
That one, btw, is harder to assess as there were frequently very lively hubs around a dining hall in one of the corners of campus, but we weren’t necessarily seeing that.
But yes, several schools were downgraded in our tours for feeling a bit flat. Several of those that got revisits as part of accepted student events were understood better then. But it definitely has an impact.
“Walkability” was a factor for us too. West Virginia was way too spread out for D21, life at Alabama was best served with a car, but then everything at Ohio University is a 10-min walk, which suited our DD just fine. D23 dropped Michigan early on because of busing needs and didn’t love the campus breakdown at Boston College. Much like @tsbna44 we reviewed acreage at each school and compared it to her high school. An acreage list would be cool to review as an alternative to Wikipedia searches. I wish college info websites would include a “walkability” score, or even better, classroom-to-dorm distances. I know it’s not exactly a straight-forward measurement, but it still would be a nice data point.
If 930 acres is too big, don’t take her to Sewanee or Berry…
Yeah - I just looked up the acreage so could be. I just know on the tour - we had OSU which overwhelmed her and Denison, which seemed to go on and on.
Of course, her school is downtown and 95 acres - so totally good visits - because ultimately it leads you to a school like that.
Oh, she’s long in school. We went to Sewanee because it’s not far from home and enroute to other schools (heading that way) - not Christian so no Berry but i’ve been to Rome…actually stayed in Rome.
Funny my son never parked at Bama…biked or in the rain took the bus - but I think most his classes were concentrated in the engineering quad or nearby and yeah, the campus is huge. I know the school tour is on the bus. And when we’d drive around he’d point out places he’s not been but they’re part of the school. But related to school, his car always resided at his apartment.
One thing about bigger schools - bikes work miracles. And some (Bama did) have student bike shops and they fix up your old bike for cheap…that’s what you want, an old cheap one in case it gets stolen (which ours never did). It was my MBA bike from 20 years ago - two colleges.
Mine wasn’t a fan of campuses that relied on shuttles to get around either. She chose a large school in UCLA but it is the smallest UC by acreage and has a defined and walkable campus. It had a lot to do with feeling that energetic vibe of all the people moving together.
Interestingly, my S24’s HS has a pretty spacious campus, particularly for a HS, with rolling hills, woodsy areas, and some nice viewpoints. I don’t think it is at all a coincidence he seems to be drawn to a sort of expanded college equivalent, because he has had a really good HS experience.
In contrast, I was extremely excited to experience in college something very different from my HS, probably in part because I was pretty meh on my HS experience.
That said, his current top two college choices are not on that model. Very nice campuses, but not so much the rolling woodsy thing and more the classic many quads thing with Gothic architecture.
So basically, he wants to go to either an American Oxford, or if not that a beefed up version of his HS. Which I suppose is at least one reasonable way to look at it. And he probably would have loved Bryn Mawr (which we quickly drove through), but sadly that is not an option for him.
Edit: Oh, although the one college he only visited virtually that is very likely on his final list is Vassar. Somewhat ironically, now by the end of the process, knowing what he likes, we should totally have visited Vassar! But of course if it is a post-admissions possibility, we definitely will.
For that matter, he surprised me with the thought he heard Middlebury had no supplementals (probably from his close friend who is a Middlebury recruit), and was thinking about adding them to the application list. I am worried the location is not really on point for him, but I am pretty sure the campus would be, so same deal–if he applies and it is actually a post-admission possibility, we will definitely check it out.
There’s campus size and then there’s campus size.
Just for starters, a lot of land-grant colleges have large farms as part of their campuses, but they will never be seen by anyone except agriculture students. And there are also a lot of colleges, maybe particularly LACs, that have very compact campuses in the sense of what one would think of as their campus, but also have a lot of undeveloped land, often counted as part of their endowment. (And some of it isn’t even contiguous!)
So I don’t think a simple “more than X acres” (or even X acres per student) cutoff makes sense as a measure of physical compactness.
Indeed, and to geek out for a minute, this is where something like a weighted density measure would make sense. A weighted density measure, unlike an average density measure, gives you a much better sense of how many other people are typically near a given person. Sub-areas with few if any people in them don’t move the measure for a given jurisdiction, because they are assigned little to no weight in the formula. But the sub-areas where a lot of the people are actually found will then dominate the measure because they get very high weights in the formula.
Weighted density calculations are often done based on residential locations, but you can do them for occupational locations, and I think theoretically with enough data you could do them for some blend of dorm and class/lab locations. And in fact, although it may seem hard to collect such data, if people are willing, you can pretty easily use cellphone locational data these days to get really robust data sets.
Like, you could have an app which would not necessarily even need to constantly track you, you would just have to voluntarily note when you were at your bedroom, when you were at a class/lab, maybe libraries, dining, or athletic facilities, and so on. If you had enough volunteers at enough college campuses, you could develop a really robust picture of how moving around worked in practice for each college, with simple comparable and indeed searchable summaries of weighted density.
Maybe some day!