<p>Now that we have visited over 30 individual colleges and universities (and many we visited more than once), I feel the need to bestow (entirely subjective, opinion-based) awards to some outstanding schools. Look out US News & W.R.! </p>
<p>Please feel free to disagree or add your own!</p>
<p>Most Beautiful Campus -- Traditional: Sarah Lawrence
Most Beautiful Campus -- Modern: UMass Boston
Most Beautiful Campus -- West-Coast Flavor: Stanford, CalTech
Spectacular Locale -- Pepperdine, UCSC
Most Wildlife on Campus: UCSC
Coolest/Funniest Tour Guides: UChicago, Amherst, Yale
Congeniality (Tour Guides, Admissions Officers, random students, or faculty went out of their way to be helpful): Williams, UMass Amherst, UPenn, Sonoma State, MIT, Princeton, Grinnell
Most Responsive Admissions Officers: UPenn, UMass Amherst, MIT, Williams
Most Vibrant, Exciting Atmosphere: MIT, USC
'Great Books' Curriculum: St. John's Annapolis, UChicago
'Great Books' Curriculum -- Abridged: Bard
Pre-Professional Curriculum: Emerson
Free Snacks: Wheaton (M&Ms)
Nicest to Parents: Williams, Bard, St. John's Annapolis, Sarah Lawrence
'Save-The-World' School: Boston College, Tufts
'Big School' Feeling: Boston University, USC, UCSD
Urban Setting: NYU, Columbia, UChicago, UPenn, Yale, Emerson, Northeastern
Pastoral Setting: Williams, Grinnell, Bard, Sonoma State
Parents' 'I Want To Go Here' School: St. John's Annapolis</p>
<p>Most beautiful campus: Caltech
Funniest tour guide: Caltech (Senior ditch day and all those pranks including being the victim of an MIT hack in progress)
Best town outside the gates: Harvard, runner up Columbia
Best presentation of academic programs: Carnegie Mellon
Best LAC art museum: Colby
Best University Art Museum: Harvard? Yale?
Best food: Caltech (at least the lunch offerings)</p>
<p>I completely agree with your award for 'I want to go here' school: St. John's College--Id take either Annapolis or Santa Fe (or take turns between the two)!</p>
<p>Most beautiful campus: Caltech
Best tour guide: UCLA, Rice
Most vibrant: USC
Best campus-city combination: Columbia
Best staff (admissions office, info session, tour guides): Rice</p>
<p>If you came away from the University of Chicago thinking it had a "great books" curriculum anything like St. John's, someone screwed up at the information session. "Great books" is kind of a fighting-words phrase there, and is most often heard in the sentence, "The Core is NOT a 'great books' curriculum." And by and large it isn't, although if you really want you can choose some great-booksy options within the Core and cobble something like it together. The Columbia Core Curriculum is much closer to a "great books" style than Chicago's.</p>
<p>College with best family-style restaurant within walking distance: McDaniel</p>
<p>My daughter and I are <em>still</em> talking about the dinner and breakfast we had at Baugher's, a stone's throw from McDaniel. Three huge sweet potato pancakes with homemade apple butter, for the unbelievable price of $3.</p>
<p>Not as well travelled as some of you, but . . . </p>
<p>Most beautiful campus (large): Cornell
Most beautiful campus (tiny): Bryn Mawr
Most color-coordinated campus: Stanford
Most knowledgeable tour guide: Harvard
Most effective tour guide: Yale, twice
Best backward walker: Brown (in flip-flops, no less)
Best grace under pressure by tour guide: Dartmouth (being grilled by a U.S. Senator about drinking and drugs, detailed answers about Jewish life on campus by non-Jewish guide)
Most serendipitous tour guide: Wesleyan (roommate of friend's sister); BU (shared son's very unusual hobby)
Best hypothetical drinking game: At HYPS and Chicago, whenever mention is made of Nobelists teaching freshmen
Best delivery on promise: Harvard (S attends freshman seminar taught by Nobelist). Honorable mention: Amherst (freshman seminar taught by college president).
Most beautiful library: NYU
Most aggressive squirrels: Yale (despite Chicago's claims to the contrary -- we were being stalked by a pack of them a la Jurassic Park velociraptors)
Best food on and near campus: Yale, Penn (but we know where to go)
Worst food on and near campus: Wesleyan</p>
<p>Nice to see two lesser known/reported on CC Calif. schools (UCSC and Sonoma State) making your list. But I have to award most beautiful campus to UCSC.</p>
<p>Best backward walker: JHU (flip-flops <em>with</em> kitten heels)
Most helpful prof: Lehigh Engineering tour (prof invited whole tour group in, spur-of-moment, and spent a long time talking/answering questions)
Best on-campus cafe food: Lafayette
Best near campus food (too many to list ;)): Stanford, JHU, Tulane... we, too, knew where to go
Worst off-campus food options: Lehigh/Lafayette (sorry, Allentown/Bethlehem folks)
Most beautiful campus (modern): Hofstra - plantings/landscaping awesome
Most unintendedly soporific tour segment: Harvey Mudd (freshman in lab describing his research; arcane and went on for 15 minutes with guide not knowing how to segue out)</p>
<p>Most beautiful campus: Wellesley
Worst campus: Harvey Mudd
Best groomed and maintained campus: Stanford
Most polished, articulate, and knowledgeable tour guide: Harvard
Most clueless tour guide: Princeton - couldn't depart from his script no matter how inappropriate to his current audience
Best on-campus food: Pomona
Most vibrant campus and surrounding area: Harvard
Least vibrant campus and surrounding area: Mt. Holyoke
Best livestock: my alma mater -- UC Davis</p>
<p>Another vote for Caltech campus and its lunch food. S's first room had a bed, dresser, big red couch, all floating in semi-circle from the ceiling. Magical (bless those engineers). The smell of oranges pervaded the campus, and the olive trees have led to a campus industry.</p>
<p>Best place to visit on a mid-October Saturday afternoon: Princeton (and that from a Rutgers grad.)</p>
<p>Interesting about the USC comments. I have been there many times in the last four years and I think I know what people mean when they say "vibrant," but I'm not sure. Anyone care to clarify? I'm sad that my son graduated because I loved visiting that campus. </p>
<p>I may miss USC but I do no miss paying the tuition.</p>
<p>I haven't been on that many tours per se, but I wanted to go
to Columbia just to do the core!
Also, I'm terribly biased, but I love Stanford's campus. UCLA is also great.</p>
<p>Most unexpected food: visited Harvey Mudd on March 14th and the entire tour group was stopped in the hall of the math department and offered pie.... no, they insisted we each take a slice. It's like the patron saint's day of math nerds, evidently. D1 managed not to break into her recitation of pi to the 100th digit.</p>
<p>Most friendliest admin receptionist: UNH
Best Tour guide story: Cornell (prof sharing live feed from Mars Rover with physics class as NASA was getting it)
Encountered friendliest students: Whitman College
Best campus location: University of Washington
Preppiest tour guide: Dartmouth
Nerdiest tour guide: Middlebury
Most beautiful library: Lewis & Clark College</p>