Hi folks. Parents of an D19 and S21 here. I enjoyed coming on CC for my D back in the day. With apologies for coopting the thread for a moment, my advice from this side is to try to get a sense of how a school has moved forward in light of its Covid history. D19 chose Scripps College, one of the Claremonts. All the colleges were closed, nothing on campus, for 18 months. She took a gap year. Upon their reopening this fall, they are in over their heads, still Covid-centered. Scripps never reopened its central hub coffee shop. They’ve never resumed cross-college dining. They’ve never again hosted an academic event. Student-faculty collaboration has gone missing. Career center programming is weak; center director left. This spring, they started the semester with locked classrooms, no dining hall, no dorm lounges, no fitness center, no outdoor pool, canceled Family Weekend, no indoor study spaces, no events. One can argue about appropriate calibrating of a Covid response on a college campus, but it’s important to discern when they’re “open” if they’re really open, and the horizon for that issue is longer than you might think. In Scripps’ case, I would strongly caution against this choice, as they are a shadow of their former selves, unrecognizable, plagued by high staff and leadership turnover, struggling to seek any sense of community, and the fight back from that will not be short because they haven’t even begun the journey away from it yet, in spring 2022.