<p>My son & I feel orientation was worth it. It answered a lot of questions about registration and classes that he had and he became familiar with the campus. It was optional and they had an assortment of dates throughout the summer to choose from. If you were coming from out of state you could attend during Welcome Week (which leads into fall semester starting). The cost was $150 for the student to attend and room on campus (in one of the suites). </p>
<p>Parent’s attendance was optional and they had parent programs scheduled throughout the day (and parents & kids would not take part in the same programs). Everyone attending (parents, families and students) who wanted to stay on campus were housed in the suites. If a family of 6 attended, student & parent & family they would be assigned to the 6-bedroom suite. Moms with Daughters (and dads with sons) would be assigned a double within a suite, sharing the suite with others. Moms with sons were assigned two rooms in the suite. The other rooms could consist of other families or individual students who attended alone. </p>
<p>My son attended orientation alone (his choice) and was housed with two boys who were best friends and another boy. Two of the boys brought a lot of alcohol and the room became a party room at night. My son said if he had to do it over, he would have preferred both of us to stay off campus at a hotel and he’d go in for the programs each day (which a lot of other families did). </p>
<p>Then you haven’t paid the bills. We are on the West Coast and not by a hub airport. After past college exploration trips, we are figuring that for two people, two flights, 2 nights at cheap hotel (probably requiring a commute to campus) and the tiniest rental car, the cost is about $1200 to much of the East Coast or Southeast. For schools like Cornell, where you are flying to a tiny airport, add $200-400 if you don’t get lucky on your flight costs .</p>
<p>$150 is a bigger trip to the grocery store. $1200 is a mortgage or rent payment for many people. </p>
<p>Sally, if you get anyone’s ear on this point, I believe a MANDATORY separate summer orientation should have to be added to the college expenses disclosure list in the official financial aid disclosures in April, including the AIRFARE costs for out of state students.</p>
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<p>@Picapole You should’ve read the rest of my paragraph, rather than stopping half way through it. </p>
<p>
I have been continuously speaking about the orientation model my college has been using. For the colleges that only have orientations in June, I feel they should have extended dates spread out over the summer to allow flexibility. But for the colleges that do have orientation session outside of June, there’s no reason to get worked up when you have the option to attends another month, as I have previously stated. </p>
<p>In regards to colleges adding airfare costs into the calculations for out of state students, I think it’s a bit much to expect a college to keep tabs on how much it will cost that one student. What is expectable is that the college included the orientation cost with a little asterisk stating transportation costs will vary. </p>
<p>Good point. Colleges commonly group “Miscellaneous Expenses” together when publishing the Cost of Attendance, and there is almost always a separate heading for “Transportation.” But an unanticipated cross-country plane trip in the summer (which may also require additional expenditures for ground transportation and for dorm accommodations, meals, and possibly hotels) can be a significant enough figure to warrant a separate disclosure.</p>
<p>I will mention this on the NACAC (National Assoc. for College Admissions Counseling) forum next week.</p>
<p>@Niquii77 I did read your entire post. But nowhere did you state that orientations for OOS students specifically back up to the date that the students arrive on campus for fall term. Flexible dates that require a separate round trip are still expensive! </p>
<p>@Sally_Rubenstone Exactly! The Transportation heading is what I’m referring to. </p>
<p>I’m sitting here at my mother’s house because my daughter’s orientation is Monday morning. We live 2000 miles from her school, but my mother only lives2 hours away, so we’re making a vacation of it, and also brought the first load of school clothes and things from home (thank you Southwest for your 2 free bags!). I don’t know if orientation is required andr not, it was just listed and I’m guessing expected. I’m sure if you didn’t attend you’d still get to go to school. It is $60 for the student and $30 for ''guests" which was to cover the dorm and food. Parents could stay on campus, but they discouraged it. I’ve looked at the schedule and much of it was the same as the ‘discovery weekend’ we went to in September - dorms, meal plans available, sports and clubs, team building, etc. There were several two-day sessions available, the first for the honors kids, but that was when my daughter was still in high school so she couln’t have gone anyway. Many kids picked the earlier times for ‘better’ classes, but I’m not worried. I never had trouble getting classes, and she’ll figure it out. After we’d left home, she got a notice that there is a ‘registration hold’ on her because she has not turned in her vaccination forms, which of course are at home. It will work out.</p>
<p>My other daughter has orientation the week before classes start in Aug. They have stuff for parents, but I don’t think I’ll stay. No cost for parents but the hotel room. However it is in a summer resort area, in August, so hotels are not cheap.</p>
<p>I think it is a revenue maker for the schools, and in this day and age with everything online, registration could take place from a yurt in Mongolia as well as on campus.</p>
<p>I’m a parent and my D has a summer orientation coming up next week and my husband and I are going. She’s staying in the dorm, we are not although we could have. There was an extra cost but the deposit for her school was lower than normal so I still think we are doing pretty good on that end. There are some shared and separate programs for student and parents. It’s a day and a half program and it is mandatory but they do offer another date right at the beginning of the school year but it is watered down.</p>
<p>I like that my D gets to get stuff out of the way before school starts. She will register, get her ID. See her dorm room. Meet her roommate. Set up banking. Get medical stuff in order. It also gives her time to correct anything that needs correcting. So yeah, she’s excited and I’m excited for her.</p>
<p>My school (Middlebury) is pretty much like this. Orientation is the whole week before the first day of class. The “it’s too late to turn back now” attitude will definitely be present because we learn about our roommate only a couple weeks prior to orientation, we register for classes during orientation (mind you, we start those classes a few days after registering for them), and we pretty much have a week to get acquainted with our peers before the school year shakes things up. So my experience will more than likely replicate the experience of people back in your days. </p>
<p>My daughter’s orientation is right after move-in day for new students, in mid-August. Students are given a tentative schedule which they can change when they meet with their advisors. The day after move-in day there’s a family program and then we say goodbye.</p>
<p>At my alma mater, they have multiple orientation dates during the summer. The school blocks off class spaces for each orientation date so, at least theoretically, every student has the same opportunity to get the schedule s/he wants.</p>
<p>We live 5.5 hours away so it’s a big trip, and I am glad it’s combined with move-in. It’s a pretty big class, around 4000 freshmen.</p>
<p>TinnyT, was same thing for my daughter at Amherst. No need for another trip in the summer. Btw, D’s roomie at med school is a midd grad…go nesac!</p>
<p>My kids orientation was similar to that of GA2012MOM and TinnyT. I believe they attended some programs and the it was mainly bonding between the new students. With one of our kids we didn’t go to move in, with the other we did and it was mainly that the other decided to move with everything except the moon. </p>
<p>Re- Registration. I believe at my kids schools they registered for classes online prior to them even getting on campus. While on campus the registration was basically for add/drop.</p>
<p>Its important that one has to check these things out as Sally is doing to calculate all these added costs.</p>
<p>When I went to college many years ago, I received a long course description list in the mail over the summer telling me what I had to take in my major (no choice) and what I had to pick from. I filled it out and sent it in and they created my first schedule. I suppose I could have changed it some if there was a problem but not sure what I would have changed since most of the classes I took were from the no-choice list. Then right before school started in the fall, we had an orientation weekend that was more like a way to meet people. My child had an orientation that we had to pay for and I believe they wanted everyone to attend (but made exceptions). Fall schedule classes were picked during orientation. Luckily we live close by but I wondered what others were paying to go to the orientation and thought it was not really necessary. Perhaps after I went to college, the colleges got tired of kids complaining about their schedules they didn’t create and decided if they charged for orientation and made the kids register themselves for classes, it would be no risk to them and smoother for the administrators in the fall. I’m guessing kids today are more apt to not accept their schedules created by someone else than we were.</p>
<p>I hadn’t even graduated from high school when I went to my college orientation! My school had senior exam exemptions during the last semester so a few of my friends and I (who were attending the same school together) kinda got together and the conversation went something like this:</p>
<p>“So we’re exempt from final exams…what are we going to do that week?”
“Well shoot<em>…I don’t know”
“Hey look! There’s a college orientation session that week, wanna go?”
“Sounds freakin</em> awesome, let’s go!”
*These words may not have been the EXACT language we used, but you get my drift.</p>
<p>So…we carpooled down to where we were going to school, had an awesome couple of days (various orientation sessions, registering for classes, getting laptops, partying, etc.), and drove back. Personally, I thought it was fantastic to get that out of the way in the beginning of the summer, if only because I REALLY knew my way around campus afterward (which was mighty useful, considering I went to visit several times that summer).</p>
<p>Dunno why anyone would expect to get a full feel of a school during orientation, when he/she has 4 years to “discover” the school.</p>
<p>I think mandating an extra visit wasaaay before school starts is burdensome. Even boarding schools for 14 year olds don’t impose this silly level of hand-holding months before September. </p>
<p>It is essential that all schools have orientation for incoming students. At smaller schools, it is easier to plan orientation a week or two before classes begin. However, this method would not work very well at larger schools.</p>
<p>Larger schools need to have various orientation dates throughout the summer to try and accommodate all students, especially those whose high schools end or have graduation in June, and in some cases, the last week of June.</p>
<p>As @Picap stated, if families have to incur additional expenses in order to attend mandatory orientations, then these fees should be included in students’ financial aid packages under ‘College Expenses’.</p>
<p>@julese I agree with how your son’s school handles course registration. Incoming students should NOT be given preference of getting first choice of classes because they were fortunate to attend an earlier orientation. Schools should take registration requests and then deal with students’ schedules only after ALL incoming students have had an opportunity to register.</p>
<p>I’m at student at the University of Michigan and orientation was mandatory and I believe it costed around $200? (don’t quote me on that), as well as an optional “parent orientation” that takes place at the same time. Orientation was when we scheduled our classes for the fall! That was the main point of the thing, to get a schedule, but we were also split up into groups by academic units to have tours, meet with advisors to learn about academic requirements, discuss with peer advisors our…less academic concerns about starting college, and then we were given the opportunity of “fun activities” at night (a movie at the local theatre, frisbee on our law quad, etc.). It was basically a chance to get more comfortable with the university as a whole. And it worked; I definitely felt better about attending after having met with other students and lived in a dorm room for a couple of days.</p>
<p>At U of M, we’ve had ~6,000 incoming freshman the last few years, so I think orientation dates are spread from as early as the first week of June to the first/second week of August. I went in early June because I wanted to get a good schedule! (Most people shoot for early orientations because of that, even though the university keeps spots open in certain classes/doesn’t let students register for certain classes until a later date so that students with a later orientation date have a roughly equal chance.) Also there is a “fall orientation” for students who couldn’t go to earlier orientations, and that’s at the end of August, and there’s also an “international orientation” that those students go to at the end of August (the sessions are tailored more to international students I assume, and they’re able to move into their dorms a bit earlier than everyone else). </p>
<p>As I said before, my daughter’s college has a freshman class of close to 4000 students. Move-in day is Tuesday, orientation through Saturday, classes start the following Monday.</p>
No, there is no specific orientation for out of state students. The flexible date allows the family to chose the easiest date for them schedule wise or financially. They still have to pay the cost no matter what. </p>
<p>Now, this is my take on the situation and I know many parents on this thread disagree with me just on the nature of the thread. If you are sending your kid off across the country, you should be able to afford ALL expenses that comes with attending the college. If orientation is required, you need to be able to afford to send your to orientation. Colleges should make these expenses known. My college does this by sending each admitted students steps that they need to complete in order to attend in their respective term; orientation is included in those steps. </p>
<p>Incoming students shouldn’t get preference for attending an earlier orientation, but having the school open up courses with the passing of orientation works just as fine. It allows the students the flexibility to change their schedule to their liking. Sometimes, it even fits in with the registration culture of the college (i.e. first come, first serve*).</p>
<p>*oversimplified description of the registration process</p>
<p>In the end, colleges should just do what works best for them. Some colleges have programs that cause scheduling conflicts that others do not have. Some are able to get all their students registered the week before, while others would be having to cut large programs that take place that week. Some colleges do it better than others. Some colleges are able to make it work differently. Perhaps, the great thing is that people are able to pick and choose what college they go to, and that parents are looking ahead into what it takes to get their child from admitted student to freshman. </p>