<p>So, we're looking at a pretty-much-final list of colleges. Absent from that list are two schools that we thought, going in, were likely to be excellent fits for our son. Both are among those listed on our school's Naviance site as ideal matches; both are strong in the relevant academic departments; both are in the right ballpark as far as sociocultural atmosphere; both seem likely to be on the generous side with need-based aid.</p>
<p>So why isn't he applying to them? Visits. </p>
<p>He had two objections to College A: one was not really visit-related--he thought the curriculum was a bit too unstructured for him. OK, fair enough. I actually think he would take to this school's roll-your-own philosophy like a duck to water once he got used to it. But that's his call. The other objection, though, was at least partly a visit artifact: he felt the place was too isolated. Now it's true that this school is a couple of miles from downtown Town A, which is itself not exactly a teeming metropolis, but I strongly suspect that if we had visited during the semester, this would not have been an issue. The empty campus with its wide views of surrounding countryside just looked isolated on a hot August morning.</p>
<p>College B's fall from grace was 100% a visit issue. We didn't learn anything substantial about the place that would make it less of a good fit than we had thought it; we just had a primal "ick" reaction to the way the school presented itself in the info session and tour. In other words, we knocked the school off our list for having a lousy admissions office (or to be charitable, an admissions office having a lousy day). This makes little sense; once you're in, you're never going to deal with those folks any more. Yet we can't undo the impression they made--if I brought up College B to my son now, he'd just roll his eyes and ask me if I was serious.</p>
<p>I'm beginning to wonder if visits are all they're cracked up to be. A little learning is a dangerous thing.</p>
<p>College A: the curriculum is whatever your S wants to make of it – he can even triple major at a college with no core. Location can be key for some kids, whether it be a booming metropolis (NYC, Chicago), a suburb or a rural town. </p>
<p>College B: Yup, been there done that. After several hours of driving to see one highly regarded LAC, I recieved the following reaction, “I’m not getting out of the car, let’s go…”</p>
<p>But that’s how decisions get made and lists go from way to long to manageable. Sometimes it’s unfortunate, both my boys eliminated colleges I liked but they didn’t for one reason or another. For the school B, if money weren’t an issue, you could offer up another trip “just to be sure”, but if yours are anything like mine, they’d just say “no” and move on. My #2 eliminated a college because there was trash in the stream running through it (he’s abit of an environmentalist). Now that could mean the kids don’t “care” which would upset my son, or it could mean that facilities doesn’t have the time/money to pick up trash or half a dozen other things, but the bottom line was that something was “off” at this school for my son. The same could be said of the admissions office and staff, if the experience was “off” it could mean something or it could mean nothing, but the impression is left.</p>
<p>I hear you. My d had a TERRIBLE tour at my alma mater - terrible. The worst tour EVER. And even though it’s a terrific school, a beautiful place and a great fit for her, she just can’t see past the crummy tourguide: “If they choose a girl like her to represent them, I just can’t see myself there.” Drives me nuts!</p>
<p>Yep, had similar experiences and I agree that the resulting decisions aren’t always logical. But if you are working from a long list it’s pretty easy to latch on to some minor aspect to whittle it down. Take the same school when it’s having a better “hair day” and the perspective might have been completely different. That sort of thing is bound to happen when there are 20 great prospects but you can only attend one.</p>
<p>Choosing colleges can be more subjective than objective. I remember not applying to a school way back when just because it was a crappy day when I visited, and I couldn’t stand the way it looked in the rain! (Also, I noticed a student in the econ class I visited writing a letter instead of taking notes.)</p>
<p>I agree with ‘momofthreeboys’ in that the visits can help to seal or break the deal. In reality there is no ‘one college’ for anyone - there are multiple colleges that would be a good fit and provide a fine education and opportunities. One needs to look beyond the rep or stats of the college and consider whether they really want to ‘live there’ for the duration. For some students it’s important to have a top football team, for others it’s having a ‘college town’ atmosphere. Others want a more serious environment but some want a party environment. Some schools are well maintained while others aren’t. Some are a hub-bub of activity in construction of new facilities, labs, research centers, etc. and others not. Some may be more or less diverse in particular areas that the student may or may not feel strongly about.</p>
<p>I think the impressions from the visits are valid factors but it’s true that one needs to be realistic in that if they happened to get a bad tour guide, they realize it’s not necessarily indicative of the majority of the student body. Sometimes repeat visits are worthwhile. It’s also true that there’s a different feel while school is in session or in the middle of a weekday than in the summer, spring break, a weekend, or 10am on a Saturday when most of the students are still sleeping.</p>
<p>College visits can definitely be deceiving, but try telling that to a teenager.</p>
<p>Back in the dark ages when I was 17, my mom took me to look at some southern schools on a car trip to Florida. We happened to visit one highly esteemed university on the day of their largest party of the year. The streets were full of drunk students covered in mud. My mom was appalled; I thought it was great. Guess where I ended up? :-)</p>
<p>What about the other colleges on his list? Have you visited them? If so, did he like them? If you haven’t visited them, then it’s time to visit. :)</p>
<p>Sounds like the first two have been crossed off HIS LIST, so it’s time to move on. It’s not as if those are the only two colleges where he’d succeed at. So, on to the next ones… :)</p>
<p>(I wonder if you when scheduling a campus visit, if you can request one of their “better” tour guides…just wondering. We’ve never encountered a bad tour guide or anything like what some of you have described on any campus. There are other campuses that have their stuff together when it comes to “showing off” their school. )</p>
<p>Do you think that colleges realize the impact on potential applicants that the tour guides have? </p>
<p>Some of the colleges we toured have had lackluster representatives and it really does color your view. Some are so flat they make you feel silly for being excited to be there. The best tour we had was at the biggest university that we saw. The tour guides were clearly selected with care, trained well and genuinely loved that school.</p>
<p>I have always been anti-visit. Not that I forbade my kids from visiting anywhere, but I always maintained that what you get from visiting is a bunch of really vivid, but mostly random impressions that are usually a lot more misleading than enlightening. You have to take them with a huge grain of salt. That, and you make certain that all the buildings have windows and, yes, they have a salad bar and yoghurt in the cafeteria. Woo-hoo!</p>
<p>When I was a kid, I visited four colleges, and chose the one whose looks and tour guide I had liked least, because everything ELSE about it besides how it looked was perfect. I chose my graduate school sight unseen, and I know for certain that if I had visited before enrolling I never would have gone there. I HATED how it looked, the whole gestalt. I couldn’t believe I had signed up to spend years in this hell-hole, had taken on faith other people’s word that it was beautiful. It took me five or six whole weeks to get used to it, and to start to appreciate what a great university it was despite the horrendous architecture.</p>
<p>There’s a flip side, though. When push came to shove, my son was choosing between two fine universities, one of which he had visited twice, for multiple days at a time, and one of which he had not ever gotten around to visiting. And he really had a hard time giving #2 a fair consideration. It was too unknown, when he was comfortable with #1. (He has visited #2 several times while in college, and says he wouldn’t have liked it when he was in 12th grade, but who knows?)</p>
<p>When we do a college visit we don’t just do the “tour”…</p>
<p>First, we always go on a day that school is in session. We like to see the kids…what their attitude is, what they wear, what the “culture” is on campus.</p>
<p>We get there to the campus area early, and eat breakfast at an off-campus student haunt or at a on-campus venue. Then we take the tour. Then we eat at a on-campus venue (a different venue). Then we do a “self-tour” of what the tour didn’t show us (inside some res halls, deeper exploration into the rec center or library, visit the department of my child’s major, etc).</p>
<p>For dinner, we eat at a different off-campus hangout. If we have time, we stay in the area until sun sets. It’s kind of nice to see what the campus looks like at night…you’ll also be able to see how safely lit the campus is at night.</p>
<p>I dunno, the admissions office is the school’s face to the world. For prospectives, anyway. If they cannot make the effort to put on a good impression there, what does it say about the rest of the place? Your interactions with staff, even the landscaping and other service people, can tell you a lot about the atmosphere. </p>
<p>When we moved my son into his dorm in August, recent alumni were there to help with the boxes. The President (a former governor of a large state) was at one dorm to help with the boxes. Parents were told not to lift a finger. This reinforced the impression we’d gotten all through the application process of a school full of helpful, motivated, competent people.</p>
<p>I thought uh oh when my son commented that all the students in the parking garage at one college looked depressed, luckily they were cheery everywhere else! </p>
<p>The admitted students weekend really sold my older son on Carnegie Mellon - they had a presentation about the school and a tour specific to the school as well. I made him go to all the schools where he was accepted - even the safeties - because I wanted him to pay attention to the plusses and minuses of all the schools. Sometimes even the last choice school will make you realize why another school is better. </p>
<p>My younger son strives not to be swayed by the tourguides, but at least three schools have had people that he didn’t care for (Bard a really ditzy info session, Brandeis an overly enthusiastic info session and Tuft’s presenter seemed snooty.) He’s liked all the tour guides. He does have opinions about location that I wanted to confirm with a few visits. But I have to confess he just looked at Macalaster from google satellite and rejected it.</p>
<p>It’s interesting what he liked. Tufts for example got plus points for chalk drawings on their walkways!</p>
<p>mom2collegekids–yes, we’ve visited all the others but two, and those last visits will come soon. He liked all the others. Two in particular, which were kind of afterthoughts before the visits, vaulted to the top tier afterward. (BTW, we’d love to emulate you and do all our visits when classes are in session, but since our son’s high school only allows seniors two excused absence days for college visits, that just isn’t realistic.)</p>
<p>Just to be clear on one point: the tour guide was not the main problem at College B. He was not especially impressive, but the real problem was the structure of the tour–which seemed designed to give as incomplete and fragmented a picture of the campus as possible–and most of all, the info sessions (we came in halfway through one, and stayed for all of another after the tour), which were almost comically bad.</p>
I didn’t want to identify the colleges in the opening post, because I didn’t want the thread to be primarily about the individual schools and whether our son’s reactions to them were justified or not, but more about the impact of visits on the selection process and whether that impact is proportional to the amount of information you really glean from the visit.</p>
<p>But now that we’ve got a good discussion going, I might as well fess up…College A is Hampshire, and College B is Bard.</p>
<p>That would have been funny if it had been Brown though…</p>
<p>Anyway, I think your son isn’t necessarily wrong in disliking a school based on the admissions staff, especially if they were REALLY horrible. After all, admissions staff are the people that the college selects specifically for the job of getting students to want to come to their school. If those people can’t even do their job, what’s to say the rest of the faculty doesn’t have a similar problem. I always wonder about a school that can’t even represent itself well in admissions. That’s when it matters, and if a school can’t provide for its students (or potential students, as the case is here) when it matters, then…what does that tell you about that school?</p>
<p>I guess it really comes down to: Do you really think the admissions staff were having a bad day? Or do you think this may be a trend with this college?</p>
I don’t really think they were having a bad day, especially hearing that mathmom had a similar response–“ditzy” is a kinder word than I would use, but it sounds like she had more or less the same experience.</p>
<p>So it’s probably a trend–but it may only be a trend with the admissions office, not with the college as a whole. That’s the part that concerns me. The view you get on a visit is seen through the lens of the admissions office; what if it’s a distorted lens?</p>
<p>Or to use a different, closer-to-home analogy: you often hear admissions people at info sessions explaining that they don’t take SATs as seriously as HS transcripts because they don’t want to treat one day’s performance as more important than four years’ worth of work. There’s a similar problem in the visit process; it’s the school’s SAT test, so to speak. If a school has a bad visit “score,” but a good “GPA”–i.e., good curriculum, good reputation, good facilities–shouldn’t the latter weigh more heavily? But how do you get that to happen, given that first-hand experience usually outweighs any other form of knowledge (especially with young people)?</p>
<p>For my son, college visits were more like an introduction to what a college is like, but did little to show him what each college is like. He loved one school he was sure he’d hate, hated one that I thought was a good fit, and loved one but ultimately decided not to apply. The rest he thought were not great, but fine. In the end I think the size and location of the school will dictate whether he’s happy or not; I have no fear of him attending a school he hasn’t visited as long as it meets a few basic criteria.</p>