<p>As part of what I call my 15 minute college tour, I have a few recommendations for determining the intellectual atmosphere on campus. This is from a veteran who found that my kids pretty much got the feel of a school within the first two minutes. How that campus looked, how the students were dressed, etc. Atmospherics. But there’s a bit more to learn, and it might take a little longer.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Go to the library. Not to see the collections but to see what the students are doing there. Are they actually reading or studying? You then know you’ve got a serious student body. Are they flitting about in conversations of one kind of another, flirting, or making noise? You have a party school.</p></li>
<li><p>Go to the bathroom, literally the bathroom in the library. Take a seat. Read the graffiti. If there’s no graffiti, then either the mad eraser has come by to clean up the history, or you have marble walls. However, if there is graffiti, then if the graffiti is the usual scatological roses are red stuff, varied references to where to go to have a good time (and with whom), you have a low-brow campus. But if instead you have serious poetry, such as the epic poems that were common at my undergraduate college, then you have an intellectual student body. At my college, over time visitors to the stalls would add another stanza and literally a few feet of space could be filled with smart (and yes sometimes scatological) analysis of the nature of human society, etc. This could go on for months until the mad eraser came around and washed or painted it over.</p></li>
<li><p>Go to a coffee shop, on or near campus. Buy some coffee, take a seat near other people, and listen in on conversations. This used to be a more informative approach back when students read books rather than stared into their computer screens with their ears plugged. But can still be informative. Are students talking about serious political matters or news, about their reading or homework or research assignments? You’ve got students who are interested in the world or in education. Are the students texting away on their cellphones in solitary activity, their heads bobbing with the sound in their ears, with no social interaction at all? Hard to figure for sure, but this is very unlikely to speak well for a serious intellectual focus.</p></li>
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<p>I know these suggestions may seem facetious, but for me, and for my kids, the feel of a campus was more than the architecture and facilities, the quality of the athletics, or the food in the dining room. It was knowing what the students were like and how they interacted with one another. With this in mind, I couldn’t agree more with those who’ve suggested that you read the bulletin boards in the dorms or posted elsewhere around campus. </p>
<p>Of course, you can learn more by taking an hour to attend a class, especially if it’s a smaller class in seminar/discussion format. (What’s the point of sitting in on a large lecture? You can often find those on the web.) Sometimes in that situation, the teacher will engage you, invite you to speak if you wish. If you can, introduce yourself to the professor as you enter (don’t just show a permission pass). At one college, we had a wonderful interaction in a class, and you could sense that the students were thinking and engaged and smart. At another, the professor talked, the students were totally passive. What do you learn from that?</p>
<p>But my basic premise is that in most college visits you can learn most of what’s important to learn in just 15 minutes. There was more than one campus that we visited and my kids wanted to leave within 5 minutes. A half day of driving, a 5 minute “oh no.” OK, bad decision to go there; should have researched more. But it was time to cut our losses.</p>