DD trying to decide between Vassar, Colby and Pomona College. Visited both Vassar and Colby on same trip. Yet to visit Pomona. Good impression about Colby, but not as good with Vassar. While waiting for our tour to start, we reviewed the annual student yearbooks in the admissions office lobby. The quality of the layout, the photographs, the categories, and comments about the various clubs in the yearbooks was about as good as a mediocre junior high school’s student yearbook. I was shocked to see such poor quality in the yearbook from a top LAC known for the arts and humanities. And for the admissions office to showcase the yearbooks from multiple years in their lobby suggests they either accept these works as acceptable quality or they weren’t aware of their mediocrity. While a yearbook does not make an entire impression, it did have symbolic significance. Also, our tour guide kept falling asleep during the tour.
It is funny what stands out from a college tour! Well, DS goes to Vassar and DD goes to Pomona. (I spent a semester at Colby, but that was in another millennium). The two campuses are very different, but the students at both are very bright and also very chill about their “brightness”. Neither kid can imagine being anywhere else. Both are bio-nerds, but are really different other than that. DS is also into music/film/art and, yearbooks notwithstanding, Vassar does seem to be full of kids who are not only talented, but also enjoy and support the talents of their fellow students. He also loves the beauty of the campus (which is almost twice as big as the whole 5Cs put together), and he manages to get down to NYC at least once a month. DD is a bit more focused, and her friends seem to be the same. If Pomona students were physically transported to someplace like Swarthmore, they might be more intense, but I think the constant sunshine lightens them up a bit. I know you’ve already heard a lot about the resources offered by being part of the 5Cs so I won’t pile on here.
“Vibe” and “feel” are very much a part of both Pomona and Vassar, and it took second visits/overnights for both our kids to decide that their respective colleges were the right ones for them. Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions that you’d like me to pass along to either of them.
Choices for ED1 (recruited athlete) were Vassar, Pomona, Carleton and Haverford. Visited all 1-3 times. The vibe at Vassar was simply the right one; smart but relaxed, driven but collaborative, true interest in own and friends’ ECs, good athletic program but not dominating on campus, and a brand-new $125m science center that connects to fully renovated biology facilities.
Please don’t judge a school by yearbooks. I don’t think students in college care about yearbooks at all anymore. with various means of social media, there are other ways to share photos and memories. Yearbooks are fairly archaic at the college level now and my guess is that yearbook you saw was put together by a handful of individuals.
OP you should avoid using superficial criteria like the yearbook and where kids sit in the dining hall on the day you visit. There can be many reasons for this, including you looking for that same thing and missing other tables with more of a mixture. Sometimes we see what we want to see.
In the case of Colby it doesn’t have as a good a reputation for inclusiveness and good feelings as another school where you made a negative observation at the dining hall. Not even close.
I don’t think the Vassar yearbook is a valid metric for making a judgement. It is sort of silly to be honest.