Visited Colleges? Help Me Get D22 Started With a Good List

College Search & Selection
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I think a lot of people under-rate the “college town” experience and how much fun the average 18-22 year old can have in those towns.

A lot of students dream of going to college in the big city with its museums, restaurants, nightlife, etc.; but how often do most college kids realistically patronize these cultural establishments? Once a year…maybe? For most, a big city craving for haute culture can be satisfied by a weekend road trip once a year with friends. I have yet to see an abundance of college-aged students at any museum, symphony, or chic restaurant in the big city where I live. Not to mention, the drinking age is 21 throughout the country; so students are not even eligible to get into any bar, lounge, or comedy club until they are at least a Junior in college.

Many colleges in big cities lack a student cohesiveness on campus and the surrounding areas. Students get spread out all over the city (especially after freshman year), and a school can feel like nothing more than a commuter school where once students leave campus after classes, they rarely return for activities. The intent to stay active on campus and to hang out with friends away from campus is always there, but the logistics of big city living can make actually doing so a real hassle.

My daughter is also enamored with a college in a big city, even though she does not take advantage of any of the cultural offerings in her own hometown ( a very large city). Therefore, I am encouraging her to look at schools in some of America’s classic college towns. She has the rest of her life to be grown up and to experience the wonderful cultural offerings and sophistication of a big city…Save the big city experience for graduate school, or go on an exchange program for a semester, I say!!! Quirky book stores and coffee shops can be found in every “college town”; and I know, at no time during the semester, will she be sitting around her dorm room wishing she had season tickets to the ballet!!

So…Cheers to the Ann Arbor, Michigans, Gainesville, Floridas, Bloomington, Indianas, College Station, Texases, Tuscaloosa, Alabamas, Boulder, Colorados, Columbia, Missouris, Eugene, Oregons, and Athens, Georgias of our great country!!! These wonderful college towns (and so many more) also offer an outstanding cultural experience…a cultural experience that one can only truly experience as a young, undergraduate student.

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62

For some students, the “right school for them” can be any of a very large number of schools. For other students, the “right school for them” may have to come from a much smaller set of schools. Of course, external constraints (the biggest of which is typically parental budget, though there may be other parental restrictions) can shrink the set of possible schools considerably.

Sometimes, the tricky part is figuring out which student preferences are necessary to avoid a bad fit, and which student preferences may be nice to have, but are ones which, when applied strictly, would screen out many schools that would be good or acceptable fits. Another tricky part is finding out if there are student preferences that would make a big difference, but the student and parents may not be aware of now.

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63

Wouldn’t the specific LAC (or other type of school) matter in terms of diversity. For example, neither Washington & Lee nor University of Alabama appear to be that diverse in either SES or race/ethnicity, but that does not mean that all LACs or state flagship universities are similar in these respects.

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… And the Burlington, Vermonts; the Amherst, Massachusetses; the Brunswick, Maines; the Ithaca, New Yorks; the Northfield, Minnesotas; the Claremont, Californias and… :blush:

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I don’t understand the focus on geography (other than for cost reasons). The students aren’t choosing their vacation spots, are they? The top 3 reasons to go to a college should be education, education, and education.

When I did college visits with my son a few years ago, we visited close to 30 colleges (and a few of them more than once) in every part of the country. Some are prettier than others. Some are more convenient than others. Some have better weather than others. But none of these factors really mattered much to us.

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I went from the midwest to the northeast for college, and think a decent chunk of my education was simply getting to know another part of the country that was culturally different from where I was raised.

Accordingly geographic diversity was one factor we weighed positively when our kids applied to college. (Nice that it dovetails with colleges’ desire for geographic diversity in their applicants!). I should note it wasn’t the only factor we weighed of course. My kids have all left their, dare I say, northeastern bubble for Texas, Georgia and Virginia. And I know a chunk of their education will be the cultural diversity they experience.

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Location matters–in addition to a couple of other factors–according to some studies with respect to drinking.

Cold, rural, small size of student body, mostly Caucasian, often with Greek societies’ presence tend to have higher rates of drinking alcohol & binge drinking. Boredom is also a factor in the sense of a lack of alternative activities.

P.S. Some schools have gone to extraordinary measures to reduce excessive alcohol consumption through strict enforcement, education, & by providing alternative activities. Two schools making admirable strides in this respect are Colby College & Kenyon College–both should receive praise for their efforts.

Cold weather is a factor in that many activities are confined to indoor activities in the evening & at night during the cold weather months.

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A college’s geographic diversity isn’t determined by its geography, but by its policy and its national and international reputation.

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Love following this discussion. Thanks all for Macalester input, much appreciated. My D is also very interested in Rice, but understands it’s a long shot. Who does get into that school, anyway?!

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As a Colby grad from many (30!) years ago and I can attest to the drinking comment. Lots of it, some due to boredom perhaps, but I would say a lot of it was “hey we are on our own let’s test the limits.” I think some kids do go to an extreme and then dial it back, but if others need help with that I am happy to hear Colby is really addressing it. I do also suspect that kids now drink less than we did. Haven’t done any real research on that

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Unfortunately, it appears that binge drinking by college students is more of a concern currently than it was 30 years ago.

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Certainly that is true, but I was referring to learning about a different culture by being immersed in an area very different from where one has grown up. Not so much the college. My son who went to college in Texas was absolutely influenced – and his horizons broadened – by living in Dallas. He went to a tremendously diverse prep school with an international reputation . . . and got a completely different perspective by living in Texas.

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While college binge drinking is more of a concern today, it was probably as prevalent or more prevalent 30 years ago. People just were not concerned about it as much back then.

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74

The focus on geography can matter depending on the student’s particular interests. My daughter wanted to be close to NYC or LA because she has a part time job that she wishes to pursue through college and that can only be done in one of those two cities.
I note that the OP said her daughter’s business is related to fashion – so presumably being in NYC or other urban location as opposed to some rural location – would make a difference.

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My point isn’t that geography shouldn’t be a factor at all, but the focus should be on the primary purpose for going to college and what really matters. The quality of education to the decision on which college to go to is what location is to the decision on which house to buy (even though there’re clearly other factors in choosing a house), IMO.

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The two biggest impacts on my life from when I went to college are my spouse and friends. The actual education was third at best. My two are historically a large driver for the highly selective colleges. For location, I don’t want to spend 5% of my life somewhere I don’t like if I have a choice.

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Certainly, the quality of education (however defined for the particular student) should be the primary criterion for selection (within cost constraints, of course).

However, geography can matter in terms of quality of education for some majors. For example, if you want to study Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawaii may be advantageous due to its location. Or if you want to study sociology of urban populations, a school in an urban location may be advantageous. In these examples, the experience in the area may be helpful “informal field work”, or may provide easy access to study and research material for explicit academic work at the school.

Geography can matter for post-graduation outcomes. San Jose State University is probably a better place to start looking for computing jobs than a non-flagship state university in most other places, for example. That is probably the reason why computer science is far more selective than most other majors there.

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I assume you didn’t choose the college for these two reasons. Regardless of which college we went to, we likely made friends in college (and a few of us found our spouses there).

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San Jose State University leverages its geographic advantage to build a relatively strong CS department, same as Stanford and Berkeley. For CS students, the strength in their CS offerings should be the primary consideration.

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My D21 was in a similar situation. She is near the top of her class of 400-something with reasonably rigorous coursework (she is full IB, but squeezed in some AP classes as a junior [Calc BC and one of the history classes]). It is a public school in a small city in upstate NY. Her perception is that some of the other students have an easier time of the work than she does. Coincidently, she also started a small business making bags as part of a YEA extra-curricular, transitioned to making masks during the pandemic and donated all of the proceeds to other local small businesses. Barnard is also atop her list on most days. Her extracurriculars were OK, if not stellar (4 years of band, 4 years of FTC robotics [including qualifying for Words twice and advancing through qualifiers into the elimination rounds the year it was not cancelled by a pandemic]). She is hoping to do something around food insecurity / sustainability from a technical standpoint initially and possibly from a policy role eventually.

As an aside, and another coincidence, I went to UT Austin as a New Yorker back in the 80s. I remember the weather fondly.

Based on the similarities, a simple list of of where my daughter applied might be of interest. It is a bit eclectic, STEM-centric and has only one safety school that would not apply to your daughter, but:

Barnard
Harvey Mudd
Carnegie Mellon
Cooper Union
MIT
Swarthmore
Ga Tech
Cornell
Pomona
Macaulay (CUNY Honors College)
Michigan
Binghamton

She had hoped to apply to Penn and McGill as well, but procrastination and last minute surprises thwarted her on both.

McGill may be a nice safety school for your daughter.

If my daughter was in the class of ’22 I would try and convince her to do one thing differently; start thinking about the essays sooner . . . and then start writing them sooner. The plan here was finding schools she is excited about (and, I think most kids can get excited about most T50 colleges, so that should not be too hard), determine a reasonable ballpark estimate of being accepted and then apply to enough schools so that she is happy with her probability of being able to avoid Binghamton. Of the other 11 schools applied to, I expect the over/under on acceptances to be 2.5 and the chance of getting accepted to at least 1 as >98%. Depending on the ranking lists you use, the Top 20 colleges have space for roughly 1% of incoming freshman, The Top 40 for 3% and the Top 60 for 5.5%. It would be nice if there was a less labor intensive way to match schools and students, but writing essays is nice practice for college.

Good luck.

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