<p>On our tours, none of the Ivies/Prestigious schools we visited showed us a dorm room. On one particular trip, we only took the tour to see the dorms. We were told that we would go to the dorms at the end of the tour. However, going to the dorms meant standing outside looking at them. When we asked about seeing a room, we were told "they are all different". So....we wasted two hours and didn't see the one thing we wanted. (We had already taken a self-guided tour of the campus and had seen most of what was on the tour.)</p>
<p>As an aside. S had the opportunity to attend more than one Ivy/Prestigious school. However, he chose an OOS big U instead. For his major, engineering, he felt he had as much offered (if not more) to him as at the Ivy/Prestigious schools in terms of support, research, coop, and career opportunities (particularly for the price tag).</p>
<p>If you're fairly serious about the school and not familiar with the area, I also suggest walking around just outside of campus and getting to know what the general area is like to get a feel for what it would be like living there for at least 4 years.</p>
<p>I totally agree with ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad. We visited several schools that, when we walked and drove around the surrounding area, S said 'I could not live here for four years.' That was particularly true for our in-state flagship university plus a few small LACs.</p>
<p>We did campus tours at both UNC-CH and UVa. My daughter also did a tour at UPenn which is pretty close to state school size.</p>
<p>The UNC-CH and UVa tours were both enjoyable. The UNC-CH tour especially gave some sense of State U life, what with visits to a big dining hall, the hustle and bustle of "the pit" (an open plaza with hundreds of students talking on cellphones simultaneously), a rock band setting up in a quad, kids hanging out of dorm windows shouting greetings at the tour guide. It was a fun spring afternoon tour that presented the energy of a big school quite well.</p>
<p>Both tours were well worth the time invested. They also served their purpose. My daughter came away with some intuitive sense of both the pros and cons of undergrad education on that scale. She liked UNC-CH better than UVa, but ultimately decided both were larger than she would prefer. </p>
<p>She has since spent a week visiting a high school friend at Georgia Tech (and vice versa) with her friend visiting Swarthmore. I think both of them have expressed total shock at how different their college experiences are!</p>
<p>I think it's important to at least form a 1st hand mental image of all sizes of schools...if only to put some sense of scale into the viewbook photos.</p>
<p>We have visited a few large schools: U of FLA, UGA, UNC/Chapel Hill, UVA, UMaryland, and Penn State, and our favorite tour was UGA. We actually went on a bus around campus and stopped at different places (library, academic building, a dorm room, food service, the student recreation center, and of course the football field). The guides were quite informative and really talked up them Dawgs.</p>
<p>Cangel, last October in NYC, we went to the info sessions and tours (though we didn't last on the tours) at NYU and Columbia, largely just to get a sense of the big versus the smaller. I don't recall that there was any big difference in the size of the information sessions or tours. If anything, the info sessions and tours gave perhaps a sense that the big school was much smaller than it actually is. So I don't know how accurate the impression was, but it certainly was not at all overwhelming to visit....</p>
<p>My D and I did the tour at Florida State, and I thought it was an excellent experience. It was on an open-house sort of day for interested students so there were extra dorms open that we could see. The dean of students was passing out warm homemade cookies on the steps of one of the major buildings. I liked the tour a lot and afterward we met another tour guide who was just roaming answering questions. Many students went out of their way to speak to us and be nice. My D didn't end up going there but I went away with a very positive impression.</p>
<p>Cangel, Maybe it was because it was the FIRST stop on our son’s college visit tour, but we feel that the University of Michigan was one of our best tour/information sessions experiences. The tour was comprehensive and we particularly liked that we spent a good deal of time inside a typical dorm. </p>
<p>The information session was led by a charismatic and knowledgeable alumna – part cheerleader, part academic advisor. She focused a lot on very basic aspects of admissions, not news to us, but I think to many in the audience quite enlightening. She did a lot to put a human face on the school and projected an infectious enthusiasm. Same for the student tourguide: he was just happy to be there, you could tell.</p>
<p>The one caveat I would mention is that you need to make sure that you see the rest of the campus after the tour is over. UMich and other 30,000+ universities cover a lot more geographic space than a half hour walking tour can reveal and it’s misleading to think that a student would be minutes away from wherever he needed to be. Take the bus, get out to the outlying regions.</p>
<p>As you know, my son didn’t go for Michigan or big, but he still wears the t-shirt and who knows now that graduate school is on the horizon.</p>
<p>I already weighed in on this - but one more note. We visited a few big schools (UVA, UNC, Penn State, Cornell, UPenn, James Madison) and we found that the size of the student body did not necessarily correlate with the size of the campus. We could navigate the PSU campus (30k students) by foot (long walks though) but found the Cornell (12k students) campus to be much more spread out. At smaller schools like Duke and Lehigh, we had to take the bus or drive to see freshman dorms or athletic facilities. The campus at UPenn was very compact but UVA was quite large and spread out. Visits really help with this.</p>
<p>Yes, I have to agree that student population and campus size are not always related. The Cornell campus is much more spread out than that of Penn State. Additionally, we felt the Cornell campus was much hillier than PSU which would increase the time necessary to get from place to place. Virginia Tech (25,000+ students) is very well laid out, flat and is a manageable walk.</p>
<p>The Bucknell campus with only about 3600 students is very spread out for its size (also hilly). We also had the impression that Princeton (about 6700 students) was quite spread out for a school of its size. (I guess it is because it is kind of shaped like a long, fairly narrow rectangle.) Duke (~13,000 students) has its freshman housing so far removed from the main area of campus that students have to take a bus to get there.</p>
<p>I think that if the kid is up for it, by all means visit. We took something different away from every tour and I even think that the way the tours/info sessions are run tells you something about the personality of the school.</p>
<p>One thing I did with my kids when visiting larger publics was to have them sit in the back of a lecture hall and picture themselves in class. My middle son kept saying that class size didn't matter to him, but when he sat in the lecture hall he looked at us and said, "Oh, this really is big." Somethimes they need to see size to comprehend it. This OOS public remained high on his list, but he now had another piece of info to factor into his decision.</p>