<p>You should also look at Otterbein, in Westerville, OH, which is a suburb of Columbus. My D has a friend who is a sophomore there, and is very happy. It's easy to combine Otterbein with OWU.</p>
<p>midwestmom2kids, Do you know what the internship/job prospects for recent grads are like for a student who attends/attended Hiram? </p>
<p>Can you walk into town for pizza/shampoo?</p>
<p>Do you know how convenient the weekend bus is to Cleveland? Is this a city bus, or a shuttle that is being run through Hiram College?</p>
<p>Witt has many many great parties. Such great parties, that my S travels from Cincinnati many wknds to attent Witt parties. Of course, some consider that a negative.</p>
<p>Hiram runs an airport shuttle for Thanksgiving and Christmas to get kids to Cleveland Hopkins Airport CLE.</p>
<p>The Portage Area Regional Transit Authority PARTA has a bus stop at Hiram but when I tried to see how it connected to Cleveland and I couldn't figure it out. PARTA runs nice express routes to Cleveland and Akron for Kent State but does it only run to Garretsville for Hiram, I wonder? <a href="http://www.partaonline.org/pdfs/Windham_Garretsville.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.partaonline.org/pdfs/Windham_Garretsville.pdf</a> My suggestion that you can take a bus from Hiram to Cleveland on the weekend? Maybe this is no longer a possibility and they only run Hiram College special event busses for special occasions. My daughters two H.S. classmates who go to Hiram have cars there.</p>
<p>Taking a bus to nearby Garretsville would not be too exciting. Garretsville is just a bigger small town. I think that is where people from the town of Hiram go to grocery shop.</p>
<p>I really think you can get pizza and shampoo in Hiram. When we last drove through there, I thought there were a few shops and cafe's near the campus. But I would call the college and ask them. HiramVillage.org:</a> Official website for the Village of Hiram, Portage County Ohio, USA. - Welcome to the Village of Hiram</p>
<p>midwestMom2kids, thanks.</p>
<p>Do you know what Hiram's strongest departments are?</p>
<p>I don't think that Butler, described as homogenous (3% black in the middle of Indianapolis?), preppy and very Greek ("I don't see much discrimination or prejudice on campus—just cliques. . . . Greek life is very popular, it seems to some that most on-campus activities are put on by a fraternity or sorority.”) would be a good fit for D. </p>
<p>Boysx3 and cptofthehouse, I'm sure Witt is a great school, but if I decide not to add a day/school to the trip, is there some reason I should consider bumping Marietta or Hiram in favor of Witt? Or are you suggesting that I just add a 5th day (though that's the point when stamina come into play)? </p>
<p>Midwestmom - - you suggest dropping Marietta (42% oos) b/c it's a "very regional" school; but Hiram, which you suggest I keep in play, is only 16% oos; Baldwin-Wallace is 10% oos. I didn't think any of these schools was particularly well-known outside of the midwest. And I figured the school with the greater oos enrollment would be more likely to enroll students from the northeast. Am I mistaken?</p>
<p>Wittenberg is just a few minutes off I70, halfway between the city of Columbus and Earlham College (just over the border in Indiana). If you're not sure about Wittenberg, I'd suggest taking a half hour to drive/walk through the campus. If it looks good you might choose to spend a little more time there before flying out of Dayton. Good luck with the trip.</p>
<p>Hiram is quirky. It has the Hiram Plan. It is one of the Colleges That Change Lives. You can read about it on the CTCL web page and see if it appeals to you. If it does, and you are already nearby visiting Oberlin or Wooster or CWRU, I think it is worth a side trip to visit. A number of my younger co workers went there and loved it; two of my D's high school classmates are there now. They lock tuition for your four years, which is nice. </p>
<p>Baldwin Wallace is a nice local college that has an amazing musical theater program that attracts out-of-staters. (Search collegeconfidential.com for Baldwin Wallace.)</p>
<p>I think that there are a lot of out of state students in Marietta, OH, because the city/the college is next to a state border. The closest airport is in Parkersburg, West Virginia, four miles away (small airport). The second closest airport is Charleston Yeager Field, also in West Virginia. I think that a lot of the students who go to Marietta, OH, come from less than 100 miles away.</p>
<p>NEmom, I see that you have posts on the Witt and Hiram boards have drawn no responses. Too bad that the boards of school with such strong followings are silent (though hearing that today w/ the wind chill it's -25 in Chicago makes me consider whittling down the number of midwest school on D's list!).</p>
<p>nyc, I hope that you don't have Vermont on your list either. It may not be in the midwest, but it also isn't 60 degrees there today.</p>
<p>^^ guys, it's only 30 degrees in Atlanta today (just as a frame of reference)....with this kind of cold snap, the West Coast is the only way to go!!</p>
<p>
[quote]
Oberlin would be great, but I've visited (though D hasn't ) and have a good sense of the campus culture, so a pre-application visit isn't really necessary. If D's SAT scores make Oberlin a reasonable reach, she apply and visit if she is admitted.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Since you asked for suggestions, I'll say that I think this is a strategic error to not visit Oberlin, if you think she's going to apply. First, Oberlin has long told applicants that the "Why Oberlin?" essay is of particular interest to them. That could be that they get tired of being on many lists from people applying to East Coast schools (Ivies and other top LAC's) and then ditching an Oberlin acceptance, often (as expressed her by candidates from East Coast) they really weren't comfortable with a Midwest location. They're a school that likes to feel the student understands Oberlin's world-class resource offerings, and the student can identify how s/he'd make use of them. If your D's app mentions personal experiences that occurred on campus or she can confidently connect something from her off-campus life with something she noticed or observed when on the campus, that makes a much stronger "Why Oberlin" essay, because they'll know she's processing what Oberlin could be for HER, and really taking the school seriously. </p>
<p>The app might also ask to which other schools she's applying. Seeing other schools from Ohio and Indiana, they really might wonder why she didn't stop in herself to see if she'd really like it there. If they accept her, will she come? Schools have something called "yield" which basically means they all like to have a large percentage of their offers of admission answered, "Yes! I will marry you!!"</p>
<p>I got from your post that perhaps you think Oberlin could be a bit reachy, but you never know and her stats might improve just enough that she'd be a very viable candidate. </p>
<p>I recognize travel time is tight and you (the parent) have already been there to size up the campus culture. Still, I feel it would a much stronger application if she could include in her "Why Oberlin?" essay some personal observations SHE made, conversations she had, and so on while visiting the campus. They will also interview her if you wish, and sometimes those interviews just "click" and really help her get accepted. </p>
<p>So my suggestion is: if you really think she's going to apply to Oberlin, you'd improve her chances of gaining acceptance by stopping onto the campus with her before she applies, and mention her perceptions of that campus visit in her "Why Oberlin?" essay.</p>
<p>That said, people get accepted all the time there who didn't visit, including international students or those from distant states. But if you live within range, I'd let her visit, this time or sometime before she writes the app. My 2cents.</p>
<p>Is yield really a factor with reach schools? It would be one thing if a student applying to Wesleyan, Kenyon, UChicago and Vassar tossed in a last-minute app to Oberlin and hadn't visited. But if the other schools on the applicant's list are Wittenberg, Hiram and Earlham, doesn't that say, "I'm applying to a range of schools and Oberlin is my top choice?"</p>
<p>With college visits, it's always difficult to balance the somewhat antagonistic goals of at least buzzing all possible contenders and not running yourself ragged. The four original schools, plus Wittenberg and Oberlin - - that's six school (five if OP drops Marietta, but Baldwin Wallace may still be a possibility), the point at which a reasonably pleasant college jaunt turns can easily turn into a death march, especially if the student is going to interview (it makes at least as much sense to interview at the match schools as it does to interview at Oberlin, on spec).</p>
<p>I'm in the process of planning trips too, and other posters have almost uniformly cautioned against going overboad.</p>
<p>^ If a student is reaching with her stats, the reach school will want to know why it should take a risk on her. So expressing interest is important.</p>
<p>It is my understanding that Oberlin cares about yield.</p>
<p>If you are applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Oberlin (and you tell Oberlin this), Oberlin may well think you are not going to come there if you are accepted elsewhere (if you tell them they are your top choice).</p>
<p>
I tend to agree with nyc - if you are applying to Wittenberg, Hiram, and Oberlin (and you tell Oberlin this), whether you have visited or not, Oberlin is more likely to believe that you are going to come there if you are accepted elsewhere (if you tell them they are your top choice). </p>
<p>I also agree with paying3tuitions and Keilexandra: your application to Oberlin would be stronger if you could include anecdotes from your visit to Oberlin.</p>
<p>MIdwestMom, thanks for post #28 re: Marietta's out of state population - - just goes to show that numbers alone don't tell the entire story.</p>
<p>You might look at the kids' posts 716, 717, and 718, where they talk about what high school students in Ohio think about Ohio colleges. A different perspective. :)</p>
<p>I agree with the Oberlin remarks. I know that our counselors have said that Oberlin and Kenyon are both schools where visits can make a difference.</p>
<p>MidwestMom -- Those are fairly widespread impressions of the Ohio schools. Interesting.</p>
<p>LOL, MidwestMom, I got lost reading about a lot of our 50 states there! </p>
<p>What amused me was a poster who knew some amazingly detailed stats about OSU, but was a little bit hasty quantifying the smaller schools. He quoted Oberlin as being "small; fewer than 1,000" when Oberlin has 2800 undergrads. </p>
<p>Flipping the same coin, I've also heard students at small colleges believe their state universities number "50,000" when in fact there are 35,000. Perhaps this only demonstrates that our children have authentic comfort levels with either very small or very large schools, and can't get their heads around the other kind! </p>
<p>NYC, you certainly make a good point about ambitious traveling schedules. For the OP, I tried to acknowledge the timing issues, after reading CC stories of families driving miles to include a very nice school, only to find their kid is "toured-out," exhausted, refusing to even get out of the car! </p>
<p>Maybe the issue is whether we speak in general list/strategy terms or specific to a certain college. If the statistical reach is an Ivy, in a way there's no need to visit to help chances of admission, because they might assume "everyone" wants to be there. But if the stat-reach is a smaller, highly personal school such as Oberlin or a Kenyon, perhaps that's the difference. I could more imagine them taking someone they've never met because their stats were stratospheric than taking a chance on someone they've never met with barely-there-high match statistics. If, from a visit, an interviewer finds a student who is interactive, curious, personable, or unique (demonstrable by interview); or the student writes a very special perception during the application essay between herself and the college, that could count as an antidote to a questionable score among the LAC's. I'm weighing your point about Oberlin or Kenyon on top of a list from Hiram and Witt, though; hmm. I just don't know. You make me think. </p>
<p>Each parent has to come up with a strategy for a tour-visit that seems to fit their own child's stamina, list of colleges, and so forth. It's sure not easy and I appreciate NYC's thoughtful contribution.</p>