DS is going back for a 3rd visit to campus with a generous scholarship offer in hand. He plans to meet with study abroad, co-op office, financial aid, and tour an upper class dorm. Any other tips about what he should ask before he commits?
Graduation rates, success with job placement, how hard it is to get into the desired classes (vs their getting filled and you can get necessary classes), retention rates.
Thanks jym626 but I should have added: that cannot usually be found on the school’s website?
The issue of getting closed out of classes and honest information about the services offered/success of career placement isnt always on their site 
As an aside, I toured one school once and asked the adcomms what the grad and retention rates were. They didnt know. That was disconcerting.
Eat the food too.
Many schools have Internet forums for all things about their schools. These are more the big state school types. There are also subforums of a very large Internet forum for most schools. I read those for schools my S was looking at for people mentioning things I never would have thought about.
One thing college students complain about a lot is not having a professor’s name next to a class at registration (usually for math classes) which makes it tough to sign up for a professor they like.
If this school is far away you might ask if the dorms close for the shorter breaks- like fall break, etc.
One thing that my D has found most useful is talking to RECENT grads or CURRENT students that she knows-not necessarily a paid guide or college employees. There’s a school we toured where everyone was wonderfully helpful, it looks good on paper, the tour was good, -even got to see a real dorm room and not a show piece. D had it as #1 for awhile, but in talking to people who have gone there, they’ve mentioned several flaws that would not have come up on any visit. Another school where D has been admitted and is in the running for a huge scholarship, but where she won’t likely get to visit is higher on her list now because a very close friend is there. Friend talks to her regularly about all the pros and cons so that D is aware of the shortcomings but also the real benefits that again, might not be on the website (for example, she knew each freshman gets a single, but not that out-of-state kids are allowed to stay in the dorms during breaks).
Required classes or distribution requirements and if those change (usually for English and math) depending on one’s SAT scores or a placement test before the semester. While most colleges have distribution requirements, some are more flexible than others. Some colleges, for example, require completion of a third semester of a nonEnglish language, which a new student should know about. Some that require math require traditional courses like calculus but others might have a “business math” or, in my son’s case, the “history of math.” So whatever your or your son’s perspective on such courses, one should be informed (and some college websites aren’t that clear about this and others are in flux, such as Penn State).
Also, if your son is interested in a less common major, we found that asking on campus about the future of the department was very informative. One college had recently cut one of my daughter’s possible majors and that was not updated on the website. Also, especially for small colleges, ask if there are any professors soon retiring - he or she might be a popular one or the bulwark of a particular department. And though we were surprised when professors asked my daughter at what other colleges she was looking, we found their responses really helpful. One told her to go to one of her other choices since the major she was interested in was much better there!
I would take a look at the professors in the major he is considering. Not just what their degrees are in but what is their native language. DS has had professors that are hard to understand because English is not their first language. A class or two like that is manageable but not a bunch of classes like that. Also check out the college reddit page. Have him see what the kids are talking about. It should give him some additional insight into the college.
Re #10
The English skills of non native speakers vary widely, so being a non native speaker does not necessarily mean that one is difficult to understand.
Even among native English speakers, there may be some accents or dialects that differ enough to slow down the listener’s comprehension.
Get copies of the student newspaper for the past few months. See what the hot issues have been on campus. I find that useful as a parent. Administration at one school we visited were quoted in the school paper as saying they didn’t want to give prospective students the impression that housing was in good shape because it wasn’t. Something the tour guide didn’t mention…
Ask for the reporting rates of the statistics as well. A 97% job placement rate sounds wonderful-until you find out that’s only from 47% of graduated students reporting.
Agree that the student newspaper is a great source of dirty laundry. We visited a school once where the paper described an incident where a gay student’s dorm room had been broken into a few weeks earlier and defaced with slur graffiti. There were letters to the editor from current students defending the breakin/slurs as appropriate. My gay teen could not get away from that campus fast enough.
The fact is, not everything is knowable until you get there. Even “facts” vary by an individual’s perception. You can drive yourself crazy trying to pin down every possible variable. My advice is to focus on your three or four deal-breakers.
I would want to find out how difficult it is to get into various majors. For example, at some colleges, it is very hard to get admitted into the business program or into certain engineering specialties. Remember that many students change their intended major.
One person said “eat the food.” That was the one case of deceit at my son’s university. The food company served much better food to the parents during summer orientation than the students had on regular school days.
Thanks for all the great responses. Visit is not until MLK weekend so keep those ideas coming.
Pretend you need to get to a drugstore, grocery store, etc to pick up sundries / necessities. How easy or hard is it without a car? I mean a real store, not the campus store with small selection and trumped-up prices.
Did he sit in on classes in his previous visits? That is key. I remember one of my kids sitting in on a class where the assigned reading had been a magazine article my kid happened to have read. She said several students clearly had not done the reading, and the discussion the prof led was superficial. She knocked that school off her list.