The USA has thousands of colleges. Most of them get little attention on CC because most of them appeal primarily to local or niche markets. After all, most students go to college within ~150 miles of home.
CC tends to attract students who are shopping for schools across a wider market area.
Many of them are looking for a combination of excellent academic reputations and excellent need-based aid. How many colleges can offer both of these to all qualified students? Fewer than 100. Of those, probably at least half are small LACs that just aren’t too well known to the general public (especially first gens or internationals.)
Choosing one of these under-the-radar colleges is a little like buying an under-valued stock. You get a college that approaches the academic quality and generous aid of an Ivy League or top NESCAC school, but without all the hype that drives admission rates into the teens and single digits. So if you’re attracted to one of these schools and can do without the attention-getting brand name, you should be GLAD they get less activity on CC.
Maybe the schools without a lot of activity are the schools that do a good job getting the messages out on their own and kids don’t have so many questions. Or if a school has one poster that dominates, that can set the tone, good or bad, and sometimes bring people in or drive them away. Some of the busiest posting schools seem to be on a slow down this year. The only area that seems to remain consistently active is the “how can I go to college without paying for it” section.
I agree with what others have posted here about the population who constitutes the greatest use of these forums (Northeast, West Coast, business, STEM, high achieving and accordingly high goals), and what they are looking to get out of their activity on the boards.
Quite frankly all the “Chance Me” traffic is wearying to me, but that’s my individual reaction. Because we are depending on getting good merit aid, any school where her admission chances are questionable or reach-y is unlikely to come through with that, so not much point in putting a lot of eggs in those baskets.
Additionally, LAC’s and many other privates don’t have the caliber of offerings in her desired major of communications and media. That caliber is partly dependent on facilities, internship availability, and strong on-campus media like newspaper and even student-run PR firms. So we’re mostly in the state flagship realm, with the exception of the UMichigan and UVirginia type schools that set the bar very high, again limiting merit aid available to defray the OOS tuition.
Specific to UAlabama, after the first couple of times I raised inquiries in their forum, I was “warned” that their forum was exceptionally active and alums or parents were staunchly loyal to the point of being rabid.
This made for some interesting exchanges, because my D’s reaction based on some of the usual adolescent snap judgment factors was negative, and with her eligibility for completely free tuition we wanted to bounce some perceptions off people who were in a position to answer them.
One thread got particularly nasty, to the point of someone calling me a troll who must be trying to stir up trouble deliberately. That post got removed by an admin for unrelated reasons (I wasn’t aware of the TOS forbidding live links to blogs or other non-official sources), which was good because I wouldn’t have wanted a thread with so much hostility in it to be floating around with my name as OP.
Needless to say, I haven’t gone within 100 miles of that forum since, and don’t plan to. UA came to our city last week and we attended, and didn’t hear anything that was head and shoulders above other state flagship schools on our list. Nothing that, at this point, would make it worthwhile to give our D a strong push to apply, over her objections. Their EA deadlines are later than many, so we’ve belayed the whole topic for now.
I suspect the website reformat from a while back has reduced traffic. I used to be able to see at a glance due to colt changes when a school I had an interest in or knowledge of had a new post. Now it takes clicking into it to see. I’m just not going to do that for most schools.
I was not on cc before the website reformat so I don’t know what that did but I wonder if did cause a problem. My D is planning to apply to 8 schools. It is a real pain to go through the alphabetical list of schools to check each forum to see if anything new has been posted. I wish there were someway to subscribe to individual forums.
Also by forcing all threads related to individual schools onto school specific forums, it prevents most people from seeing them. Because of this, many posters who might know answers don’t even see the question, and it makes it more difficult for people who have never considered a school to learn about it. I love it when people ask school specific questions on the College Search and Selection forum because they usually will get lots of responses and I can learn about schools that I don’t know well. Whenever the mods move these threads to school specific forums the threads just die. Most people with knowledge about specific schools don’t check the school specific forums regularly.
In D’s case, forums for two of the schools she is applying to are completely dead (Loyola NO and College of Charleston). The last time anyone responded to a question on the Charleston board was last March, yet the school regularly gets suggested as an option to students on other boards so I know people know about it. I think these schools just aren’t on the radar screens of top stat students and don’t have a regular poster who monitors them. Of the rest, some are very active, and others get an occasional post. The two that are most active, UA and Tulane, both have one poster who regularly monitors and posts.
most students on CC fall into one of several stereotypes
(ivy league and tier 1 as safeties)
(I need to stay within 6 hours drive of home)
(I only want a school in NYC or LA,San Fran)
(I only want schools in the Northeast or Boston)
so if a school does not fit in those groups or even 100’s of LAC’s and other schools that do but are not on the radar of many people the school gets no love!
it is to bad so many students would benefit from tossing a much larger net when fishing!
There was, before the reformat. Still waiting for that feature to come back…
Ditto.
Agree. It makes a big difference when someone is regularly answering questions. MIT had (still has?) MITChris (ad rep) doing that. I haven’t been over there in awhile since none of my kids is at MIT.
I finally just bookmarked the school specific forums that I visit most. I got really tired of getting sent into the wrong forum because of fat thumbs. I think the more transparent a school’s admission policy is, the less there is to talk about this time of year.
As many posts back. NO INFERENCES, except popularity among the users of CC- which, as mentioned are mainly from select geographic regions. It may have to do with the sheer numbers of private schools and population numbers competing for places in their region on the east coast. But there, too only a small number of CC users.
Active alumni all over has nothing to do with it. Caliber of school … Popularity, not quality, can make a “hot” school in other regions.
I agree with much of what’s been said, with one exception.
The forum for ds1’s school, Carleton, is really quiet for being a top-ranked school. I think that in its case, its low traffic is in part a reflection of the kind of kid who goes there. You will not find a lot of Chances threads … one, because that’s not the kind of kid who is looking at Carleton, and two, those kinds of threads don’t generate a lot of responses. So, in that sense, yeah, the lack of traffic says something about the school, but, to me, it’s saying good things! Once your kid is in, there’s a wonderful parent listserv and all kinds of support. And I know how my ds1 has benefited from the alumni network. I’d hate to think people would look at the low traffic on that forum and assume that means something bad about the school. At the same time, I like how the school continues to fly under the radar for most.
If OP is looking for huge generalities, consider the following.
It would seem to me that schools that are upfront about their lack of merit aid programs may not generate a lot of activity here in the CC among people wondering if the school would be affordable. Schools that do a great job with their NPCs and who have easy admissions criteria won’t get many folks posting wondering about their chances to get in and how affordable the school might be.
This is the inverse of “the harder the school is to get into, the more likely there will be folks wondering if they can get in.”
It is conceivable that schools like this (easy to get into) might then have fewer threads being posted.
But as they used to tell us in grammar school, there are exceptions to every rule. YMMV.