<p>Great thread … I think very useful, though I try to stay mindful of certain unusual cases in which the visit or admissions crew was deeply unimpressive but kids seem to really like it there anyway (Brown comes to mind). </p>
<p>With that brief intro:</p>
<p>MIT - DD got a bad vibe there. Students seemed to be stressed out big time; tourguide spoke of how she had to choose between getting As and having [a life/friends] - not a real encouraging person for DD, who does like science! Although I like the cleverness of the “hacks”, MIT did not feel like a college campus to me. Most of the architecture struck me as hideous, as something built just to prove a point, that it could be done that way, but it had no aesthetic sense at all. There was one main exception to that, and that was the building housing the Infinite Corridor (Rogers, Maclaurin, ???). Inside and out, it had the feel of a 1950s Federal building, something built shortly after WWII. The place just oozed workaholism. </p>
<p>Harvard: Ruled IN after MIT ruled out. Didn’t plan to stop by Harvard, but since it was so close, we walked in and looked around briefly. DD: “This seems much more like a college.” </p>
<p>Columbia: after visiting, DD was no longer sure she wanted to go to college in a big city. She had always wanted to be near a big city, but in one can be a different matter. </p>
<p>Oberlin: Smoking everywhere. We laughed at the “substance-free” house/dorm, which seemed scarcely larger than a storage shed. Admissions person, in Q&A, had a very weak answer to one father’s query, “You seem to focus a lot on diversity here at Oberlin. Yet why does it appear that there is no political diversity?” Final nail in the coffin: student newspaper article on a senior art exhibition mentions in a completely blas</p>
<p>Someone who likes Columbia should also take a look at U of Chicago. It also has a defined campus in a big city and a core curriculum. It doesn’t feel as in the city as Columbia, but it’s pretty close.</p>
<p>Davidson–I went on a group day and it was absolutely dreadful. While the campus and town are quite nice, all emphasis was placed on how “fun” the social life is and that academics never cause too much stress. When I asked the panel of students ACADEMICALLY why they chose Davidson (the audience had already been treated to plenty of social reasons), there was no answer. The panel of six students sat nervously on the stage for a solid ten seconds before the prospective students present broke into nervous titters. Absolutely pathetic.</p>
<p>Cornell was kind of disappointing. The university info session was available on Sat, but the tours were during the week. Visits to different colleges/departments were available only on different days. The Arts and Sciences session was run by a woman who looked down at her notes, mumbled for an hour, and barely looked up. We would have needed the better part of a week to extract as much info as we did in a day at every other school that we visited.</p>
<p>The tour guide was nice, the university celebrates women, and the campus was beautiful.</p>
<p>Wish I knew more.</p>
<p>Edit: At $60k/year, it would seem that Cornell could do a bit better.</p>
<p>Jonesah, I’m disappointed to hear about your experience at Davidson! I’ve been thinking about it for our daughter. Will take a look anyway as we hear such good things about it from friends, and met such nice well rounded students from there when they around here visiting.</p>
<p>Thanks Mathmom. Yes, UChicago is still a remote possibility, but its reputation as the place where fun goes to die precedes it. She wants high quality academics and selectivity, but where learning and living is fun. Yale and Carleton appeal the most at present, possibly followed by Duke.</p>
<p>My daughter ruled out Harvard when we were wandering through campus, and happen to be following what appeared to be a group of incoming freshman there for orientation. They were very full of themselves, understandably, after all they made it into Harvard. And yet they were saying some of the most outrageously parochial things about their room mates who they had not met yet but were from California. </p>
<p>It’s weird how a few students, whether they be tour guides or just folks wandering campus, can really turn you off to a whole school.</p>
<p>“Columbia-DS loved, loved this school. I think he was born on the wrong side of the country, and should have been a born and bred New Yorker. We spent about 4 days in NYC, and he loved every minute of it.”</p>
<p>People (especially impressionable teens) should be wary of falling in loooooove at first sight with with extreme places (Hawaii, Alaska, NYC, etc)…they are often great places to visit but you don’t want to actually live there.</p>
<p>Nicest folks we EVER met - students, faculty & admissions. The downfall was the expanse of building projects. Construction every where. One project is on-going until Spring 2014. All else was great, but we have added to our list to inquire at all schools of upcoming physical projects at schools.</p>
<p>On the plus side - no exaggeration, the dorms are fantastic! Large, new, plenty of closet room, balcony and the max students to a bath is 4.</p>
<p>Trinity University loves to showcase it’s great dorms but the deep dark secret is that some of the dorms are horrendous! Our daughter goes there and lived in an absolute dump her freshman year (Miller). That dorm was certainly not in any of the photos. It was truly disgusting. Her second year dorm was better, but still nothing at all like the photos. We were told that the photo of the large, seemingly luxurious dorm room that wowed us was actually a triple that they only showed 2 students sharing. My D never actually found out where that room was.</p>
<p>Obviously you had a bad experience visiting Davidson, and while I can’t say I found any presentations/tours particularly scintillating when we visited colleges, as a parent of a Davidson sophomore, I do have to say it is certainly not a school where “fun” overshadows academics. From what our s reports it fully lives up to its reputation as an academically challenging institution. That said, he does not lead a miserable existence by any means. I don’t think the two have to be mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>One of the things I would not have realized without having it pointed out on this thread is the feedback that Harvard can be such a tourist trap. Going to college and having people constantly looking in on you must feel a bit like being an animal in the zoo. Of course, the weight one gives to that should pale in comparison to teaching quality, student life, facilities and whatnot, but it is a little something. </p>
<p>It’s interesting to look through the whole thread and see which schools keep coming up again and again with bad impressions. Tufts, Brown, UPenn and Cornell seem to get the most complaints, followed by Princeton, Northwestern, and Amherst. These schools probably get more visitors than many, so one isn’t really looking at the rate of bad impressions. But still, it’s kind of interesting which schools, and why. The main complaints seem to fall into rough categories as rude/ignorant/apathetic tourguides and admissions staff, pretentious attitudes of same and more, locations too rural (nothing to do) and too urban (too much crime). </p>
<p>Obviously to get at things like teaching quality and so forth you have to seek other resources. And with so many good resources out there, perhaps it’s not wildly out of the question that this thread can serve a useful purpose in terms of allocating scarce resources to college visits - at least, pre-acceptance ones.</p>
<p>I wonder if the large number of such complaints is related to the fact that most applicants these days live in sprawlville, where there are relatively few colleges of note?</p>
<p>I think it’s more that people voice concerns about areas they’re not comfortable with. People from large cities may find rural areas too remote and boring - and people from rural areas may find cities too crowded, noisy, and potentially dangerous. I’m not sure whether suburban kids would be more likely to be able to adapt to either, or if they’d find both extremes a bit unnerving. </p>
<p>The whole thread though does make you question whether a standard info session and tour (assuming you’ve been to a few) is all that informative and worth the effort. Certainly I would think it advisable to do visit during accepted students’ days - you’d get a more realistic feel for student life. But if you consider the juxtaposition between how badly some schools come across in visits/tours and how popular they remain for applicants and attendees, you have to question the value of a visit/tour versus other resources from which you could gather information.</p>
<p>cspan, that was exactly my point. Many suburban kids won’t feel comfortable in a town where the social life revolves around passing the time with the greeter at WallyWorld, nor an urban environment filled with people I’ve been conditioned to fear. </p>
<p>As far as visits/tours, I don’t think you can generalize. We’ve been to six so far, and they have ranged from very enlightening to nearly useless. I wouldn’t try to generalize from such a small sample, but in our experience it’s been the smaller the school, the more useful the visit.</p>
<p>Timing is a huge factor, too. D and I originally planned to see SLA after StateU, but switched the order. Got to SLA, director of admissions gave us a cup of hot chocolate and had a one-on-one info session–D got into serious discussion with her about the academic program and philosophy, then went on a private campus tour with an upperclassman. After lunch, went to StateU where there was a long line for getting parking passes; sat in a large lecture hall where admissions rep explained that he would mostly be speaking about scores and grades, and that the bus to view the campus would be coming in a few minutes. We found a graceful way to leave at that point, and didn’t look back.</p>
<p>I imagine that if she’d been tired out by the info session and bus tour she might not have been as fresh or enthusiastic for the SLA. It’s now her top/ED choice.</p>
<p>Just wanted to comment about your observation about Harvard being a tourist trap. We visited Yale, and also drove past MIT and Harvard, and what we noticed about all three were the throngs of visitors. There were literally tour buses of people just gawking at the schools, taking pictures and posing. Seriously. I mean it was ridiculous. On the tour at Yale, a visitor actually asked someone on our tour to move out of the way so she could take a picture of her friends in front of some building. Granted, the architecture at Yale is gorgeous, but a tourist destination? It was definitely a turn off for my son.</p>
<p>that’s how MIT feels (re: harvard feeling like a tourist attraction.)
I went to a summer program there and there were floods of people with cameras staring at us and taking pictures.</p>