UAH was one of my C19’s three final possibilities, and so we went there to tour during spring break her senior year. (Hadn’t had a chance to tour it previously, but ABET accreditation in industrial engineering plus a very generous stats-based guaranteed scholarship plus family nearby meant that she applied to it.) Her impression of the physical plant was similar to your kid’s impressions—very pleasant campus, good facilities, dorms quite good, food pleasant, campus vibe pretty solid. The tour somehow focused on the facilities for everything other than engineering, which was weird given that it’s a university known for its engineering programs, but whatever, still good.
The thing that moved it off her list, though, was meeting with one of the industrial engineering faculty—and I can say that he did everything right, it’s not like he scared her away or anything. It’s just that he played up arguably the biggest strength of the IE program there, which is that its students get incredible opportunities to intern in and otherwise connect with the local aerospace industry, and local industrial engineers working in aerospace are strongly connected to the research and teaching being done on campus, and so you’re basically set if you get an IE degree from UAH.
The problem? C19 had (and has) no—maybe this should even be a negative quantity—desire to work in aerospace. Her interests in IE were and continue to be in the human factors and operations side of the field, and though UAH’s curriculum had that on paper, it was clear that such a focus wasn’t going to be possible in practice.
So the topic of the thread is why your kid moved a college up or down after visiting—and thus for my C19 and UAH? The thing that moved it down was, putting it in a semi-joking manner, the very high probability that she’d have a high-paying job in the aerospace industry waiting for her if she graduated from there.
(But even though it wasn’t going to work for my kid, I still like to point it out as a hidden gem for other kids whose interests line up better with what they do.)