VASSAR: DOWN (so probably out). I want to say at the outset I personally really liked Vassar, but I also think it was understandable why, for my kid in particular, it suffered in contrast to WUSTL the day before.
Probably the biggest contrast was the campus. Where WUSTL has a strong campus architectural theme, Vassar is very eclectic. S24 did say there were individual buildings he loved at Vassar—he really liked the Chapel, and then the Library was as advertised (I had built it up and insisted we have time to visit and poke around, and it completely delivered). But overall the campus didn’t have the same “wow” impact on S24 as WUSTL.
I think contributing to that is WUSTL’s layout has a sort of ascertainable geometric formality to it—it reminds me of an English garden of the grand “country house” style, in which case Vassar would be more the English “cottage” style with a lot of meandering paths (in fact in sessions they talked about the intentional meandering) and more natural spaces. I liked both but I think S24 for the purposes of picking his one-and-only college is responding more to the monumental, meant-to-impress style.
The other big thing is Vassar had a relatively laid back structure to the middle of the day (between the opening and closing sessions), and S24 did not meet any kids to eat with or wander around with. That left some student panels as his way of seeing other students, and I thought they were great kids but S24 started getting the impression many were from the Northeast, a few from the West Coast, and they had a sort of range of related professional ambitions—pre-law, pre-med, finance, media, in Boston, NYC, DC, or LA, that sort of thing. That’s not entirely inaccurate, and giving him an option like this is why Vassar was on his short list, but facing the reality of that sort of pipeline effect did not really work for him.
It didn’t help that we drove down to fly out of LGA, and it was actually perfectly fine—we hit a little traffic but nothing unusual. But he got a quick impression of just the sheer scale and density of NYC, and for a kid who does not really like spending a lot of time jostling in crowds, this was kinda a “personal circle of hell” moment. So, he was saying he could not imagine ever living in NYC (which could change, but that is his thinking now), and I think that combined with his impression a lot of Vassar kids exactly want that made him think that Vassar simply was not the school for him.
Parent perspective: again I liked Vassar, but to be fair I am also very aware of a lot of its academic virtues, and I don’t think that necessarily came through on the visit very well (to be fair, I think they expect admits to already know all that).
Instead they were really emphasizing how caring they were to each other, how academics involved hard work but community involved “heart work”, how students and professors were willing to actually use the word “love” to each other, that sort of thing. This appeared to mean nothing to S24 (I think he just expects everyone to love him anyway). And NiceUnparticularMom frankly hated it, to the point she was saying she could not see S24 there, which is a little harsh I thought but I understood her point, that none of this seemed to be speaking to our kid’s needs.
And I suspect part of what is going on is Vassar is distinguishing itself from its normal co-ed rivals among prominent Northeast LACs, and I bet for a lot of ambitious but anxious kids that message of caring would be very well-received. But in our case it was not what S24 needed to hear.
OK, so I think Vassar is probably out (although no official confirmation yet), and next weekend is the last contender, Carleton. It will be interesting to see if it can hold up any better against WUSTL, which has really set a very high bar with S24. I suspect it is maybe going to try to sell itself in a way that resonates with S24 (and maybe NiceUnparticularMom) more than Vassar, but we shall see.