D26 and I recently went to Denison University and Kenyon College.
Denison has a really hilly campus. I was not expecting that in Ohio. Very nice views from the top and the town of Granville is very cute. We went to the famous Frozen Custard shop (Whit’s) in town and it was really good. We arrived on a Friday night with school in session and the kids were having fun. A really, really nice vibe. We had pizza in Silverstein Hall which was the only dining area open and the food was pretty good. The campus is dominated by nice red brick buildings and everything was neat and tidy. Denison had lots of staff cleaning up after the kids and generally supporting the kids. The staff were “Midwestern nice” which is to say very, very nice.
The information session was excellent. We moved into the campus tour and something odd happened. They broke the (large) info session group up into smaller tour groups. However, some groups had 1 or 2 kids and other groups had 6 or more kids. It was odd and it left some people feeling like they were VIPs and other people feeling like they were somehow less. You could see kids/parents either delighted or annoyed depending upon which type of group they were assigned to. We were part of a 2 person “VIP group.” I suspect that Denison thought that my daughter was a volleyball player as the other family that we were with was a sports family. My daughter IS a volleyball player, but she is not sure that she wants to do this in college.
Our tour guide was absolutely terrific and gave us a great tour. The dorms were good and the athletic facilities were absolutely stunning. The academic quad is surprisingly small. The school seems to have a TON of dorms covering huge areas and a TINY academic area. We completely missed the academic area on our first, solo walk through.
The Eisner Center for the Performing Arts was excellent. The school also had a really nice Wellness Center. You got the sense that Denison has a large endowment and is a school on the rise.
Overall, D26 really liked the school and the vibe. Denison/Granville have a really wholesome, Middle-America feel.
We were late for the Kenyon info session. We checked in and saw the last 15 minutes or so. When it was time for the tours, it was our turn to feel that we were not VIPs. D26 was assigned to a huge tour group and looked with envy at tiny tour groups. Our tour guide was actually just OK. She seemed to be rushing us through and just wanted to be done. Sure enough, right after the tour we saw her run over to a dance class which she was late for.
Kenyon had a really interesting campus. An odd mix of seemingly brand new buildings and ancient buildings with what seemed like nothing in between. The Middle Path starts down by the 1st year dorms, goes through the “village” of Gambier, goes through the “Gates of Hell” and then goes onto the campus where it dead ends at Old Kenyon Hall. There are lots of little white houses that used to be the houses of professors when Kenyon required them to all live on campus. Those houses now contain small administrative functions. The campus is mostly in the Gothic style which my daughter loved. Lots of art is scattered about the campus. Kenyon oozes intellectualism.
I thought that Kenyon’s dorms were terrible, but my daughter liked them. Funny how different people have different perspectives.
Kenyon gave us lunch vouchers which I always love and appreciate. The kids at Kenyon don’t swipe cards for meals. They just go into the dining hall and eat whenever they want. No one was even there to take our vouchers. We tried different things and found that the food ranged between excellent and terrible. But with experience, a student could pick out the excellent things and so we would say that the food was really good overall. Both the “Old” and “New” dining halls were really nice.
Kenyon also had an amazing sports facility. Oddly, it looked VERY similar to Denison’s. Probably the same contractor built both facilities and around the same time to boot.
The problem, for D26, is that the kids at Kenyon did not seem to be her people. There were a huge number of “theater looking kids” at Kenyon, i.e., wearing thrift store clothes, smoking, very artsy, many Gothic, lots of 1970s flower prints, and obviously very liberal. These are obviously not bad things, it just isn’t my daughter who is more preppy and athletic.
The other issue is that the town of Gambier is TINY. If you go to Kenyon, you are pretty much going to live in a Kenyon bubble. Denison’s hometown of Granville seemed like a metropolis by comparison, but in reality Granville is pretty darn small too.
My daughter wished that she could take the kids from Denison and put them on Kenyon’s campus. Then she would plop Kenyon into Granville. That would be ideal, but is unfortunately not possible.
Overall, both Kenyon and Denison rose a bit. I had to make my daughter visit Kenyon. She had taken it off of her list because of YouTube videos claiming that Kenyon is haunted. Upon visiting, I do admit that some of Kenyon’s on-campus art /buildings are kind of eerie and I can see how Kenyon got the “haunted campus” reputation in the first place. The center of campus cemetery helps with that as well.