@happy1 - Exactly. A tour guide can help amplify or mute other signals a visitor may be receiving, but they’re rarely the whole message.
Also for many kids the big challenge is narrowing down a list of schools. If my kid was somewhat interested in a huge number of schools and needed to pick 5-10 to apply to, droppimg because of a bad tour would be fine by me.
@GnocchiB , @NEPatsGirl - Appreciating that visits are a time for impressions…the impressions we had (including classroom participation) was a high level of upper class, preppy (well dressed, well coiffed) MA and CT kids who are used to a certain lifestyle, including private school and summers on the Cape. This impression was actually reinforced during the information session, when one of the admissions staff admitted to a disproportionate MA population while surprisingly admitting to diversity difficulties.
@EyeVeee - I had a hunch. That was where we spotted a perfectly coifed tour guide in Lily Pulitzer. Something we never saw on any of the other gazillion tours we took. It’s not everything, but it’s something.
@EyeVeee Which school did you see the “random acts of kindness”? That actually sounds great
@EyeVeee - can you clarify - for your younger child - Did she or he pick the school with the perfect overnight? Or the school with the overnight with the terrible host, but lots of community + random acts of kindness?
@citymama9 - Random acts can be something so basic as holding doors. They include walking you to the corner of a building to point you in the right direction, or giving you a bit more information than you actually asked for. The admissions office is usually very nice…they’re in sales. Where you pick up the vibe (IMO) is on your own, wandering. Do the staff truly express an interest in helping, or are you a nuisance?
Our family demonstrated a poor ability to navigate campuses in spite of having a map. At Colby, Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall, Lafayette, Earlham, and Union, students approached us and offered directions, advice on dining options, and/or info on how to contact them with questions. I suspect we may have found the same hospitality a few other spots but we did a better job of disguising out ineptitude.
Some people have mentioned on this thread that their children rejected colleges because they saw people from their high school. We had the opposite experience. We had a random encounter with a recent grad from my children’s high school - not someone they knew well - and found a brief and candid conversation with her to be immensely helpful. I’m even thinking the kids should make a deliberate effort to meet alumni from their high school on future college visits.
@twinsmama , if not in the visit phase, at least in the decision phase. DS found alums from his school to be a great resource. Even by phone. It’s much easier to filter the info when you know the source.
@EyeVeee I was actually wondering which school that was, because aside from academics, that’s the number most important thing to me as a parent: a campus where kindness is the norm
@CoyoteMom - In the end the school with the perfect overnight was not the first choice, instead opting to attend the school with the overnight that generated tears.
In an odd way, the challenges presented offered an opportunity to test the community, and they responded brilliantly. The trouble with the overnight was the host. For whatever reason, the host seemed angry / miserable from the start.
Students on the hall seeing a stranger, alone in the common area stopped to see if help was needed. Conversations happened. Suggestions were made about what to do…what to see…what not to eat. When lost, a student stopped what they were doing to show my child not only the direction of the assigned room…but walked all the way into the classroom to make sure it was correct.
The moments that ultimately made the difference was the discussion / interaction in the class. It was a conversation…not a lecture. The students in the room all appeared to be smart, open, and engaged. It was the environment we were looking for…excusing one miserable host.
My daughters and I hated Haverford after visiting the school. It was not a pretty campus as we had heard. There were construction and large dirt piles when we entered the school. I’m sure there were prettier areas that we could have toured but our tour guide focused around the construction. The information session was long and boring. We had one student give the hour long session and he kept saying that the students could take classes on two other campuses. I didn’t understand what would be the attraction of leaving Haverford to take classes in other places. It was the worst college visit I had ever been to!!! We were pleasantly surprised when we visited Rutgers. The tour was well organized, the info session included a panel of impressive students, and the campus was beautiful. My daughter who was originally for Haverford and no to Rutgers actually made a 180 degree turn and said no to Haverford and yes to Rutgers!!!
^
Haverford not pretty.
Rutgers beautiful.
This is what makes CC so great. A welcome counter-opinion!
Beauty truly must be in the eye of the beholder. 
So for a counter perspective . . . .
Rutgers has several campuses. Which one was toured? http://newbrunswick.rutgers.edu/about/one-community-five-campuses
Recently a proud and happy Rutgers student remarked to me that it was a “great big city.”
And when I understood that Haverford could take classes elsewhere, I took that as a positive because it gives the student a chance to have a cozy, familiar place to call home and then branch out as needed or wanted. The other schools offer different campus cultures, different activities to choose from, a larger net population if you start finding your current one too small, and for one of the campuses (Upenn) a university-size urban setting with all that offers. Could a student just stay at Haverford? Probably, and that’s okay, but students like to grow and change, usually, and the varied options I think may be helpful.
So interesting to read this thread…see how different kids connect to different schools in different ways.
From two kids recently through the process:
Stayed on the list:
Cal-tech: high energy, positive student tour guide; interestingly strange dorms. Weren’t able to get in many buildings; engaging admissions staff. No one came across as pretentious in any way; quick, bright students seemed to love their studies.
Wooster: interesting capstone projects and a lot of focus on internships and research. Amazing admissions staff. Great tour guide. Welcoming overnight. Kids seem to leave here ready to take on the real world. Admissions director was sincerely interested in being sure DS found the right place.
Moved Up:
Middlebury: best orientation led by very engaged admissions director; beautiful campus, bright positive kids, great meal service options, great facilities, cool college-owned ski mountain nearby, would have been first choice for one of my kids if music offerings were more advanced.
St. Olaf; beautiful campus, great tour guide, very engaged admissions staff, fantastic overnight, great visits with professors arranged through admissions as part of the visit. Faculty seemed truly interested in teaching and student success. Strong sense of community. Music to die for (and math / sciences). Customized diet support from food service (one kid is celiac).
Grinnell: considered too remote at first, but then great visit, great overnight – An amazing dedication among students in everyone finding their own paths, even if it was different from your friends. Two profs stopped to be sure we weren’t lost or needed something…Amazing library with fantastic stacked study areas. A lot of kids clearly find who they are here.
Wash U: really appealing campus - not too large / too small. Advanced offerings, in the end decided neuro science program was too competitive (you get in or not after your freshman year), to need to have such an intense freshman year.
Off the list;
Carlton: neither kid would even get out of the car. (Maybe we should have made them!?) To this day don’t understand that reaction. It’s a great college from what we hear from others…
CU Boulder: beautiful campus, great town, too large for both kids, both wanted on campus housing and CU only provides such for freshmen. Was one of a few larger universities we explored as options - just didn’t connect with DD or DS - both wanted smaller settings. Nice to be near ski country! Offers some advanced and increasingly well respected graduate programs that were of interest.
Vassar: clearly great school - lots of pluses, but kid interested in music and academics couldn’t get past really dark music building / practice rooms. Helpful profs we ran into on campus. A coat of paint in those practice rooms would help a lot!
Bard: cool vibe, a little alternative for my particular kids, offers an interesting combination of college and music conservatory (and 3+2 programs). Cool focus on cross disciplinary, deep thinking / learning. Music practice rooms off by themselves in a strange way - felt disconnected.
Kenyon: snobby admissions experience. Once test scores got out DD received some nice personalized outreach - but too late. I really don’t understand schools that think that being aloof is appealing. Thought about writing to them about this, but figured they wouldn’t care to know. Hope we just caught them on a bad day (although we visited twice - same experience.)
DD and DS have some home schooling and / or community college experience instead of / or as supplement to high school – every college was interested and supportive of their non-standard paths.
Good luck and success to everyone, thanks for sharing your stories!
@collegedad7 wrote
In my mind that’s a good thing-our portfolio production class (for studio art) is right next to a room where the flutes practice. On some days it’s arguably torture trying to do presentations while it sounds like someone is being beat up with a flute 8-|
Yep! I hear that! In this case it was just a seriously long walk to the (nice, new) practice rooms…
Wow, my family could not have had a more opposite reaction to Rutgers on our official tour or from our many informal visits. It’s our state school and only 30 minutes from our house. Numerous friends and neighbors are professors there and many my eldest son’s friends now go there, so he’s often dropping by to visit them during breaks from his school.
It’s a great school academically, but the “campus” was a major turn-off for my kids, and the tour is infamous in my family (all five of us went) as the worst college tour we did (we’ve done about 20 so far). My eldest didn’t even apply despite it being the de facto safety (and cheapest) for most of his peers and my daughter has made it clear she won’t apply either.
The problem with Rutgers is it isn’t a cohesive campus at all. It’s 5 mini-campuses, in three disjoined sections separated by a congested highway in some cases. And the oldest part of the campus doesn’t even feel like one – it’s just a collection of buildings in the downtown of New Brunswick on a road that didn’t look charming or appealing. And crime is relatively bad there too – it’s not considered a nice town in the state. And while the newer “campuses” are okay and had a few interesting buildings, they feel incomplete and isolated from each other.
The tour reinforced this. It’s the only tour we did, including a couple other large universities, that did the tour in Coach buses. Sure their visitor center was very nice, but what does it say when you can’t do a walking tour? The bus stopped at a couple places to see dorms, etc., but overall it reinforced how separated the various parts of campus are. Yet it’s treated as one campus, so you might live in one place and have classes in another, and need to take a bus about 30 minutes at the worse traffic times to get from one to the other. I went to UCLA, so a school comparably large to Rutgers, and I might have a 15 minute walk from my dorm at the top of the hill to the further possible class, but it was all along a contained true campus.
Making matters worse was our tour guide. They clearly made no effort to pair tour guides with interests, which would be fine if their guides were trained to be versatile, but our clearly was not. He was there for the fellow “Bros.” Our buses (three of them) were not full, so each had maybe 15 people in them, counting family members. Our guide started by asking who was interested in football. His bad luck he got the bus where no one was and his face was crushed. None of us could care less about sports (despite this we spent a consider time driving past their various sports complexes). Unfortunately he knew a lot about Rutger’s athletic teams and Greek system (another thing no one on the bus cared about), and pretty much nothing about anything else, including his own campus. He was peppered with questions about various academic programs and activities and pretty much couldn’t answer any of them. The low point was when we were driving through Cook campus – the one that looks the most like a traditional college campus – and someone asked what a certain building was. The tour guide was blank for a moment then said it was called [I don’t recall the name]. At that point one of the parents spoke up and said he was an alumni and the building was actually called [something totally different]. The guide looked embarrassed and then said something to the effect of, “you got me – I don’t really hang out in this part of campus.” So the net of the tour is we learned nothing about the campus other than it sports and frats and that the representative they selected to guide our tours could care less about his academics or any activity that wasn’t sports or frats.
To each their own of course.
Though I find it ironic to ding Haverford for its membership in the tri-college consortium when the travel time between the three schools is less than the travel time between one part of the Rutgers campus and another. Haverford is 5 minutes or less from Bryn Mawr. Swarthmore is further, but again not more than getting from Busch to Cook at the wrong time at Rugters. Besides, no one needs to take classes at the other colleges – I think most people consider the option a selling point, not a ding.
Again, since I have been kind of bashing on Rutgers, I want to repeat we have nothing but respect for it as an academic institution, though the quality varies dramatically from program to program. We just couldn’t get past the environment and there were so many choices that had both academics and environment going for them.
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