comare skidmore, wheaton and muhlenberg

arabrab
Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:37:06 +0000

Visited Wheaton last year. (Assuming you mean the MA Wheaton.) A couple of impressions:

1. Pretty quiet campus with not a whole lot around. D liked the Northhampton area around Smith a lot more in comparison. Wheaton isn’t exactly in a real rural area; there just didn’t seem to be much other than houses (on decent size lots) in the vicinity.

2. Campus is pretty, very classic New England. Chapel is beautiful.

3. D found the elementary language class she attended to be small (under 20 kids), but quite a few of the kids seemed under-prepared for the day’s lesson. The teacher was very vibrant.

4. Dorms are apparently a sore point – Wheaton was apparently promising doubles but then forcing triples each year for the fall in the expectation that most would drop down to doubles in the spring when a bunch of kids go on study abroad problems. There was also a story in the student newspaper about a rash of outsider break-ins into student dorms; apparently the administration did not publicize the break-ins for some time during which still other rooms were entered. I gather the outcry finally convinced the admin to change the exterior locks, the keys to which had gotten spread around too widely.

5. The cafe in the student center had pretty minimal offerings. Lot’s of posters around advertising and exhorting students to participate in various events. It wasn’t a campus where kids looked really happy, but they weren’t morose either. We saw a lot more girls than guys.

6. Campus upkeep looked very good.

It was too quiet an area for D, and she was looking for a higher level of academic engagement than she saw. (But, it was one class. Every other class might have been utterly fabulous and full of highly engaged students.)