This has been a big topic of discussion in my circles. My thought at the moment: if not a public school, better the right school in the wrong state than the wrong school in the right state … provided that you are confident that your child’s mental or physical needs can be safely met.
For public schools, though, too many recent (and newly breaking) examples of state level politics creeping into the universities in ways large and small.
Amazing! We need winter like last year - I was just visiting up there a couple of weeks ago for ice fishing, but it was too thin to drive truck!!!
The people that are happiest in cold climates are those that learn how to embrace (and dress for) the cold.
As an infant, my son was an awful sleeper until we figured out that he was cold. (His sibling runs hot so we had no clue). As a toddler, he’d cry in the snow or the cold water at the beach. As a little kid, he’d come in after one sled run and watch the other kids play from the window. He loved playing sports in weather I was sure would cause heat stroke but was miserable on the cold days. When he started high school he talked about going to a school where it was “hot and swampy” to escape the cold.
Fast forward to later in high school when he had an opportunity to track wolves in Northern Minnesota. In February. When it was -40. We took him to REI and luckily found a salesperson who used to live in Ely. $1,200 later we walked out with all the gear needed for 3 weeks of fieldwork in below 0 temperatures. S23 loved it so much that he chose to sleep outside so as not to miss the star gazing. He came home and took every warm weather school off of his list. His new desire was “the colder the better”. He’s currently in Colorado studying northern apex carnivores and wants to do a semester in the Arctic Circle.
For those still reading along, let me answer my initial question: yeah, this is a little nuts. Just finished the long drive between Wooster and Dickinson. Mountains and trucks and rain; oh my! Do not recommend. At least, not in February after already seeing 7 colleges. We will do the best to give Dickinson a fair shake tomorrow though.
CC needs a 
emoji we can give you. Or a 
. We are all inspired by your fortitude!
We drove through Dickinson after a Bucknell visit and I thought the campus was lovely. It was a perfect fall day, and the buildings were charming, and the town was super cute.
I agree! We just loved the town of Oberlin, the school, and campus all four years our daughter was there! If you need a good coffee or treat, visit Slow Train! Looking for a great burger and drink, try the Feve or the Inn at Oberlin 1833 restaurant/bar. Kim’s Grocery and Carryout has delicious Korean take out. Lots of yummy and diverse food choices! Have fun, I miss it!
I totally hear you on that, but I will say, we felt that Oberlin and the surrounding town/community did a great job supporting the students. If you have any questions about Oberlin and our/my daughter’s experience, feel free to message me!
It’s definitely not all gray/gloomy skies; no more so than a good many schools. Obviously, compared to schools in the South/Southwest, etc. it is not as sunny. We’re from NY and there were many times the weather was nicer in Oberlin than it was for us at home. It’s similar to many Northeast/New England/NY schools, maybe a hair warmer.
@goldbug, hope your day is looking up with the craziest part of the PA Turnpike behind you! (Although I admit to loving those tunnels!)
I was surprised at first, but the sunny day weather data is pretty clear that Ohio has fewer sunny days than many places, including the Northeast (and it even has fewer sunny days than Seattle)!. (I did a deep dive on this because of a kiddo with seasonal affective disorder - so I have looked up data on every school we considered, and removed all Ohio and some New York and Pennsylvania schools for this reason). New York is interesting because it has really gloomy areas (Binghamton) and quite sunny areas (NYC).
Here is Ohio:
And New York:
Washington:
Wisconsin:
Pennsylvania: (Massive difference between Cleveland and Philly)
My kids both hate hot sunny days, so we were looking for the exact opposite: schools with more overcast or rainy days, and as few hot days as possible. 
Since we are talking about college, however, we tried to exclude the summers, and compared only the weather during the school year. “Number of sunny days” doesn’t necessarily break it up by season.
We really liked the comparison tool on https://weatherspark.com which allows you to superimpose weather graphs from different cities and towns.
Not to go down the rabbit hole, but western Washington weather-wise has a dry season. I didn’t know that before I lived here but from June through August it hardly rains. At all.
So before anyone considers Washington because it doesn’t look that bad, your child likely won’t be in class when it’s gorgeous 
.
Of course it’s 60 and sunny today but that’s pretty rare in February!
I can only speak to her experience with the weather in her four years there- zero difference from us in NY, maybe a touch warmer. My point is, if you’re used to general seasonal weather patterns and “typical” winter weather, the weather there is not “gloomier” or more cloudy than what you’d expect in many regions. If SAD is a significant concern, I’m sure that would eliminate a lot of schools, including many in Northeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, etc. The Oberlin daughter now lives in NYC and we were just talking about this- she said not much difference (that she can tell) from her Oberlin days, weather-wise.
There was a long back and forth about this on another thread, but yes, for SAD cloudy days have a huge negative impact, and temperature and sunny days do not necessarily go hand in hand. There are a lot of places in the Midwest that are frigid but sunny. Those stayed on our list. Warmer but gloomier places did not. Grey skies are bad for SAD, even if the temperature is warm. And without question, there are fewer sunny days (regardless of temperature) in Oberlin than in NYC. And more sunny days in Oberlin than in Binghamton and Syracuse.
The Pacific Northwest is incredible in the summer. 
If it isn’t choked in wildfire smoke. 
I also am fine with the amount of cloudy and rainy/snowy days in that region (basically downwind of the Great Lakes and west of the mountains, which creates a cloud/moisture trap), and would prefer it to lots of hot. Also great for gardening and green spaces and such.
But I don’t have SAD. If you do, it is pretty brutal that a lot of those days are concentrated in the winter. Honestly I could not recommend it for college to a kid with SAD–too many other great colleges where this would be a non-issue.
Otherwise, as four-season person who likes each season to be what it is supposed to be (by my standards), I think it is good for that!
I swear I have the opposite of normal SAD. If it is above 80 and humid, I’m miserable.
I like to call that SAN, short for “sanity”.
I am now a believer in micro-climates. It’s not just the region of the country in which you find yourself, but where you are in that region. We have kids with plenty of experience throughout the northeast, and w/o question the further inland you go the worse the weather. Yes, there is a difference between coastal New England and upstate/western New York. The Finger Lakes region is lovely, but the weather is more grey and overcast as compared to the places my kids have spent time in New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, western and eastern Mass). I also tend to feel as though I run into more harsh weather upstate than in much of New England (freezing rain, sleet, etc.). Don’t get me wrong: plenty of crappy weather in both locales. The PNW is grey and gloomy for long stretches, and I hate that; but the weather is much more mild than it is in the east, and as others have said, the late spring, summer and fall weather is lovely.
Where did I leave off?
We flew to Ohio a week ago today after three action-packed days in Minnesota. I don’t think I ever quite caught up on sleep.
Monday night: the boys + DH go explore Fort Snelling while I had a pity party in the car on the phone w/ a wise friend. Why was I feeling sad? Because this was probably the point when my son opined that he really just liked California and I was exhausted and the idea of driving Sullen and Snarky (my current irreverent nicknames for my biological and host sons) all over Ohio/Pennsylvania without an additional adult for company sounded a lot less fun. I got over it.
We got into Granville after midnight but I’d called ahead to warn the Granville Inn that we’d be late and they were absolutely lovely – showed us to our room and even fetched us a rollaway bed (I think I must have mentioned that somewhere?)
Tuesday: we toured Denison. This tour didn’t make a huge impression on me for some reason but I can’t put my finger on it. The school seemed well connected to the town, the buildings appeared to be well maintained and the campus cohesive, the students seemed athletic/purposeful. I got a weird feeling of being back on the SF Peninsula (packs of boys with big floofy hair and pajama pants and a kind of general slouch). The DSs were impressed. Our tour guide was a chem major angling for a finance career and she talked a lot about resume building (which I’m instinctively snobby about but then…the point for most of these kids is to land a job and given how little practical career support I got as an undergrad, I shouldn’t pooh-pooh this emphasis. The kid will need to pay rent somewhere, and most people shouldn’t be doing PhDs these days, probably.) We had a great lunch at the Mai Chau kitchen, co-located with a brewing company.
We then drove to Kenyon for the afternoon tour. Kenyon weirdly didn’t offer an info session (or maybe the student panel at lunchtime was supposed to be in lieu thereof?) but we did sign up for two campus tours: first a general tour; then an arts/sciences tour. The boys were enchanted by the setting and the architecture at Kenyon. I was impressed by the posters in the science building (and the humor and sense of personality from the physics majors). I met an old friend for coffee and a walk and sent them on the second tour without me. We ate too many tater tots in the village pub and shopped for fancy sodas at the convenience store. Snarky had his first Girl Scout cookies. There was one weird incident: when we checked into our Airbnb there was a strong, unmistakable odor of gas. I contacted the owner, who sent his wife over to tell me that this was just “old building smell.” Then, out of an abundance of caution, they called the gas company out. They clanged around in the basement for a solid hour. Then the house smelled better. Our host claimed it was a false alarm and maybe he’s right? But it was unnerving.
Wednesday: we had breakfast in the Kenyon cafeteria (honestly kind of meh but a beautiful space). The shy teen was miserable because the cereal came out too fast in his bowl and overflowed and someone saw. I’m moderately worried about this level of social anxiety. I had a great chat with a current student who explained how much better Kenyon was once she got a car, got an ADHD diagnosis, and took some time off to recover from a bunch of personal stuff that happened freshman year. The Middle Path (a wide walkway that connects both ends of campus to the village) is picturesque but perhaps too gritty. Metaphor?
That afternoon we had a wonderful scenic drive to Oberlin. The first person to spy a legit Amish family was rewarded with a Butterfinger (and that person, it turned out, was me!) The weather was unseasonably mild that day; skies were blue; Oberlin put on a show for us. i’m not sure what else to say about it – I’d love living there because I’m a huge music nerd and with a world-class conservatory in the heart of town, there’s always something happening. But the boys were happy too. Someone on a previous tour had told us that 75% of Oberlin students identify as LGBTQ+, implying that a straight guy wouldn’t have an easy time of it. (this stat has been making the rounds lately but I can’t find a reputable source for it. Sounds like something you’d see taken out of context on Fox News.) DS didn’t seem concerned. We never made it to the comedy show because DS wanted to go to a game shop in the next town and then we needed to get dinner and it just didn’t all come together. But I had a brilliant cocktail (a whisky sour made with tamarind) at the local Thai place and the food was nice too.
Thursday: turns out maybe Wednesday was the high point of our trip. Thursday, Snarky woke up with a bad cold and Sullen stayed up too late chatting with friends, so getting everyone showered and on the road by 8 was painful. It was raining. We made it to the College of Wooster right on time. Wooster was …fine. Pretty, cozy, nice students, seemed like a reasonable place to go to school. But the whole time we were there I was looking for a place to nap and contemplating with increasing dread the 5+ hour drive we still had to make that afternoon. Snarky loves to sing along to bad 80s and 90s music and while he has absolutely no sense of pitch, it’s entertaining and helped keep me awake. We made it to Carlisle unscathed, navigated the labyrinthine halls of the Carlisle Inn to find our room, avoided locking outselves out, dragged ourselves out in the rain for a thoroughly generic and overpriced dinner at the 1794 Whisky Rebellion (although I finally ate salad!), and crashed.
Friday: I wonder how much we might have liked Dickinson had we seen it first. I think I put it in a bucket with St. Olaf: nice campus in a scenic location, friendly students, totally solid option. The admissions staff made much of the co-location with the Army War College and the Central Pennsylvania Ballet School (but why?) There is plenty of outdoors stuff to do in the vicinity of Carlisle and students can walk to town (always a plus in my book). The visit ended strangely: we went to try to find the original site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which my son had just learned about in APUSH. Apparently the school has been absorbed into the Army Barracks and no one who works there seems to know which of the buildings are actually still standing. In the end, after getting a background check, stopping at a dystopian visitor center, and finding the graveyard (not the original graveyard), we called it a day and got on the road. Our destination: Brooklyn.
Why did we stop at Lehigh? Because DS had to use the facilities. I’d reluctantly resisted the siren call of driving through Princeton because we were all pretty sick of colleges at this point, I know Princeton to be kind of painful from a convenient parking standpoint, and I was feeling anxious about rush hour/Friday night traffic into the city. But we were driving through the Lehigh Valley when he announced that we needed to find a bathroom, so I offered him a choice of Lehigh or Lafayette. “Which one is closer?” he grumbled. (Lehigh might not actually have been closer). I’ve got to admit, this school kind of intimidates me. The imposing gothic fortress architecture on the hills across from the defunct steel mill, the strong masculine energy, the intense “work hard/play hard” reputation…the school color may be brown but to me it seemed grey. “If this place were a Hogwarts House, it would be Slytherin” I thought to myself. DS, of course, was enchanted. (face-palm) I’m not mentioning it until he does.
Getting to Brooklyn turned out to be mostly fine, although there were some hair-raising moments (notably merging across x lanes of traffic at a toll station to get on 95 S). We crashed on the sofa of my friend’s place in Windsor Terrace, ordered takeout sushi, and watched TV.
Saturday: Reward day! I took the boys to a terrific bagel place where they proceeded to order a wrap and a muffin (shrug). DS went to meet up with his buddies from France while I took our exchange student to hit some tourist highlights: the Empire State Building (no lines!), met up with a friend at Rockefeller Center, took the subway down to Battery Park for sunset views of the Statue of Liberty and the 9/11 memorial and finally a Broadway play (“Merrily We Roll Along” with a Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, etc.; highly recommended). We finished the day with drained batteries (cell phone and personal). No one said anything about colleges.
Sunday: I let the boys sleep in and met a friend in Park Slope for breakfast. We cleaned up/packed/hustled out to the airport (a 30-minute drive door to door from our apartment in Brooklyn. Way easier than I thought it would be!) and came home. I may never go anywhere again but I guess at some point we need to sort out spring break (groan)
Upshot: Oberlin was the favorite. Denison/Kenyon were next. Then St. Olaf and maybe Dickinson and Wooster somewhere in there, despite the bats. Lehigh was a wild card and because I had a strong visceral negative reaction, I’m going to wait and see what he does with it. Macalester was DS’s least favorite school, which is a bummer for me (I was looking forward to easy flights to and from the Twin Cities) but it’s his life! And there are so many good options.
Based on these experiences, I’m still thinking we should visit Bates and maybe (given his interest in Oberlin) Wesleyan over spring break. The others we were considering were Union, Skidmore, Vassar, Holy Cross, and Clark, WPI (wild card) and Brandeis. That now sounds clinically insane to me. What should we cut?