The complex was funded entirely by donations. I’m not sure that makes a difference in how it’s viewed but we love it. There are so few facilities in the area and my younger kids have benefited. My 11-year old just had a basketball tournament there. I can understand how Waterville, ME wouldn’t appeal to many people but this really is a wonderful addition to the school and community.
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delete, wrong thread
Yes, I don’t doubt Colby’s sports facility is fabulous for many of its neighbors, and in the eyes of many prospective students. A lot of people must have liked it, or the idea of it, for it to have been built.
One thing that emerges from this thread (or two threads? I can’t figure out what’s going on) is that the college selection process is not always strictly rational. It’s often the little things that rub visitors the wrong way, or appeal to them.
Or in the case of Colby’s sports center, sometimes very very big things.
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I mean…we all think that, right? It’s why we’re all here every day. 
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And come to think of it, the pay around here is not great either . . . .
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We also toured Drew and Seton Hall and had some of the same reactions but also some opposite reactions.
We also really enjoyed our Drew tour guide. I wonder if we had the same one? He was great. Liked the campus and they were very welcoming there. Ultimately it felt too small for my D. We didn’t visit the town close by and sounds like we should have done that.
For Seton Hall my D did really like it. We had met with our AO before hand so that started out things nicely. The information session was not bad. It did have a lot of information. We did however go on the tour and again great tour guide. Felt really good about the school after the tour so you might have had a slightly different opinion if you had done that. Yes there are some religious symbols in classrooms but didn’t bother us much (we are also not religious). We got to go in the chapel and it was beautiful. When we first drove into the town of Orange we liked it. The beautiful old churches were very cool as we don’t have anything like that on the west coast. Maybe we entered from different directions ? 
Anyway just wanted to put out a different perspective. I think Drew is amazing and they really seem to care about the individual. Sounds like it could be a good fit for your son. On the other hand we really liked Seton Hall too. So it is interesting how different people experience things.
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The tour guide we had at Drew studied international relations and I think French.
In terms of the smallness, one thing I forgot to mention was that my son also liked that the town of Madison had two schools – Fairleigh Dickinson is a 15 min walk up the road from the Drew campus. I have no idea realistically how much cross-socialization goes on between campuses, but at least conceptually it felt like there was more of a community in the area than one tiny college in a tiny town.
As for Seton Hall, if the information session had been less discouraging, we might have stayed for the tour, but everyone involved in organizing it just seemed not really happy or engaged. And, this is a minor thing, but the person from Admissions who was running the event kept mispronouncing FAFSA as FASFA. That alone wouldn’t have been a big deal, but she also couldn’t answer a couple of seemingly simple questions from another parent, and referred them to the website. Especially after a top-notch overview of everything at Drew, it didn’t really inspire confidence.
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Gotcha. I guess we lucked out on people being happier on our day.
I forgot about Fairleigh Dickinson being right down the road. Maybe they do get together for things.
I really feel like we may have had the same Drew tour guide. If so they should give him a raise as he really is good 
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This somehow makes me think of the time a Northwestern classmate of mine who grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, got a fundraising call from a student who said, “I see you’re from Bethseeda — I’m from Bethseeda, too!”
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About the comment that South Orange (Seton Hall) is not as nice as Madison (Drew), I live in Maplewood, the next town to South Orange. New Jersey is so densely populated, it’s not like where my D goes to school in the south at all. Don’t like South Orange? You can take NJ transit one stop to Maplewood, a picture-perfect downtown with great restaurants, shops, concerts and a Frederick Olmsted-designed park. Another stop it’s Millburn, same. Or Summit, also very nice. Or go in the other direction to Hoboken or NYC. My favorite place, the South Mountain Reservation, offers about 2,000 acres of hiking trails, and is just down South Orange Avenue.
I see the Seton Hall shuttle bus at various places, including the supermarket and Short Hills Mall. The Seton Hall students I know (from my gym) seem happy with it.
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I am very familiar with New Jersey, and personally don’t get the hype about Maplewood (and incidentally, since I am a bit of an Olmsted geek, the park there is not an original Frederick Olmsted design, that park was designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm in the 1920s, when Frederick Sr. himself had been dead for a couple of decades; the firm was a venture of his sons).
Regarding what I was saying about Madison vs South Orange, of course, one can take the train to the next town over. But there is something to being able to walk 5 minutes down the road for a cup of coffee to a place that you find charming, on a whim. Sure, the NJ transit to Maplewood is one stop, but off-peak it will run once an hour. So you have to time it. It’s not the same thing.
And as for other places one can go by train that you mention… as I said in my original post, we live in NYC. The idea of going to NYC to hang out isn’t an exciting selling point to my son, in the way it might be to someone who is not growing up here. South Mountain Reservation is lovely, but hiking is not really a day to day focus of my son’s life. My point about South Orange vs Madison was about how charming the area immediately outside the campus gates is, where one might walk on a daily basis to hang out with friends and study, not about how easily accessible other cool places are.
Of course “charming” is in the eyes of beholder, and your mileage may well vary.
Got it. It’s ok if you don’t get the hype. The real estate prices are insane so lots of people do.
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I wasn’t familiar with Maplewood so I looked on Redfin. (I’m in So California). Looks lovely and something I miss from having lived in similar suburbs in the Chicago area. I miss that!
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This discussion is making me a little homesick as a New Jersey native, but it also reminded me of an old New York Times article about Maplewood - “If Brooklyn were a suburb”. Now that could of course be be taken either as high praise or not, depending on your preferences.
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The movie “One True Thing” was filmed there starring Meryl Streep, William Hurt and Renee Zellweger. One of the perks of living there is an abundance of Broadway musical actors who give free concerts. Lots of local talented artists and musicians. My neighbor is in Taylor Swift’s band. Lots of Brooklyn transplants.
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Maplewood seems totally fine for what it is – an expensive suburb. My primary point of reference for home costs in the area is the NYC housing market, but house prices in Maplewood, as far as I know, are on par with parts of Queens and Brooklyn, and more expensive than Staten Island. My budget is low enough that I am not sure how Maplewood is an alternative to insane real estate prices – to my mind that would be more parts of Central Jersey, or Philadelphia.
In any case, what I personally mean by “I don’t get the hype” is: I know a bunch of people who moved to Maplewood from Brooklyn, who are ambivalent about moving to the burbs, and, I am guessing, deal with that ambivalence by insisting that it’s basically exactly like Park Slope, just in New Jersey and with more space. Which…no, it’s not. And it’s fine that it’s not. It’s just weird that the hype is that it’s Park Slope West.
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That’s exactly the hype I don’t get! It’s not at all like “if Brooklyn were a suburb.” Articles like that use “Brooklyn” as a proxy for is parts of Brooklyn that are inherently not suburban, so that analogy is a category error. What they mean is, it’s a destination for a certain socio-economic strata of Brooklynites, and those are not Brooklynites from parts of Brooklyn that are, in fact, suburb-like (i.e. Marine Park, deep Midwood), but rather people who are typically not originally from NYC but who have spent their twenties and thirties in Park Slope and Fort Greene. I think Hipsturbia is the right moniker…
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I have zero interest in living or working in NYC. I enjoyed living in Boston and DC. Different strokes and all that. I know plenty of folks who moved from Park Slope and are happy, so again, different strokes.
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We live in a neighboring state and looked at a few NJ schools between S22 and S24 (including those being discussed here.) Concerns we had at each one was the likelihood of each emptying out on the weekends. The ones we looked at had high percentages of students from NJ and NY, and some already have reputations as suitcase schools. Of course some parents of athletes and Greeks say that weekends are active if your student is in one of those groups.
One of my close friends has a son who’s graduating from Drew this May. He chose it due to proximity to NYC, but overall he hasn’t had a great experience due to the social scene. He’s also had to live on campus all 4 years because the surrounding area is so expensive, he couldn’t afford off campus rent. I think that living on campus as an upperclassman, negatively impacted his social life.
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lol, so 20 years ago, my husband and I made the Park Slope to Montclair migration to buy our first house. We’d spent our 20s in Manhattan and Park Slope (we are both originally from CA), and were priced out of PS.
We didn’t take much to Montclair, although it was a very lovely suburb. We had our D out there, and when she was one year old, we sold the house and moved back to Park Slope. We were a “cautionary tale” to a wide range of folks terrified of making the suburban leap. In fact, a local newspaper interviewed us about it.
I think if we’d been older, we would have appreciated the sweet suburban towns in northern NJ. I can’t imagine a college crowd finding them interesting, though if they are just down the street, then that’s a plus and certainly more appealing than being isolated.
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