<p>Williams - students starting to drink before dinner on Thursday night, and continuing, bringing flasks to a capella concerts, and then complaining about the loud drunks in the next entry way.</p>
<p>Harvard - “Music building reaked of mold.” Same experience. But they were very honest. The head of the undergraduate music department told my d. that the person she wished to study with (and whom she had actually done some work with on the west coast at the University of Oregon) only taught graduate students, and that in alternate years. That was the end of that.</p>
<p>Reed - the “stimulants” table at the library (I actually thought it was amusing, but my d. didn’t). Tobacco smoke everywhere! (and the smoke-free lounge causing an asthmatic reaction in my younger one.) The admissions officer telling us that 75% of Reedies had played a musical instrument before attending, but the school couldn’t muster a 30-piece orchestra. The tour guide (who loved the place, and was extremely articulate and well-spoken) telling us that in two years he had never been “to Portland”. (duh!)</p>
<p>The tourguide who acted like she had never been in the library she was showing. The gothish tourguide who looked like she wished she were anywhere else. The tourguides who just couldn’t manage to make their swipe cards work on the dormitory doors - yeah, you could tell the college really didn’t want us seeing dorm rooms.</p>
<p>We had a marathon tour of VCU. We particularly wanted to see the film program. After visiting every other arts department in the school (which was the second part of the exhausting tour) we finally arrived at the film program. There was no one there, and the door was locked. It didn’t help that the Assistant Dean of the arts school knew nothing about the film program. We spent a whole day and wound up knowing a lot about clothes designing and sculpture and pottery, but nothing about film. </p>
<p>Rah Rah Peppy info session presenters and tour guides - I think this was our family’s number 1 most seemingly irrational turnoff. It always struck us as fake and that the center of college life is football. </p>
<p>Extreme liberalism - While everyone else in my family gravitated to this quality in a college (my D will be going to the most liberal one we visited!), as a conservative I found myself very out of place. I felt people looking at my W’04 bumper sticker (they don’t come off) with disdain. It’s ok though, I’ve come to really love the school she’ll be attending in spite of all the Obama signs on campus.</p>
<p>–The student newspaper which detailed the $7000 in damages to be split among the residents of the freshman boy’s floor for fire and water damage.</p>
<p>–Bulletin boards filled with notices of only leftist events–diversity days, consciousness raising, racism seminars–and nothing about the evening movie or a bowling outing.</p>
<p>–The student presenter in the information session who was “majoring in sociology and religion, and applying for a semester in Miami in marine biology”
HUH? (this came across as manic resume-building)</p>
<p>–the lovely Roman Catholic college, where when DH, DS and I moved with our tour group of about 25 through the chapel, we were the ONLY ONES who did not genuflect or dip into the holy water. AWKWARD. (and I’m embarassed to admit here that this was a problem)</p>
<p>–The quite overweight tour guide who changed from her too-tight shirt into her tour guide shirt in front of us.</p>
<p>I forgot one classic university marketing faux pas:</p>
<p>The model dorm room (unoccupied but attractively furnished, supposedly used only for tours), with its overwhelming, unmistakeable “baked-in” smell. My daughter – never having lived in an environment where kids were free to smoke marijuana indoors in great quantity with impunity – didn’t really recognize the smell. But almost all of the parents on the tour had their nostrils flare, and you’ve never seen so many rolling eyes.</p>
<p>Of course, my negative reaction to this wasn’t so irrational, at least not IMO. It didn’t turn me off on the college, but it didn’t add anything to its appeal, either.</p>
<p>thats why it SEEMINGLY irrational…on the surface, to others it may seem not a reason to dislike a school, but for another, it strikes a cord somewhere</p>
<p>for us, if the kids didn’t have indivuality, at least somewhat, in dress, when given the option, perhaps they wouldn’t be so individual in the classroom</p>
<p>We didn’t need a campus like Haight Street, but we didn’t want someplace where it looked like everyone shopped at the Gap either</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Ivy. They crammed everyone in a small room without enough chairs, then forgot they had scheduled the info session. When director of admissions showed up an hour later, he did not apologize. </p></li>
<li><p>Another Ivy. The tour guide’s friend as a joke lay down in the path so that every single person on the tour had to step over him. The tour guide said nothing to him, but said it was a buddy from his team, as if this showed how friendly the student body was.</p></li>
<li><p>The famous research university, where there had been a well-publicized freshman death from alcohol poisoning, where the tour guide led a chorus of the school drinking song for parents at the end of the tour.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Amazing that my kid found any place to apply!</p>
<p>Oh here’s one: we visited a small LAC on a gray, rainy day and the tour guide took us into an academic building and couldn’t find the light switches, so we climbed three flights of stairs and toured the building in the dark. She was so awful that ZG and I got on our knees and crawled away behind a wall to get out of there. She did not apply.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Conn. College, where the tour guide assumed my daughter was a sibling </p></li>
<li><p>UPenn, where the person giving the information session asked how many people were interested in the nursing program, and, when not a single hand in the packed auditorium was raised, she then proceeded to spend ten minutes describing the nursing program.</p></li>
<li><p>Williams, where the info session guy was practically a caricature of preppiness. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Irrational and perhaps unfair criteria for eliminating a college from consideration, but these are the things that make the critical first impression.</p>
<p>One tour guide kept say the tour would be about an hour, we were half way through, etc. and it lasted 2 hours, very unfocused. Another tour guide, when I asked if she’d describe her college as friendly, said she didn’t know what I meant by that. Another top LAC, the students looked like they’d walked out of a North Face catalog. While my son went to a class, my husband said, “I’m not paying for this one.” After the class, my son said the students sat like lumps in rows, taking notes–no questions, no discussion. Smoking turned him off, nerdiness was a plus.</p>
<p>Quite rational I think, but entertaining just the same. While on a tour with a small group, we passed by waste can after waste can full and overflowing with trash. At one point we all stepped around a couple of used condoms on the sidewalk. I can tell you that I had about “had it” with this school, given that their sales pitch of this place showed like a back alley. Just to be a wiseguy, as we stepped over the condoms I asked what the M/F ratio was. The guide responded, then I said “Oh, I just wondered”. Our group all chuckled, and the tour continued. S had no interest in that school.</p>
<p>I really really disliked the architecture (if you could call it that) at Harvey Mudd, made even worse by the lovely Spanish colonial architecture of Scripps right across the road.</p>
<p>At one school the tour guide asked everyone what they were considering majoring in, and then spent the rest of the time talking about HER major and HER courses. (Which, I’m afraid, was Dance and Gender Studies.) She never referenced my son’s major (math) again.</p>
<p>At one excellent LAC we had two tour guides. I thought I’d get twice as much information! Instead, neither of them knew the answer to anything, and they always had to have a little discussion between themselves before answering. This was during April break, and one of the tour guides was a senior. When I asked her what she was doing after graduation, she looked at the other tour guide, giggled, and said, “Saving the world.”</p>
<p>then there was the campus where the students were just downright nerdy and unattractive and just not my cup of tea.</p>
<p>I wear North Face too, WashDad. It was the sameness of the whole place, much as cgm described in the OP that bothered us. Stepford Students…like nobody had had an original thought in years or if they had one, they wouldn’t mention it. The school is very popular, highly selective, etc. Just not my son’s cup of tea.</p>
<p>“Mini also has the “entitlement index” (or something close to that) which ranks schools by some measures of the wealth of student population … again there is a correlation to schools with the wealthiest students often having the reputation of being privaleged/preppy (this one may be on the CC archive and not the current version).”</p>
<p>It’s a combined measure of students paying full freight/students coming from private schools/minus Pell Grant recipients. It is fiendishly difficult to update, but we found it an EXCELLENT indicator of experienced privilege/preppiness on campus. (In fact, in the schools we visited, we didn’t find a single exception.) </p>
<p>Ah, yes, Pomona. First there was the blowhard admissions director who wanted to impress us with stories about all the wonderful students he rejected. He was a piece of work. Then they passed us off to the tour guide, a total airhead who spent much time telling us how much she liked working at the college radio station, and that one could drink on one half the campus but not the other. </p>
<p>To be fair, we actually quite liked Pomona (though not nearly as much as Scripps, which we thought better in virtually all respects), and liked it better the further away we were from the admissions office.</p>