I’m with @simba9. Big schools are unpopular with me for exactly the reasons stated. I did have a couple of amazing teachers at the big university I attended, but most of the professors in my major were preoccupied with their graduate students.
Schools in goober areas
Schools with old style dorms (communal showers down hall)
Schools with bad food
Commuter schools
Schools where kids can’t get needed classes
Schools with little social programming
Schools with town/gown issues
My own personal opinion:
- Being any school in New Jersey not named Princeton
- Expensive/overpriced
- Snobbish vibe from the students (more common at northern private schools)
- Being in a crime-ridden area
- Not having a good social scene
- Weak sports teams
- Crappy food
- Being in the Deep South (AL, MS, and KY especially)
- Being a popular choice in my high school (hated my graduating class)
- Extremely conservative
- Commuter school
- Low graduation and retention rates
- Not being near a beach
Being a commuter school (most students live at home with their parents) or a suitcase school (most students go home every chance they get).
Schools with racial tension
- Too cold
- Too conservative
- Too rural
- Too hot
- Too preppy
- Too blue collar
- No Greeks
- Too liberal
- Sports too high profile
- Too urban
- Too rich
- No Starbucks
- Ran out of $$
- No sports
- Anything else subjective
Too expensive, too many entitled rich kids.
When the name of the college is easily confused with another college and you will spend the rest of your life explaining that u didn’t go to that other school.
Then why is Harvard so popular?
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Then why is Harvard so popular?
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Because it’s the big cheese.
^^yep
Everything my second son was looking for in a school. Small, LAC in a cold climate and he was fine with a rural location. He had so many great choices and he would have been happy at almost any of them. He would not have been happy at any school that would win a popularity contest.
Overall, my guess would be the least “popular” schools are lower-tier schools with unexciting locations, mundane or ugly campuses, and nothing in their reputation that makes them stand out. An unexciting location can be overcome by a rep for a great vibe for a particular target niche, such as “geeky / quirky” (many CTCL schools), but if a school doesn’t stand out for anything in particular it’s just not going to overcome that, at least for people coming from a distance.
Individually? Well, for my S, turnoffs are what turn some people on – fratty, conservative, preppy, really into sports team, massively big, in the South, and (weirdly) too much sun. Also he really hates it when schools use the word “rigorous” a lot in their marketing. He’s pretty high on the nerd scale, but has latched onto “rigorous” as The Annoying Word of the Hour and suspects it signifies a not-so-friendly atmosphere where the profs are dragons.
I guess it would really depend on the student.
For my daughter (now a freshman), a good student with high stats, all of these were automatic no’s:
- huge (feeling lost in a big crowd)
- big sports programs (doesn’t care about those, doesn’t fit in sports crowd, she’s geeky)
- “big party school” (same as previous)
- hot, humid climate (no south)
- mostly rich, entitled kids (I guess that’s “preppy”, so no HYP)
- an intensely high-pressure environment where everyone is pushing to be “the best of the best” (no MIT, CalTech)
[her top choice was UChicago, did not get in though]
A highly unbalanced boy/girl ratio can be a real downer for boys. It’s the number one reason why students say they don’t like RPI, for example, (well that and the president’s salary).