@Midwestmomofboys, as you can tell from my icon I’m not necessarily unbiased when it comes to IU. That said, there are times when Bloomington looks nicer than others…and for me the presence of leaves was important. As a student, I found the campus to be gorgeous during the Fall and Spring seasons. It was terrible in the Winter. Most IU buildings are made of limestone which, without any green, orange, yellow or even brown leaves, offers little contrast to the dead grass and gray skies.
Just Googled “gum wall.” Makes me glad I live a long way from the West coast. GnoochiB, it’s worse than you could even imagine, & not confined to SLO.
Gum is also something I found disgusting about Ann Arbor. Apparently they have a gizmo that scrapes up gum off sidewalks, so it’s not always bad, but there are times when there is so much old gum on the sidewalks near campus that it’s beyond gross.
@moooop - I’m in the “IU is beautiful camp” . . . but then again the only other campuses I’d seen in Indiana by that point was Purdue and Ball State (went on a road trip with my roommate way back when LOL).
I was surprised by the original IU comment because all these years I have held IU in my memory as a pristine example of a bucolic college campus. 
But maybe I was there on a great fall day (can’t remember).
^Weather and time of year does make a big difference! Campuses just look dreary when it’s overcast and rainy. My kids probably ruled out one or two for that reason!
^^I also love limestone buildings.
A few yrs back, wife, kids & I all got our schedules synched & embarked on an ambitious quantity-over-quality Griswald-style college road trip. In first few days, we visited (no tours) Rochester, RIT, Colgate, Syracuse, RPI, Williams, Holy Cross, Boston College, Harvard, MIT, BU, & Northeastern, and were followed by a huge rainstorm the entire way. Oh, and kids hadn’t thought it was necessary to bring raincoats. All photos taken on this leg of trip show gray skies and wilted, grumpy kids sans smiles. I remember buying some socks with the MIT logo on them at the MIT Coop because someone stepped in a deep puddle & refused to forge on without dry socks. Those socks remain the family’s sole connection to HYPMS.
Northwestern. First it was cold out and the tour seemed designed to keep us from ever entering a building. Second, the admissions staff was the rudest we encountered. And my kid found the we are so great, it’s sooooo hard to get in here attitude silly given it was a " likely" for my kid (our school is a local feeder, close to 10 percent of the class is often granted admission, we get in with much lower stats than the rest of the nation and D had stats above the middle 50… a naviance 100 percent admit rate for her stats and we have lots of kids applying so good data)
Is it too early to say that I know I will hate SUNY Binghamton when I visit with my son this fall? I guess that doesn’t qualify, because it won’t be unexpected. And the haters gonna hate hate hate… :))
@Lindagaf Yes. You may hate it. I haven’t visited since the 80’s when I had two friends going there. SUNYs just aren’t as pretty as other campuses in my opinion. You can get a good education at Binghampton and meet smart kids, but it’s not picture perfect
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I have to agree about Duke. If was the one campus visit that turned out poorly. The campus itself was beautiful, but the tone of the admissions office was a major turn off. After the info session/tour, we had a sit down with an adcom. Duke has run various advertisements over the years claiming to offer the most merit aid among schools in the top 10, so we asked about that. It was met with a tone of incredibility that Duke would stoop to offering merit aid, and that in any case, our kid would not get any.
It turns out this particular adcom had just graduated from Duke with some “studies” major and could not find a real job so she was doing the adcom stuff to make ends meet. It was not good advertisement for Duke.
The kicker was that as we were leaving, a bus from the freshman dorms pulled up, and out came about 20 Chinese men all speaking Mandarin to each other. What kind of “top 10” school has to accept 20 percent of their incoming class from foreign countries?
@Lindagaf. Never too early to hate. Watch out for the speed traps on the highways around Binghamton, they finance the state police. Funny, Binghamton was one of three schools I applied to and I’ve never visited. Nearby Ithaca is one of my favorite places on Earth and if you’re a NY resident Cornell has a state sponsored college that gives you a tuition discount. Binghamton was always known as the top business school in the SUNY system. Still?
I dragged my daughter to Cornell three summers ago and we did our first official campus tour. We stayed on a farm and visited the wonderful Ornithology center. I wanted her to love Cornell as much as I did. She hated it with every fiber of her 14 year old being.
My story is a little backward from these.
Hated Ohio State when we arrived the day before our tour. I had a headache and it seemed so crowded (Arrived at a class change time).
Woke up the next morning with a bad attitude and insisted nobody could change my mind. Wanted to just get the day done. Fast forward…by the end of the day LOVED it. I don’t know how they changed my mind except I will say don’t judge a campus by driving through. I feel that just parking the car and walking it made a difference.
My child is currently at OSU and loves it.
The school that was unexpectedly my least favorite was Alabama.
Did not enjoy the tour by bus rather than walking the campus.
The “award winning quad” was ugly and uninviting to me.
The mansion fraternity/sorority houses just reeked of “Greeks rule the school”
Yuck…
Sometimes hype poisons a school for people. We had heard that UDel was a gorgeous campus, very collegy. We were totally underwhelmed. I think it just couldn’t live up to what we had been expecting. It was fine as it wasn’t DD’s top choice anyway, but when my close friend (whose two kids both went there) asked me how much we loved it, I decided to stick to accolades about the school run dairy and its ice cream - which really was delicious!!
Me too! Applied to 3 SUNYs on one app back in “the day”, and I never visited any of them. I think the other two were Buffalo and Purchase or Stonybrook - whichever ones my mom deemed the best of the system.
Re: IU - I’ve never been to Bloomington but I have meant to visit ever since I saw the movie “Breaking Away” as a kid. Anyone else ever see it? About townies and college kids and the setting was gorgeous. I wanted to go find that quarry…
@OHMomof2 I saw Breaking Away as a kid and dreamed of living in Bloomington one day. Never happened, but we visited multiple times and love that town so much! Try to go.
Breaking Away is great movie. One of my favs.
I was a late-80s graduate of IU and swam in that quarry many times. At that point, it existed just as it was portrayed in the movie. Not sure of its present situation. My guess is they shut it down. I can only imagine the legal liability.
Back on topic, we did a big whirlwind driving tour of the country last summer (saw W&L, WUSTL, Pomona, Stanford, Berkeley, and Chicago before swinging back home). We liked Berkeley much better than Stanford. As others have said, Stanford was a bit too sterile for our tastes though we did love the Redwoods. Berkeley was a messy, but we loved it. My son will certainly be looking back to there when it comes time for graduate or professional school.
@EyeVeee Interesting - I had always heard that Swarthmore was very competitive - maybe not cutthroat, but competitive. Haverford students never speak about their grades to each other. They’re more interested in their own personal growth than worrying about how they compare to others. That’s very rare in colleges.
They filmed Breaking Away when I was there. In the scene where Dennis Quaid drives backwards down the street, on the right side of the scene that’s me in a white shirt walking on the sidewalk with a short female student. I watched them film a lot of scenes, a process that was amazingly tedious. The working title was “Bambino,” and since none of the actors were famous at the time, most students assumed it was going to be a dud. The plot didn’t sound very good: “local kid pretends to be Italian and rides his bike a lot.”