The other school that was a least favorite of both my kids was SUNY Stony Brook. The facilities were underwhelming. Student Union and dorms could use an uplift. The campus is just ugly looking. But the clincher was when they said all freshman have to be tripled up in a dorm room. No singles or doubles.
This is the best thread in the month of April. Gives us a great opportunity to bury those colleges that our sons and daughters were rejected from in a veiled form of lousy campus visit experiences. I love it. Keep it coming! 
@TiggerDad, both DDâs accepted to Colgate - doesnât change that they still didnât like the tour⊠. You never know whatâs going to turn them off - we had others where they said letâs go after 5 minutes.
At least your kids went on the Stony Brook tour. My two middle sons refused to get out of the car and itâs Hâs alma mater!
Tufts. Iâm not sure what it was, as my child liked the tour guid and the person leading the info session. Yet, after we left, he declared he didnât like it and would never apply.
U S News should figure out a way to factor in the % of prospective students who refuse to get out of parentsâ car at each college. That might be the most important criterion there is. Sounds like MIT & the SUNYs would be tough to beat in this category.
My favorite character in this discussion is the Max Headroom used car salesman at Northeastern. I always wondered why colleges with huge endowments relied on wet-behind-the-ears undergrads to represent their billion-dollar institutions as tourguidesâŠWhy not hire professionals who excel at speaking & presenting themselves smoothly? But now I realize that if they did this they would end up with a whole bunch of Max Headrooms, and that as bad as the awkward/Whereâs Waldo outfit wearing/hungover/uninformed undergrad tourguides are, they are preferable to slick car salesmen.
I guess Iâm a hard ass parent. If my kid would not get out of a car after we made efforts to visit a schoolâŠwell, they wouldnât want to test me on that. Iâd never force my kids to actually apply to a school they didnât like but they can at least give it a try for awhile. We could always cut the visit short if warranted.
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I agree @doschicos that the visit should take place at least for the tour part once youâre there.
Iâm perplexed at the outrage of folks over having to pay for parking. Maybe itâs a west coast thing but it seems to me we paid for parking at most of the schools we toured, except for a few small LACs. Didnât seem so strange to me.
@MotherOfDragons - thanks, but I think youâre thinking of @Dustyfeathersâ hilarious post!
@MotherOfDragons , you canât tease us like that. You have to share the hate! Which post of @Dustyfeathers 's are you referring too? Or maybe @dustypig knows.
No refutation allowed. Anyone has a problem with someone hating on their kidâs school, get your own voodoo doll, like I did. (More pins in it now, someone else hated on it!)
As a parent with exceptionally well-honed hating skills (and also a hard ass), my approach is to tell the child to get out of the car so we can catalog all the reasons we hate it. Child was very obedient and we giggled through the self-tour about how bad it was. We still laugh about that one.
The back story is that the only reason we were visiting Stony Brook is because H insisted. I told him before we went (less than one hour drive) that neither boy was interested in attending the school. Both of the boys had gone over the majors with me and neither found anything that interested them. Now, the older one is now a poli sci major and the younger dropped out because he had no clue what to study. Thatâs the reason I didnât insist that they take the tour. If either one had requested the visit, they darn well would have been out of the car and walking. As it was, H went on half the tour with me and then I got bored with his going on and on about how wonderful the school is and why our boys were wrong to diss it so I went back to the car, too. For the record, I agree with my sons about how hideously ugly the place is. This almost happened again this year when H tried to force youngest son to apply there. I refused because itâs not the school for him, either, so son didnât push submit on the common app to pay the fee.
Edit to my post 383: while opinions are opinions and may vary, I like to make sure that any facts I cite are accurate, so that students and parents can weigh both facts and opinions into their considerations. Thus I would like to clarify that Cornellâs website states that housing is guaranteed for sophomores who submit their application on time.
I am not sure why our tour guide thought sophomores might need to live off campus, nor why a colleague of mine who has a son who is a sophomore at Cornell said he was unable to get on-campus housing for his sophomore year and she had to help him find an apartment. Maybe some people miss the application deadline???
(At any rate, my personal preference is guaranteed college housing for all four years.)
@dustypig you are right; it was @Dustyfeathers (but you have the better avatar, so that may be why I automatically typed in your name ;)) )
Hereâs the post that made me laugh so hard:
If youâre going to be mean, you damn well better be funny. And this was SO funny :).
That was beautiful @Dustyfeathers
I was just gearing up to diss some perfectly fine schools, but am pretty sure Iâm not up to the task.
I didnât visit many schools, but @tonymomâs post (i.e., dissing H with child attending Y) reminded me of something I posted years ago:
Harvard shows a film at the info session that makes a fuss about a student using the same sink that one of the Roosevelts used. DS went on that visit with his mother, and texted: âcould they be any more full of themselves?â when the video hit that high note.
When they returned from the trip, I told him that one of the things that had stuck with me from elementary school science is that, given the number of molecules in a glass of water and how water is continually recycled, my science teacher had told us that the odds were that a glass of water we got from an above ground reservoir had at least one molecule that had originally been in Cleopatraâs urine. I think thatâs more impressive than Rooseveltâs sink. Whether itâs true or not.
They say first impressions matter so why some schools donât take more care around college visits and guides is a mystery to me. One visit that sticks out was Boston U. We had to report to an admissions building to âsign inâ which was a pretty brown stone town house, but it was totally unfit for purpose. Too many people for too small a space so folks were queuing on stairways and out of the building. People who had signed in should have been moved along to the next venue an auditorium but the they were standing around getting in the way, had it been raining it would have been a disaster. The tour guide was a fresher who inexplicably began her speech by saying âWelcome to Boston Collegeâ! It was clear this was her first time and she was extremely nervous and spoke way too quickly⊠Mrs Guapo and I kind of felt sorry for her so stuck around, but every time she turned around to speak folks had melted away. The whole campus seemed tired and shabby, and I couldnât help thinking the posters in the windows of the monolithic freshmen halls across the street were cries for help. Didnât apply.
the tour guide at Boston University said Welcome to Boston College? Feel terrible for that poor girl but frankly that is absolutely hystericalâŠ
Wow, I thought I was a pretty big deal for having been a non-speaking extra in Breaking Away, and here comes IxnayBob chug-a-lugging Cleopatraâs secretions.
Pretty tacky of Harvard to point out a Rooseveltâs sink. After all, you never hear of tourguides at Yale saying, âYou see that washroom over there? William Howard Taft spent a whole day in there after the Great Porridge Eating Contest of 1877.â
I know my posts occasionally include a typo, but this posterâs comment about the city of Baltimore gives an interesting visual image:
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When the windows start to shudder, that is time to get the heck out of there!