“So that suggests that Harvard is…”
Trying to inspire its scholars to seek truth and righteousness in the tradition of the Hebrew scriptures? Just my read. I’m no scholar of that dumb-sounding claptrap in the Bible.
Alright, I have one that hasn’t been hit yet, I think: darling WashU.
I know, the kids are nice. REALLY nice. Everybody is nice. Everybody is smiling. Everybody is happy. All the time. In fact, when describing the Back 40 as Disney-esque, our tour guide said that just like DisneyWorld, WashU is The Happiest Place on Earth! /
It was cold and windy the day we visited but we were constantly reassured that the weather is usually much nicer!
I also hear that the polar bear at the zoo across the street comes over to play frisbee with the students every day at noon. :-bd
@crazymamaB - I just checked and every school any member of my immediate family (kid, spouse, self, parents, in-laws, etc.) has ever attended has been dissed here at least once – mine more than most – so I’m feeling better about my own rant. Equal opportunity dissing!!!
Speaking of libraries, they say the best view of Providence is from Brown’s science library - because that’s the only place in Providence you can’t see Brown’s science library!
And guess what? I love Brown. But I can still throw a little shade it’s way. LOL at people coming in this thread and sticking up for their college. That’s not the point! I’m sure Harvard won’t crumble and fall if a few people point out what they didn’t like about it.
Just hoping that @Porcupine98 will keep posting now that s/he is on such a roll!
I’ll bookend my disdain of Harvard with equal dislike for Tufts (but for totally opposite reasons). Tufts is remarkable in how unremarkable it is. The champion of meh.
Tour guide went on and on about its unique tradition of painting the cannon. Which is basically identical to the tradition of painting the rock/bridge/statue/whatever I’d seen at so many other schools.
At the library roof top stop with the Boston skyline view, guide nattered on about how only at Tufts could you have a beautiful green campus but only be a short train ride to the great city of Boston. Well, except for maybe BC (where we’d just come from) which has its own T station.
Everything about the place said “Tufts Syndrome”, which I guess should not have been a surprise.
OMG the rooftop garden view of Boston. I took a photo of the skyline from there since we were forced to stand there looking at it for like 20 minutes. It was the tour grand finale and the guide wanted us to know how long it took to get there and how many kids go there (oddly, he said hardly any go in for fun). I had to zoom my phone’s camera way in to get that skyline, by the way, D and I still laugh about it. I, too. Vividly remember the cannon painting tradition (until now that was jumbled in my mind with the CMU concrete fence painting tradition and whatever school makes you guard a painted rock overnight so some other student group doesn’t paint over it and Miami’s seal in the ground where you meet your future spouse that no one painted because it was sacred but everyone hung sheets from the surrounding trees with announcements about parties) and all the Jumbo-the-elephant talk. Also, no dorm tour, I hate that.
For anyone who wasn’t around that year…the college tour bingo thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1837440-college-tour-bingo-p1.html
OWU also had a medallion. Or maybe it was an archway. Or a rock. I forget.
When I asked one school what they painted or walked through or didn’t walk through, the guide just started laughing. Both Ds ended up going to paint something schools, one has a don’t walk under there spot too. I know D1 has painted, not sure about D2.
DD goes to a don’t walk through school and I can’t wait for DS (current 10th grader) to discover the joys of college tour bingo. We don’t have any of his test scores yet so there’s no telling if he’s qualified for a rock paining, an arch passageway or a don’t walk through school. If I pay a lot of money to a test prep company maybe he’ll even be in the running for a medallion in the ground school or maybe even a rub the nose of the statue school!
Van Pelt Library at Penn - ugly, but not as ugly as those “temporary” residence towers.
All this bashing of Duke, did none of you see the lemurs? Lemurs! on campus!
My D18 and S19 are the instant dislike kids. We are from Texas, home of some really ugly campuses, so I figured Pepperdine would elicit some praise, but no, they won’t get out of the car. ~X( No real reason, but didn’t like UCLA, either. Joke’s on them, I’ll just tour campuses without my kids!
Honestly, I defy anyone to beat TAMU at the ugly school game. HUGE campus, mismatched, awful architecture and a truly boring college town.
“Honestly, I defy anyone to beat TAMU at the ugly school game. HUGE campus, mismatched, awful architecture and a truly boring college town.”
@ollie113 Are you an alum of UT-Austin? 
Lehigh
I know people are split on their reaction to “The Hill”. I’m definitely on the No Thank You side of the argument, but I’m not the prospective student.
I really love everything else about the school. I think it’s right in the sweet spot of student body size. It’s a great research university with relatively small classes, and the kids have fun there. That’s a lot of upside.
But that hill and that depressing town. They must be having a whole lot of fun there, because the kids seem to like it, and they don’t seem to be having any trouble attracting good students.
I have to admit, there was a very active, upbeat vibe there. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Hill, but my daughter was soaking in the energy of the students. Maybe all that Hill climbing has their blood pumping
We visited CMU with our oldest D. Overall she liked it. I was underwhelmed. I thought the dorms looked like barracks and the campus overall just didn’t impress me. That combined with the guide who looked like she hadn’t showered in a while and prefaced every statement with “that being said” it just didn’t give me that we cost $65,000/year vibe. I was impressed with the University of Pittsburgh however. It didn’t strike me so much as a college campus as a college city but it was much more impressive to me than CMU.
@oldparent , I can diss West Point!!! Hurrah! I have been there many times to watch football games, and a good friend is a grad. First of all, to be fair to West Point, it’s free, and it’s owned and operated by the government, and it’s part of the military, which explains why it feels so much as though you are entering a high-security, dark, dreary, mean, outdoor prison. It’s ginormous. Way too big to be just a college. There have to be some kind of secret prisons and torture chambers somewhere in that jumble of buildings overlooking the Hudson.
I feel sorry for the cadets. They have to stand in the rain, sleet, snow, or sun, no matter how badly Army is losing, which they usually are. I have never seen a single cadet crack a smile, and fun is illegal and punishable by a stint in the secret torture chambers. They live vicariously through the tail-gaters, who provide the only source of joy in their dreary lives. No idea what the quality of education is like, but my friend is pretty erudite and successful, so I am sure that once the thumbscrews are removed, they must be learning something.
P.S. In fact, Army football games are a ton of fun even though they always lose. I love the parachutists, the marching band, the cheerleaders, and the whole experience, but I sure as heck wouldn’t want to go to college there! Go Black Knights!
@WalknOnEggShells …as I said earlier in the thread (#144)…Lehigh was a good fit for one child on paper, yet everyone else in the family felt as though it was the set of a horror movie (someone chasing you up or down the hill, zigzag paths). I didn’t…but I wasn’t looking to spend 4 years there.
The town is definitely not helping, but the school seems to be slipping slightly in terms of reputation. 20-30 years ago, it was known in the Philly area as a really strong school. The smart kids in your class were the ones who looked at Lehigh. Lafayette was nearby, but didn’t have the same reputation. I think that’s flipped in the past 5-10 years, and now Lafayette gets as much or more love than Lehigh. Some of that could be the town (although Easton isn’t going to win any “best places” awards either).
That being said…
Williams College deserves a tip of the hat for having alumni that disapproved of the new modern eyesore library & quickly raised enough money to have it replaced.
Those run-down Pennsylvania cities are an acquired taste. They don’t have the typical college town amenities, but once you get past the grit and grime you can usually find some decent ethnic food, some un-flashy bars, and a lot of unpretentious people.
Rice University has yet to show up here. I thought it might be a good fit for one kid, but wife is from a country where rice is popular, & she wouldn’t even consider looking at it. She couldn’t imagine explaining to Grannie that out of all the famous colleges in the USA, her offspring chose one that sounds like a place where they study paella all day. Tufts and Bucknell also failed the how-the-name-sounds-to-the-foreign-ear test. I get not liking “Tufts”…that’s a lot of sounds crammed into one syllable, and even Americans have trouble with it (I used to live near it, & nobody pronounced the second “t”). I like “Bucknell”…to me it sounds strong & clean. But to the foreign ear the first syllable apparently sounds uncomfortably similar to another very popular English word.
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@northwesty I suppose you can take some solace that given their insanely low acceptance rate, you probably wouldn’t face the dilemma of accept Harvard’s offer!