My kid’s best experiences were in dorms that didn’t offer too much-having to share a group kitchen, television room and laundry, etc, made for great friendships.
@roycroftmom Wow, I must have the wrong idea of what makes a crappy dorm. A group kitchen sounds pretty nice to me. Are there dorms that have private kitchens and laundry rooms??? Mine had no kitchen, no tv room, no laundry. At all. (Of course they’ve since knocked it down.)
What is the Falcon college in Boston? @SwimmingDad @Stuffedquahog
And thank you to @Old_parent for re-orienting the thread. “I’m not here to be helpful, I’m here to judge and criticize.”
;))
Absolutely, OCDad. There are dorms that come with daily maid service too. Apparently there is a market for this, but I find it rather sad-kids sitting alone in their rooms watching tv while their laundry is going and snacks are cooking on the Viking range. Great as an adult, or even older student, but there are some real non financial costs to that.
Yikes. Okay, I agree that there’s a point at which it’s too much. I’d argue that there’s a difference between campus appeal and level of service and the latter can clearly get out of hand. I frankly think even freshman singles is a dangerous idea. Too easy to go in there and hide.
@GnocchiB Bentley University in Waltham, MA.
@OCDDad My son’s very 1960s dorm has a small kitchen with oven, microwave, and sink for each of the wings on each of the floors. To @roycroftmom comment (which I agree with): all of the rooms are small, fairly un-renovated singles. What my son finds is this encourages people to keep their doors open unless they are studying, sleeping, or grumpy. It’s definitely an incredibly social dorm (set of dorms actually) and has had this reputation for years. For my son (who is not entirely social) this has been a good fit for him. It is definitely helping him find his community.
@SwimmingDad Understood, though I’d argue (hey, it’s the internet- what’s there to do but argue) that @roycroftmom ‘s daughter has found her experience positive because that dorm had more rather than less. One seems to offset the other. It actually seems like you DO care about the condition of the campus (at least the dorms), in that worse is better. 
I do find myself wondering, for those who don’t care about campus appeal and amenities rather the classroom experience, wouldn’t you just audit a class
Sorry, posted by mistake.
…audit a class and get back in the car? I think the NYT did a piece recently where they theorized that campus visits are actually the worst way to pick a college.
@OCDaddy My son’s dorm is actually less as she was saying…just these little kitchens are there. The room itself is clearly unrenovated - when we walked in I thought “uh oh”. My oldest son said nothing…his younger (17 year old) brother comes in two minutes later and says “dude, your room is off the hook!” and my oldest looks at him “I know, right? This is sick”.
My daughter’s dorm hasn’t been renovated since 1955, the year it was built. By today’s standards, that’s ancient, but my college dorms were all 19th century, so it is all matter of perspective
Ha! Hilarious. Still, you can’t touch my spaghetti soup argument.
@roycroftmom I demand to see a picture of an unrenovated 1955 dorm laundry room. 
“Ancient”/unrenovated dorms just immediately lead me to the thought of lead paint! - the hyperchondriac instincts in me would not want anyone to live in those places, let alone my child. X_X
“I do find myself wondering, for those who don’t care about campus appeal and amenities rather the classroom experience, wouldn’t you just audit a class”
It’s not necessarily a black and white issue, it’s just that aesthetics and (nonacademic) amenities would be way, way down the list of things that would be important in the search. Again, everybody has different criteria - thank goodness! - so what is a deal breaker to one person might only be something that makes another person shrug and roll his eyes. Probably partly because my husband and I were both raised in very poor families, put ourselves through college and now have our own business, we tend to be very practical types. Including viewing college as a means to an end not necessarily a be-all, end-all experience that requires an absolute perfect “fit”. We want our kids to get the best education they can to be prepared to be self-supporting; while it’s absolutely not acceptable for them to be miserable, the idea that they have to find a place that fills their soul with joy at the feng shui and rightness of it all doesn’t even hit the radar screen.
If we happened upon a campus that had foot long grass, for example, instead of recoiling at the untidiness and crossing that college off the list, we’d likely end up having a family discussion on the difficulties, intricacy and challenge of plant maintenance probably morphing into a discussion of whether EPA clean air regulations should be extended to gas mowers in commercial settings leading into a debate over the role of government regulation…
And if one of my kids asked whether he should be afraid of lead paint in an old dorm, I’d let him know that as long as he avoids gnawing on the painted surfaces and not to eat any paint chips, he’ll be fine. And if he can’t help himself gnawing on the paint or eating the paint chips, he’s probably not yet ready to go off to college. But I’m mean like that. 
@OC Daddy: In my W&L days the spaghetti was more like a soup and it in no way helped my experience.
LOL. Not to derail this thread, but I would agree about my W&L days. I was describing the spaghetti cabbage rolls to my D18, and her look of horror was priceless.
What the heck is a spaghetti cabbage roll? It sounds like the frankenstein of food. :-&
My son spent 3 years in a 100 year old dorm building. And he LOVED it.
I lived in 1800s historical brownstone buildings in Boston, owned by the univ, and it was hard to get into those.
I only got it for summer school, no high enough on the lottery to get them.
Yet many kids tour my old campus and hate it…too urban and old.
To each his own.
Classroom experience would be so dependent on the particular class and professor at the moment, not sure
you can draw any conclusions about the actual education from a visit. Maybe by talking to students one could
ask about a variety of classes. I did see a class with 10-15 sears at a small LAC and another with 1000 seats at a large well known uni. That does give you some idea, but my kids picked the larger unis…as they have more courses/majors to pick from generally. So again, the campus visit does not tell you much about academics, only day to day life which is important for a kid who would live there for 4 years.
^^My kid dropped a school from top ED choice to about number 10 on the list because he sat in on a class in which the prof was great but the students were totally disengaged, including with each other coming to and going from class.
I doubt, knowing the school, that his experience was truly representative, but that sealed the deal against the school for him.
Some of the most selective colleges have the worst dorms, so it doesn’t seem to be deterring too many people.
@doschicos It was bad! Its memory was reluctantly dredged up back when the students at Oberlin had publicity about their food protests a few years ago. My college dorm mates all agreed that we would have appreciated culturally appropriated food versus what we got. I hear the food at W& L is much improved these days.