We live just south of San Francisco, about 35-40 minutes from UC Berkeley, I’m not sure why, but very few of the top kids from the local HS seem to want to go to UC Berkeley.
@parche this thread is all about shade, not pleasantries or compliments.
@simba Some don’t want it cause to many UCB and UCLA represent everything people in California hate about California. Too many people and a giant struggle to get things done. Waiting in long lines, fighting for resources at a giant public with constant budget issues, traffic everywhere, getting through crowded towns to get to school, parking a pain, triples/crowded dorms, can’t get into classes, can’t double major, not graduating on time, uptight students, not a collaborative environment, and professors with no time for students. The food court above the bookstore at UCLA is a hot mess and a snapshot of the chaos there overall, and the area around UCB brings a skanky feeling to a campus that is just old now. There are plenty of people that would not attend either even if free. UCB and UCLA have this allure to people outside of CA because they don’t live it everyday, just like they romanticize CA overall. And tens of thousands apply to them cause you just check another box to do so on the UC app.
There, that’s some shade. Let’s stay on track people and keep @Old_parent happy.
Lot of students don’t want to go to college in their own backyard regardless of how strong that college is. I don’t blame them and I actually think it is good for young adults to move away, gain independence, try a new area of the country. There is a lot of personal growth that comes from that in addition to the academic learning.
I grew up in Evanston, IL – 5 blocks from Northwestern. Never even crossed my mind to look at applying – fine school though it is. At the time, I could have cared less. All I liked (and knew) about it was the fact that you could hang out by the lakefront on the rocks and drink beer. That and the football team was (at the time) a sad joke. That has changed a bit. Our student never thought about Georgetown or GW. Even UVA was too close – and too much like high school. @doschicos – agree totally with your last.
Lets go back to the east coast. Emory’s presentation left us cold. On the way there D saw right-wing creepy billboards for the first time. Construction and cranes everywhere. AO spent an interminable amount of time talking about atlanta, corporations, oxford, some science professor and almost nothing about emorys curriculum. D actually likes to hear about the freshman experience when visiting colleges. Thank goodness for the tour guide who was studying jewish studies and was very personable.
Agree on the backyard concept. We live just outside of Boston. Our youngest refuses to consider any schools in Boston…I think he thinks we will be in his business all the time. In actuality what he should be worry about more is that we move back into the city and he walks into a bar and there we are having a drink. “Hi honey! It’s mommy and daddy! Let us buy you and little playmates sodas!”
I grew up in Wellesley, MA. Just the idea of not leaving my (admittedly lovely) home town for another 4 years made me want to scream. Add in the possibility of having to make small talk with my mother’s best friend in the liquor store or embarrassing myself in front of my second grade teacher while being a normal college idiot walking around town and Wellesley never made it anywhere near my list. Not going beyond the place I’d spent the previous 18 years seemed very sad.
Also, Wellesley’s a nice town but it’s very, very suburban, one of those places you want to move back to after you have children and are ready to join the PTA. Fun and funky it’s not.
(I know this isn’t a direct answer to the prompt but I figure it’s negative enough to qualify. :))
Couldn’t get mine to look at Richmond either. One went 75 miles away, the other 750 miles away, and the youngest TBD.
@doschicos I also think it’s a good idea to leave home and try living somewhere new for college. But the most attended 4-year university for kids from our local high school is San Francisco State, which is 15 minutes away, so it’s not necessarily a matter of students avoiding Berkeley because they want to leave the Bay Area…
I kind of agree with @blueskies2day that Berkeley has more of an allure for people outside the Bay Area than for locals. (Except for people outside of California who hate UC Berkeley because of what it represents, politically.) It would be interesting to see the geographical breakdown of where people who apply to Berkeley and UCLA are from.
As for as keeping to the tone of the thread, SF State is a university I truly don’t think much of.
I actually like the campus and neighborhood vibe around UC Berkeley. There are about five zillion little shops and bookstores and record stores and good cheap places to eat circling that campus. Sure, sometimes there is a going to be a screaming homeless dude staggering past you on his way to nowhere, but that is nothing compared to a really good bowl of Pho or a massive carnitas burrito or about 500 other great things that you can buy on a student budget.
I went to school 45 minutes away. Rarely went home. Even for Thanksgiving it was one day and then back to my life. I did see my father and brothers coming out of the movie theater while I was waiting in line for Star Wars as we’d driven down to the city to see it on the big rounded screen of a Cooper theater. That is the only time I can remember seeing my parent(s) without making a plan to do so, and we were still separated by dozens of people. More funny than annoying.
One benefit of going to college close to home was I could use sports tickets my father’s company owned when no one else was using them, and I went to 10 or so hockey games on them. Drive down, pick up tickets at will-call, no interaction at all. Also no need for new doctors or dentists, no ordering tickets for thanksgiving months in advance, I could borrow the car if I really needed it for something. My brother went to the same school, and I could see his apartment from my apartment, but rarely saw him.
I used to hang out in Berkeley when I was stationed at a nearby military base. Was much cheaper than hanging around San Francisco. Saw one homeless guy pull a switchblade on a pizza shop cashier. The first time I went in that huge coffee shop on west side of Telegraph, I was confused by the endless list of available drinks, most with exotic Italian & Spanish names. I wasn’t knowledgeable or picky about coffee, & just ordered the cheapest thing. Turned out to be a small glass of milk.
Homerdog, I have a Midwestern kid at Northwestern, and from what I hear, it is still exactly as you described it.
Smith, after the info session, a student walked up to us and told us there was no tour, handed us a map and told us we could self tour. ( A tour was listed as available on the web site, after the info session ) She then walked back to her desk and was back on her computer in no time. I got the impression ( overheard ) they made the decision right then since we were the only one’s in the info session.
That’s crazy, @Akqj10. We had the exact opposite experience at Smith but it was also a little awkward. We were the only ones there. The info session became a one-on-one which was fine. The awkwardness came when 7 young women introduced themselves to my daughter one by one telling her about their majors/interests, all in a group, then told her she should pick which one she wanted to tour with. It seemed like some odd version of The Dating Game as they were all very earnest. “Now you can pick one of us.” My 17 year old felt pretty uncomfortable. 
“Can’t resist on the geography. Did you know most of Maine lies south of parts of well populated Wisconsin and Michigan (much less the western states with the 49th parallel for a northern border)? Map projections skew things.”
I won’t speak for your home state Wis75, but most of Michigan’s population is located south of Maine. Even the southern border of Michigan with Ohio is slightly south of the Maine/NH border. Furthermore, Maine extends almost as far north as Michigan as well. You can clearly see these facts using a globe.
"7 young women introduced themselves to my daughter one by one telling her about their majors/interests, all in a group, then told her she should pick which one she wanted to tour with. It seemed like some odd version of The Dating Game as they were all very earnest. “Now you can pick one of us.” My 17 year old felt pretty uncomfortable. ’
Ohhh, I think I’m gonna pile on poor WashU more, but that was another turn off about their info session and tour. After the least informative and appealing info session of all those we attended, the mechanism to break the group into smaller tour groups was also the least organized. When the info session ended, the AO introduced 10 different WashU students and listed their majors, telling us they would be waiting outside the auditorium and we could decide which one to tour with. Of the 10, only one was a STEM major. The 100+ people in the auditorium all filed out and crowded mostly around the one STEM major and one other student who looked fun, resulting in disproportionately huge groups around 2 potential guides while the other 8 stood there awkward and mostly alone. Much confusion and milling. After a while, the AO came out and asked people to redistribute to other guides. Awkward and nobody was happy. Again, compared to how all the other colleges we toured handled this it was strikingly bad.
Then on the actual tour, the info given by the tour guide wasn’t helpful. The campus was beautiful and there is active construction that shows how it’s growing and soon to offer new, interesting programs. But the tour didn’t give much info that a map wouldn’t give, punctuated by stories that a 12 year old would tell… “Yeah, that’s where my friends and I sat on a blanket and watched a concert…[snort, snort] SO COOL!” or “I had a class in that building… [snort, snort] SO HARD!” “Yeah, that’s where career services is. I have no idea what they do there. Guess I should start looking since I’m graduating this year. [snort, snort]”
The last part of the tour was in the dorm area, which was (from the outside) very nice. But to show us a room, the tour guide has us all stand in the hall while she knocked on random doors until a student agreed to let us in. Not sure how thrilled most college students would be with this on a Saturday morning and again, it felt very awkward. I didn’t go in - it just felt very rude to wake someone up and jam 15 people into their room to poke around.
Thinking back on our experience, much of this indicates an issue with their admissions office. Again, I believe that given the stats of the students, the students themselves are probably generally awesome. The admissions office is not good at conveying this. Instead of picking student representatives that are both relatable and inspiring, their picker is off. Combine that with unimpressive info content and disorganization that makes prospective students feel awkward and has them leave with a poor impression and the school is putting out bad vibes in a place that should be a huge draw. I truly believe this is an admin issue, not an issue with the school. Unfortunately, DS is 17 and wasn’t able to overlook just how weird and unimpressive all this was, especially when we flew there specifically for the visit.
If any WashU AOs are reading this, please, please, please take some tours of other schools in the top 30 range and see how their info sessions are structured. What types of student reps do they use (hint, there is obviously a very stringent interview process at many of the other colleges, it’s not just any warm body with availability on a Saturday), how do they structure tours and what info is given? They’re not all the same, but most of the others are well done and have some common elements - like info sessions that showcase the programs that are unique to the school, strengths of the opportunities and important info that a prospect can’t get from the web site. The best schools also tend to use student representatives that are appealing to potential students, so think hard about what talented teens are seeking and are drawn to. Use the other schools as a guide because your session was very, very different and not in a good way. You’ve got a lot of great raw material to work with - spiffy campus, smart students, fantastic programs - and you show NONE of it.
If the cleanliness of the dorm room was a factor in my son choosing WashU, then he probably would have picked BU or Tufts. The room we saw was absolutely filthy and piled with left over Cup of Noodles styrofoam cups, Amazon boxes, and shoes. Turned out to a girls room…
Odd about the arranging of tours. I recall that pretty much all of the WashU tour guides were STEM of some sort (Bio/BME) during his 2 visits.
One memorable comment on the WashU tour my son and I was on. When we passed by the Danforth University Center (DUC), our tour guide mentioned that originally the plan was to name the building the Forsyth University Center, but someone realized that the acronym might have been rather offensive…that got a barrelful of laughs from everybody when they realized what you got if you replaced the letter d with the letter f.
“One memorable comment on the WashU tour my son and I was on. When we passed by the Danforth University Center (DUC), our tour guide mentioned that originally the plan was to name the building the Forsyth University Center, but someone realized that the acronym might have been rather offensive…that got a barrelful of laughs from everybody when they realized what you got if you replaced the letter d with the letter f.”
I wish they’d been able to work in a few of these stories on our tour. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure if our guide had tried to tell this anecdote, she would have snorted and giggled and gagged on her story until she collapsed to the ground before the story escaped her. 
Can you tell I really wanted my kid to like WashU? Because I did. On paper it was awesome. In person, there was nothing appealing about the visit. Nothing. No way in Hades I could have bribed, cajoled or threatened DS into going back to take a second look. And after that visit, I sadly agreed with him. One or two weird things would be no biggie, but the whole thing was just plain bad.
Has anyone visited U of South Carolina and hated it? S19 has set his sights on it.