My high school senior ruled out a potential college on the grounds that the students listened to a lot of Southern rock. A friend’s son chose a university because a beguiling tour guide told him that she, too, loved Rubik’s Cubes. A neighbor said her daughter’s decision was sealed when she discovered the dining hall served cappuccinos.
’Tis the season of college tours, when high school students and their parents map out a route — “Can we cover Wake Forest, Davidson and UNC in one trip?” — and try to narrow down their lists.
Even students fairly certain they won’t venture farther than Athens or Valdosta still want to inspect campuses outside the Georgia public system.
Having been through the process twice in the past four years, I’ve decided that it may be saner to treat the ritual as a vacation or a chance to reconnect with your 17-year-old. (If you can manage to leave all iPods at home, even normally reticent teenagers will resort to conversation after 10 hours in a car.)
I’m not sure that students or parents learn much in a 24-hour campus whistle-stop. So many factors can influence a student’s initial impressions, from the temperament of the tour guide to the temperature outside.
When my daughter returned from a weeklong blitzkrieg of the Northeast, she seemed cooler to campuses she visited in blinding rain or harsh cold, probably because the students were huddled in their dormitories rather than lazing on the quad.
Colleges excel at selling themselves on these campus visits. Perky student guides showcase the science center and library with the charisma and charm of TV shopping channel hosts. The show-and-tell videos on study-abroad programs rival PBS travel documentaries.
Not that everything can be scripted to perfection. My son lost interest in one school after an overnight dorm stay. He flew to the college on a Sunday afternoon, and his student host immediately whisked him off campus to see a cult film. Several hours later, after meandering around the area, my starving son finally asked whether they could stop for a sandwich. Then, the host realized that he had never called the admissions office to bring a cot, so my son slept on the floor with a coat thrown over him. He was barely awake for the tour that morning and flew home that night knowing very little about the college itself.
The truth is that selecting a college is a bit like renting an apartment. You won’t know until you sign the lease and unpack that the couple upstairs argues every night or that the hot water runs out by 9 in the morning.
Then there’s the greatest unknown of all: the roommate. My first roommate was an upperclassman who dated an assistant football coach. I interrupted many a huddle.
I disliked college until I moved in with another freshman, a girl whose boyfriend went to school elsewhere. I began to get more sleep and more pleasure out of school. (My previous roommate was finally assigned a single, at the housing office’s insistence. I’d been her sixth roommate.)
In researching what to look for on college tours, you’ll find admonishments to count emergency call boxes, an alleged telltale sign of campus crime. College guides also advise leafing through yearbooks, scanning school newspapers, listening to radio stations and studying bulletin boards to develop a sense of campus life. (You can also check online reviews, although they seem to draw the least satisfied students.)
Some guides tell you to visit colleges on weekends to gauge whether students go home. Others recommend that you come during the week so you can attend a class. They urge you to chat with professors, admissions staff, financial aid officers, career counselors, happy students and unhappy students. Of course, you have to eat in the dining hall.
If you followed every bit of advice, you’d have to hang around each college for a week. I think a successful college fit has less to do with the size, location and “personality” of a campus than the willingness of students to extend themselves.
As a young reporter, I was covering night meetings in northern New Jersey when a call came on a freezing January afternoon from a Florida newspaper editor I’d met at a conference. Did I want a job? If so, load the Mustang and come on down. I did.
And I hated it. My first sight upon arriving was a dead cow in the median, four legs in the air. My apartment was overrun with “Palmetto bugs,” a nicer way of saying nuclear-powered cockroaches. I worked in a bureau with few twentysomethings and covered a semirural area populated by retirees.
In my first months, I complained so much that an exasperated colleague finally told me to stop griping, that if I wanted a more exciting life I had to create it myself. I found a book club, joined a gym and began to explore the coastal beaches. Life improved.
In other words, even a picture-postcard campus won’t matter if students don’t get out of their rooms and put themselves in the picture.
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