The College Visit Checklist--The Dorms and Alternative Housing

On the official college tour, parents and students will be taken to model dorms. Visitors should be encouraged to poke their heads into every facility they can see and think hard about where students must live. I like to tell my own students about the studio apartment I had overlooking the sea in Southern California--for $50 a month at a new campus of the University of California when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. During the baby-boomlet of recent years, many colleges turned single rooms into doubles and doubles into triples and quads. How anyone studied in those settings is a mystery. Some quite prestigious schools house students in tiny rooms and in buildings with rattling windows that should have been remodeled or torn down years ago. Check out the adequacy of electrical outlets and circuits for all those little refrigerators, heaters, computers and other equipment. Check out the laundry room and any amenities--and of course the provisions for web access. It is sometimes hard for students to think clearly when they see a place that might be their first home away from home. Every place looks great. So it's important to take a little time to take everything in.

Some American colleges still require students to live on campus, or to live on campus until they are juniors or over 21. Read the rules carefully. Upperclassmen love to find alternative living arrangements in apartments and rental houses. But where are they located with respect to the campus, and what are the town and gown conflicts? Is the local community friendly to students? If students are going out of state, what do they need to know about differences in rental and leasing laws?

I write these short essays from my perspective as professor, parent, and also accreditation evaluator. College counselors, I think, should encourage parents and students who tour to wander around a campus, looking into a variety of buildings. How much study space does the library offer? What do the counseling and career centers look like? How about music halls and art studios? Are there any palatial administration offices that suggest overstaffing or that a lot of money is being spent on things that are not vital to education? What about faculty offices? Are people welcoming? The whole point of this series is that students and parents are making a very large financial investment, and therefore they should be as careful and as demanding as they would be if they were buying a house or a car. The next essay considers what happens if you do not find a college that offers the right education and facilities at the right price.