The school offers the right major. The school is the right size. The school has the right setting. The school has the right reputation. The school offers financial aid. But your teen won’t even get out of the car to do a tour.
We at U.S. News & World Report like our data. We share it in a variety of forms, notably our annual Best Colleges lists, a tool to help your child choose an institution of higher learning.
But at “Getting In,” we know that hunting for the best school can also be deeply subjective. Applicants sometimes just get a vibe – a feeling, sometimes entirely divorced from what the numbers say. And it can instantly disqualify a school in their eyes.
The term The Ick typically refers to something that is an immediate romantic turn-off (like: “He’s rude to wait staff” or “She brags that she doesn’t follow the news”). But I think it also applies to the college quest.
In the past couple years, many of my friends and I have gone through the application process with our children. Time and again, I have heard stories of the family car pulling away from what had been a promising campus because the teen declared they’d sooner stay in high school than go there.
From one parent to another: Be prepared. It won’t make sense to you. And it might not really make logical sense to them, either.
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Maybe they didn’t see anyone on campus with a smile on their face. Maybe the tour guide’s answer to “where do you hang out?” was to describe their favorite library spot. Maybe the student center was deserted. Maybe there were “too many streets” cutting through campus (an actual complaint from my son). Maybe the nearby town looked like the setting of a zombie movie, full of empty shops and boarded-up restaurants (another real-life objection from my son). Maybe it was raining and the place felt dismal.
One thing we learned during our college hunt was that schools have professionalized their tours and that guides are directed to take steps to minimize The Ick. When my son was going through the process, I joked that Stop No. 3 on the modern visit seemed designed to neutralize a common knock about the institution. So at one prominent university founded by Catholics, Stop 3 was about the religious diversity of the student body. At one state school on the East Coast with tens of thousands of undergraduates, Stop 3 was about how yes, it’s a big place, but you can make it feel like a small community.
There can be other considerations made for modern sensibilities as well: The tour guide at my alma mater told me they no longer mention its role in the Manhattan Project unless asked. Apparently The Bomb gives applicants The Ick.
How to respond to The Ick depends on your student and your relationship with them. Will trying to talk them out of it help? Can you try to nudge them to give a school a second chance? If you make a pros/cons list, will that prompt a reevaluation?
If you’re looking to forestall The Ick, one tactic to help your child try to stay positive is asking them to take notes of what they like at each school you visit – though that requires them to agree to go on the tour. (If they agree, it also helps them remember the schools better months later when they make decisions about them.)
Whichever approach you take, there are two main things to keep in mind. The first is to try to help your kid distinguish between immutable characteristics (like, yes, the number of roads on campus) and a first impression that could change with time (like through a visit back on a sunny day).
The second is to make peace with the fact that your child is the one who is going to be living on that campus with those other students, not you. This is probably the biggest decision they’ve ever had to make. Help them, but don’t dictate an outcome. Yes, even if you are paying for school.
You need to be prepared for your student to declare a given school unsuitable for no particular reason. It just gives them The Ick.
