Years ago, I asked a friend why her daughter selected a certain urban university as her final college choice. “It was easy,” her mother informed me. “She weighed all the academic, social and financial considerations, and then picked the only school that guaranteed her a private bathroom.”

If this seems like an odd way to select a school, then you probably haven’t visited a college dorm early on a Sunday morning, when the common bathroom shared by a dozen students can be dirtier and more unpleasant than a rest stop on the state Turnpike. Picking a college solely on the basis of bathrooms may be extreme, but the fact is, some students care much more than others about the privacy, cleanliness and the overall comfort of their living arrangements.

Ideally, college is a time when you learn to adapt to different people and situations, even if they’re less than perfect – but some aspects of campus life can be unacceptable for certain students . During my son’s sophomore year he lived in a dorm room that was tiny, dark and slightly less cozy than a jail cell in an underdeveloped nation.  He was not particularly bothered by this, although I’m pretty sure that same room would have been a deal-breaker for my daughter.

When you’re deciding where you (or your child) will go to school, it’s important to remember that college isn’t just where you’ll learn, it’s also where you’ll live. Here are some factors you should keep in mind:

Availability of on-campus housing : Some colleges have plentiful on-campus housing and guarantee a room in a dorm for all four years of school. In fact, some schools forbid moving off campus without permission from the college. Other schools have limited housing and guarantee a room on campus only through freshman or sophomore year. In many schools it’s common – even expected – for upperclassman to find off-campus housing. This is an important factor for many students: some can’t wait to live in a “real” apartment or house and some hate the thought of having to commute to campus and make their own meals.

Sharing a room: Mindful of the fact that many young people going to college have never shared a room (and don’t want to start now!) many colleges are building new dorms that feature singles. But a private room is rarely guaranteed on most campuses – certainly not for underclassmen. If living with another person would be a problem for you, this is something you’ll have to consider.

Mandatory meal plan: The quality of food, number of dining halls, and availability of alternate meal choices varies greatly from school to school. Some colleges require all on-campus students to be on the meal plan, while others allow students to cook in their dorms.

General condition of the dorms: Is the university housing old or new? Clean or grungy? Are rooms spacious or are three people crammed into a room that’s supposed to be a double? Are dorm rooms air-conditioned?  Are there suites or on-campus apartments available or just traditional double rooms on a hall?

Special dorms: Many colleges are trying to enhance the on-campus experience by providing dorms that are geared to students’ needs or interests. Many schools now offer a drug and alcohol-free dorm for students who want to stay away from the party scene, a quiet dorm with strict noise restrictions for the studious, or theme dorms for students with a shared culture or interest in a particular topic.

Ideally, these considerations should just be part of the college selection process – and maybe not a huge part. But that isn’t always the case. As a teenage friend told me recently, “I don’t think of myself as particularly spoiled, but I just don’t want to spend four years living in some depressing, dirty, little hell-hole.”

Wait till she sees the bathrooms.

Another excellent Article in NYtimes for students on the waitlist

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/education/14waitlist.html?pagewanted=print

There is a beautiful and highly selective school in New England that accepts only 17 % of its applicants. It is considered to have some of the best facilities and professors in the country and is known for offering students a wonderful education, along with an unusually active, stimulating and rewarding campus life.

And yet, my daughter invariably refers to this college as “the gray school” because on the day we visited the weather was rainy, overcast and cold. And despite the fact that I begged her not to let the weather influence her, the comments she makes about this particular school will generally include the words “depressing, dismal, and dark.”

I don’t care how smart your kid is, he or she will probably prefer a school seen on a bright and sunny day to the schools they see in rain or snow. On a recent tour of colleges we saw the gray school first; right after that the weather cleared up and every college we saw after that seemed infinitely more desirable. There were wall-to-wall kids playing Frisbee and laying on blankets spread out in the quad. People were in groups, walking and laughing and eating outside. The dorm rooms we saw were light-filled and pleasant. Everything looked prettier, and everyone seemed happier.

This is why many families never visit schools during the winter, when dirty snow, frigid tours and barren trees give prospective students a less-than-welcoming sense of the place. But even spring visits can be unpredictable. One family I know had a school visit planned during the recent spring break, but when the weather was bad they blew it off and went to the movies. At the time I thought that was an extreme reaction, but if I had done the same, my daughter might not shudder now at the mention of a certain New England school. We are planning another visit to this particular college and before that trip I plan to check my tires, my car’s navigation system…and the weather report.

I have just returned from a trip to visit several East Coast college campuses and it turns out that what made the biggest impression on me was not the snow-covered quads of academia, the libraries bursting with volumes, or the tour guides with their perky combination of factual knowledge and unlimited good cheer.  What I will remember most is the look of dread on the faces of high school juniors as their parents humiliated them in front of tour guides, admissions officers and prospective classmates.

In one short weekend I witnessed countless examples of clueless behavior on the part of parents who seemed to have no idea that their college visit was not a personal experience geared solely to them.  On tours with dozens of people and information sessions in auditoriums with hundreds of others, parents insisted on taking up the group’s time with questions that pertained to their child alone.

During one info session a father asked a long-winded and excruciatingly complicated question about financial aid for temporary, non-resident international students.  Not satisfied with the answer he received (and failing to pick up on the admissions counselor’s obvious annoyance) he pursued his point with an even more specific follow-up question that was unlikely to have applied to anyone else in the room. Was it a valid question?  Absolutely. Was a group information session the wrong forum for asking it? Absolutely.  A question like that should be asked of a financial aid officer during a one-on one meeting or phone call.

On a tour later that day, a concerned mother asked a seemingly endless series of questions intended to find out if the dorm bathrooms would be cleaned to her son’s exacting standards – the other parents were clearly annoyed and her son looked acutely miserable.  Another mom held the entire tour hostage while she waited for the tour guide to explain how Food Services would accommodate her son’s serious food allergies. Our tour guide was a charming sophomore from Texas, but I’m not sure he was the person to whom life and death questions should have been directed.

It is clear that these parents –  while misguided – are acting out of love and concern for their children, but annoying the on-campus personnel is rarely a ticket to college admission.

Some parents seem to have confused a college tour with a TV game show, and think that stumping the guide or admissions counselor with an impossible-to-answer query will somehow win them bonus points – I can assure you it does not.  At the other end of the spectrum are parents who ask common knowledge questions – one dad this weekend  wasted the time of over 300 people by asking what the undergraduate enrollment of a certain school was (a fact he could have tracked down instantly by looking at a guide book or the school’s own website.)

My advice for college visit etiquette is simple and blunt: look around and realize that this is a shared experience. Do not ask questions just to hear the sound of your voice or to try and look smart. Do not try to dazzle the admissions people by asking a ridiculously complicated or obscure question. And try not to enrage other parents with a tunnel-vision focus on your own child’s particular concerns and requirements.  Following these suggestions may not guarantee your child admission to a certain school, but they will certainly make the ride home a lot more pleasant.

A place on the wait list is usually offered to students who have applied for regular admission and it does not, as a rule, mean that the school needs more information about you – it merely means that the school doesn’t have the space to accept you immediately. Basically, the college is waiting to see what its first-choice accepted applicants are going to do – if the school needs to fill slots they will offer you a spot in the freshman class.
Colleges usually rank their wait lists, so you should get in touch with the admissions office and find out about your ranking (the higher you are on the list, the better your chances of being accepted). Ask about the school’s wait list history: how many students have been waitlisted in the past and how many were offered admission. You should also ask what kind of housing and financial aid is available to late-accepted students.
Meanwhile, don’t passively wait out the decision-making process – ask for an interview (whether it would be your first or second) and keep the admissions office updated about academic or extracurricular honors and achievements. It may also be helpful to write to the school and let them know that you will definitely enroll if you’re accepted (but don’t make this claim unless it’s absolutely true). Your high school guidance counselor can also give you advice and support during this process.
If you’ve been waitlisted you will not be notified about admittance until after the May 1 decision deadline has passed, so to be guaranteed of a place in college, you’ll need to accept a spot in a school that has already accepted you. Fill out the paperwork and send in a deposit – if you’re accepted off the waiting list and decide to attend that school, you will forfeit the deposit you’ve already paid. You may not hear from the wait list school until August 1, so attending that school may be a last minute decision. Ultimately, waiting out the wait list can be a stressful and expensive option, so you need to carefully consider how badly you want to attend that particular school. If you’ll be just as happy attending a school that has already accepted you, it may be wise to commit to that school wholeheartedly and get on with the process of preparing for college.

President Obama signed legislation, part of the health care reform package, that authorizes the federal government to originate all federally-guaranteed student loans, such as Perkins and Stafford loans, effective July 1, 2010. The U.S. Department of Education will end the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, whereby it granted subsidies to banks and companies like Sallie Mae and Nelnet that lend funds to student borrowers and collected repayments from them.

Although all federal loan funds come from the government, it has been obligated to cover as much as 97% of any defaulted loan, effectively eliminating risk for private lenders. In 1993, Congress created the Direct Loan program, in which funds go from the Education Department to students — assuming that money could be saved by cutting out middlemen. The FFEL and Direct Loan programs had been in competition with one another since then. This July 1, all new student loans will come through the Direct Loan program. The savings, estimated at $61 billion over 10 years, would be used to increase the need-based Pell Grant program by $36 billion and invest in community colleges.

How will these changes affect students and their parents? Under the new legislation, students will take out their loans through their college’s financial aid office, instead of using a private bank. Because this does not take effect until mid-year, check with your school’s financial aid office to see how this will affect loans you may be awarded for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Customer service is said to be somewhat better during the loan origination process in the Direct Loan program, and a bit worse during repayment. But the biggest difference may be that students in repayment will no longer have to put up with the unnerving practice of their FFEL loans frequently being sold from lender to lender, which has added to students’ confusion as to who holds their loan at a given time. Under the Direct Loan program, the U.S. Department of Education holds your loan, no one else.

The new student loan legislation will make it easier to pay back student loans, by reducing the share of income a college graduate must devote to loan payments and accelerating loan forgiveness — but not immediately. Those who take out new loans after July 1, 2014 will have to devote only 10 percent of their income to payments, down from the present 15 percent. Those who maintain their payments will have their loans forgiven after 20 years, reduced from the current 25.

The bill also includes automatic increases, tied to inflation, in the maximum Pell Grant. But the grant increase — to $5,900 in 2019-2020 from $5,550 for the 2010-2011 school year — is tiny compared with the constant rise in tuition for public and private colleges. Because college costs are rising so quickly, the maximum Pell Grant today covers only about a third of the average cost of attending a public university, compared with three-quarters in the 1970s. Each year, more students graduate owing over $20,000.