Campus Tour #1

Last updated on: June 25, 2017 at 8:57 pm by Jane the Actuary

Campus Tour #1 2017-06-25T20:57:45-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So we went on our first campus tour yesterday, to Marquette University. To be honest, it was underwhelming. And I don’t know to what extent it’s really anything about Marquette vs. our newness to this process as parents.

As a mom, I’m looking for two things: I want to know that the university is being a good steward of our tuition money, and I want to know that my son is being taken care of. Yes, I know those two things are a bit contradictory, but bear with me.

We started off in an auditorium, where an admissions counselor showed us a powerpoint deck and gave us an overview of All the Great Things About Marquette. In the question-and-answer period, tuition was asked about, but with little more of a reply than just citing the number. I suppose they figure that the details are best dealt with in a brochure. How many of the parents there were planning on writing a large check? How many were counting on financial aid? How many figuring that they’d qualify for a merit scholarship? No way to know.

We were then sent out in small groups with tour guides. Ours led us to a math-and-science building, where she pointed out the office for free* math tutoring, the location of the free tech support for students’ personal computers, and the “cafe” where food could be obtained with meal card “swipes.” We walked past the free health clinic. We saw the library, the big selling point of which was the extended hours of the study spaces. We saw the student rec center, with its free pool, and tennis courts, and cardio equipment, and postings of intramural sport tournament winners. We saw the chapel, imported from France, where daily mass is said, and the student union, and a dormitory. We learned that, if you can find two like-minded students, you can get “free” money for any student activity you want.

(* free = included in tuition. Interestingly enough, she was careful enough to say “included in tuition” each time rather than free.)

Here’s what we noticed:

My husband asked about the Catholic character of the school, and she was almost apologetic. She said that about 60% of students “identify as Catholic” (I guess it’s just become routine to use the “identify as” phrasing for just about everything) but that it was totally OK not to be Catholic, and the main way in which the Catholicness of the school manifested itself was in how it encouraged everyone to “do service.”

The campus was much more compact than I expected. To be sure, it’s a smaller university than the Big 10 colleges I’m used to, but there also seems to be proportionately less green space. Of course, it’s hemmed in by the interstate interchange, but it seemed to have grown quite a bit in student body size after its boundaries were fixed, judging by the fact that many of the student dorms were high-rises.

The entire financial “deal” seemed to be wholly-bundled. I couldn’t quite figure out how it worked, but the meal plan is described as “eat when they want, as much as they want, as many times as they want”, though I couldn’t quite figure out how far that goes. Can you indeed have breakfast, lunch, midafternoon snack, dinner, dessert, and bedtime snack? It seems that, similar to a cruise where the basic option is included, there are limits imposed when you chose other more restaurant (or fast food restaurant) style eating options.

One oddity was that the dorm we toured was one that was slated to be closed and torn down by the time these potential students would be entering. It was 50 years old, but seemed more old-fashioned than that, at least in comparison to the similarly-aged dorms I recall from my college years — the dorm really seemed to consist of fairly-small double rooms, a basement laundry, and a cafeteria, with minimal “community building” features other than a common area on each floor. But why would they put a to-be-eliminated dorm on the tour list? Is this representative of all the others? Do they figure that dorms aren’t relevant to the student’s decision?

The other surprise was that freshmen and sophomores are required to live on campus, but juniors and seniors must leave campus (or live in an on-campus university-run apartment). And, so far as I understand the system, there are freshmen-only dorms and dorms for freshmen and sophomores. I had the definite impression that one landed in a dorm freshman year, then found a friend to be a sophomore-year roommate, and relocated elsewhere the next year.

Now, perhaps my expectations were formed too much by my experience at Michigan State, and my observation of the Notre Dame dorm system while a grad student there, but I expected the norm to be that the dorm forms the basis for community life and your first source for friendships. True, this is rather extreme at Notre Dame, where very few students live off campus and each dorm celebrates its own traditions, but it seemed quite the opposite at Marquette — dorms really seemed to be for sleeping, and that’s about it, perhaps reinforced by the fact that they are split off from the rest of the university by Wisconsin Avenue. Throughout the tour, our tour guide emphasized the places students study, as if studying doesn’t really happen in ones’ own dorm room, or in in-dorm study spaces. I was also accustomed to daily, or frequent mass, taking place in the dorms at Notre Dame, and this wasn’t the case at Marquette.

Oh, and the dorm that was slated to be torn down? It’s being replaced by a new dorm that is or will be under construction; then, on the site of the existing dorm, they’ll put in a new rec center.

So did I feel like the university is a careful steward of the money it takes in? Not really. It seems to figure that parents will resign themselves to the tuition rate, whatever it is, and will, in the end, assess the value by how much is “included in the price.”

And will my son be “taken care of”? One thing that I realized, in learning about Marquette, is that I’m not as concerned about how many “amenities” the college has as whether there will be a community there, and, so far as I can tell, for a kid that does have a hard time making friends, that really seems to start in the dorms. So, on this mom’s checklist, even if not on my son’s, is some feeling that there’s that sense of community.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMarquette_University_campus.jpg; By scottfeldstein [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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