There Were No Students.
There are two small private colleges named “Wheaton” in this country. Shane and I chose to visit the Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.
We visited Wheaton for the first time while pandemic rules were still strict. We were not allowed to go inside buildings, so we met our tour guide in the freezing cold. While we were waiting, it started to rain. And yet, after listening to the tour guide talk about the classes, clubs and traditions, and wandering around the gorgeous campus, Wheaton was too beautiful and too compelling to dismiss.
We made a return visit when the campus was more fully open. By fall open house, Shane had done a number of Zoom sessions and he liked the students he met online. He just wanted to get a feel for in-person campus life.
Unfortunately, the fall open house was all … adults. There was no student panel. There were no student speakers. There were no students leading other students from place to place. The staff was great, but the campus was empty, other than a few hundred prospective students and parents. Our tour took us through empty hallways, empty rooms, empty buildings. After flying in from Maryland to see “campus life,” the only student we met was our tour guide! And the pandemic rules had nothing to do with it.
That’s when Wheaton started to lose steam. We’d been there twice and seen exactly two students. But the Zoom students continued to impress. So we went back for one final time: admitted students day.
We showed up for the one allotted admitted students day. The campus was swarming with prospectives; parking was dreadful. There were more prospectives on campus than the entire student population. The event was disorganized to the point that they ran out of water during the breakfast, and when I asked about it, everyone seemed surprised. No one mentioned the water fountain 50 feet away.
During Session One, all the students were separated from parents with no instruction on how to reunite. Shane went to sit in on a class – which was not actually a class but a discussion about class – while I sat and listened to more staff. They didn’t say anything unique or special. We’d been to a lot of open houses, but Wheaton was oddly generic.
Wheaton has a spectacularly loose curriculum that should have been the focal point of everything they said and did – but nobody mentioned it, other than our very first tour guide on that cold, rainy day. I had to look it up online to see if it was real. (It is.)
They randomly set loose the entire prospective population with limited options. It took us an hour to see the one dorm room on display for the masses. The only interesting session was so full, we couldn’t sit – or see over the people standing in the aisles. Lunch was a catered meal for prospectives only, so we couldn’t see what “normal” lunch would entail. The only students we saw were those directing traffic, and we were often sent to the wrong places.
At the end of the event – a chaotic mess which screamed for organization and leadership – there was an incredible, fun, exciting spring festival. And there were the students! They manned booths for clubs, smiling and happy, excited to be there, fun, intelligent, interesting. They played frisbee and catch and sang and danced and laughed. Finally! We got to see student life at Wheaton!
But by then – after three visits, three chances, and no other signs of life – it was too late. Wheaton was off the list.