After more than twenty years in admissions and college counseling, I’ve visited a lot of campuses. I don’t spend much time evaluating residence halls, blue-light phones, or whether the student center serves good coffee anymore.
Dear reader, they never serve good coffee.
Instead, I’ve started looking for something much harder to see.
I want to understand how a college cares for its students after the admissions brochure is closed and the decision has been made.
Today, that brought me to Illinois Wesleyan University.
The visit was arranged by Carin Smith, someone I’ve known and absolutely admired since 2004.
When I first started in admissions, our colleges happened to be next to one another alphabetically at college fairs.
If you’ve never worked a college fair, it’s hard to explain the strange little community they create. The same admissions counselors travel the same circuit for 12 weeks … and potentially 12 years.
You see the same faces four nights a week.
Relationships are built one folding table at a time.
I had inherited a territory from one of the people I most admire in admissions and life.
Counselors would walk up to my table looking for Chris.
Instead, they got me. Carin took the time to make sure they met me.
She answered the questions I was too embarrassed to ask. She shared what she knew, encouraged me when I needed it, complimented my shoes more than once, and quietly helped me find my footing.
She didn’t have to.
She simply believed that’s what you do.
As I walked Illinois Wesleyan’s campus today, I realized I recognized that feeling.
Not because everyone was exactly like Carin.
But because every conversation reflected the same instinct.
Students.
Not just how to recruit them.
How to know them.
How to challenge them.
How to notice when they’re struggling.
How to help them become the people they came to college hoping to be.
Every conversation reflected a genuine commitment to the students who choose Illinois Wesleyan—not just getting them to campus, but walking alongside them once they arrive. That’s the kind of student support you can’t capture in a brochure or a ranking, but you can feel when you’re there.
I left genuinely excited for the students who will have the opportunity to experience it firsthand.
On the drive home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Carin.
Twenty-two years ago, she welcomed a nervous young admissions counselor into a profession that felt beyond intimidating. Today, I realized I experienced that same spirit all over again.
It made me wonder if institutions begin to reflect the people who bring decades of experience with them when they choose to dedicate the next chapter of their careers to building something new.
Families spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether a college is the “right fit.”
We look at majors.
We look at rankings.
We walk through dorms.
We sit in on football games.
We ask about study abroad.
All of that matters.
But at some point, every student has a week that doesn’t go the way they hoped.
A bad exam.
A roommate they can’t quite figure out how to live with.
A stretch of homesickness that hits harder than expected.
A phone call from home that changes everything.
And in that moment, the question isn’t about programs or brochures anymore.
It’s simpler than that.
Do I feel like I belong here?
That’s the moment a college stops being a place you’re visiting and becomes a place you’re living.
And that’s when you start to see what a campus is actually made of.
Every college has tutoring.
Every college has counseling.
Every college has advisors.
But student support doesn’t look the same everywhere.
What separates colleges is how that support actually shows up in real time.
When a student starts to slip, does someone notice? Or does help only arrive after the student has already decided to raise their hand?
That difference is small on paper. It’s enormous in real life.
So I always come back to a simple question for families on campus visits:
“What does it look like here when a student starts to struggle?”
Not the directory.
Not the list of services.
Not the slide deck.
The story.
Who notices first?
What do they do next?
How long does it take before someone shows up who actually knows the student’s name?
Because every college can talk about support.
The ones that stand out are the ones that can describe it without sounding like they’re reading it off a website.
They can tell you what they do when no one is watching.
And maybe that’s the real test.
Not how a college recruits students.
But how it shows up for them once they’ve already said yes.
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