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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Maybe I am naive but why does it matter in terms of learning? [/quote]

A[b]lso, commuter schools like George Mason tend to have a higher percentage of older adult students.  
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I wasn't ready at 17 to go too far away for college, so I went to Mason and lived on campus.  Most of my classes were made up of commuter younger students and older adult students.  It's hard to form connections and also extremely hard to schedule study groups and group project sessions when everyone is in such a different place (literally and figuratively for the older students, many of whom were parents and also working full-time jobs).  My roommate was gone most weekends and a lot of evenings and the same was true of many of the people on my floor.  Even those who lived on campus acted like part time commuter students with how much they went home for meals, laundry, quiet study areas, etc.

I hated it so much after my first semester that I enrolled in NVCC for Spring semester and left Mason.  That fall I transferred to UVA where I was required to live on campus as a new incoming student and even though I was housed with Freshmen, it was the BEST experience.  I made fast friends with my dorm mates and people in my classes.  There were very little scheduling issues because everyone was on the same level.  It was just a completely difference experience and what my peers who went away to other colleges experienced their first year vs. my disaster semester.     [/quote]

That all may have been true for you whenever you attended but GMU is definitely no longer a commuter school.  In fact, first year students have to live on campus.   https://housing.gmu.edu/apply/new-students[/quote].  We had the opposite experience from you.  DS has been at GMU for four years and lived in the dorms all four years.  Check here for international and OSS students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University.  Many of the FCPS students in DS's class and in another subsequent child's private school had GMU has their no. 1 choice but didn't get in.  Check also for all the satellite campuses and the new S. Korean campus.  The Va Assembly has been pouring money into GMU for two decades.  The university is regularly named no. 1 up and coming university in the rankings.

The opposite experience was that one of our children took a NVCC summer course as a rising high school senior to boost his chances on the SAT subject matter tests.  His professor was awful.  She was truly phoning it in.  She didn't care about the course, her teaching, the labs or the students.  He stuck with it, got his A and is at Stanford today.  But due to that experience, we would never recommend NVCC.  There are just too many adjunct profs teaching for a set fee per class. I realize that is just the experience of one professor in one class but it was clear that this prof had three courses going on at the same time, was being paid only a certain amount, and was just not interested.  A few times she didn't even bother to show up.  Meanwhile DS has had the opposite experience with most of his profs at GMU (there was one or two pills along the way).  Overall the GMU experience has been great.  Look also into the GMU abroad programs which DS has done.[/quote]

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