I went to Toronto once in my early 20s and loved it. I remember as being like New York but cleaner and more international. I thought Lucy would love it too, and I really wanted there to be a college here she would like. But there really isn’t anything in Toronto resembling a small liberal arts college. The University of Toronto, which is huge, has three campuses, and I convinced myself that once of their satellite campuses, UT Scarborough, might feel like a small school within a big university and offer something like what Lucy was looking for. I set up tours at the main campus in the morning and the Scarborough campus in the afternoon.
After getting to bed at 2am, we slept too late to take the bus from the airport, which was pretty far from downtown, so we took a Lyft to campus and got a quick breakfast in a campus coffee shop. The University of Toronto was one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen, and it seems like it’s a world-class giant research university, if that’s what you want. But it’s not what Lucy wants. 15 minutes into the tour we were wondering if we should bother with the rest of it. But we stayed for most of the tour, and I think it was useful just to get a sense of the different kind of colleges that are out there and for Lucy to get more clarity on what she doesn’t want. They have a lecture hall that seats 1300 students, and most of your first-year classes are giant lectures. Most students live off campus, and it doesn’t feel like there is much of a campus community. They do have a college system and you apply to a smaller college within the university and if you live on campus you live at your college. Our tour guide said her college, Trinity College, had only 400 students, and you do feel like you know everyone there. But Lucy pointed out that she never mentioned the word community and it didn’t feel like the college was actually a community. The tour guide showed us the Trinity dining hall, which she said people compared to the Hogwarts dining hall. I thought it looked exactly like that except the pictures didn’t move. Lucy said it was nothing like Hogwarts because it didn’t have 4 long tables. The University of Toronto felt like a more urban international version of the University of Washington, but with much more beautiful old buildings. It was also surprisingly expensive for international students. King’s College charges international students about twice what they charge Canadian students, which still works out to less than UW for in-state students, but U of T charges about 4 times as much for international students, which doesn’t seem worth it for what you get.
Lucy is fine with more snow and a little colder than Seattle, but not so cold you can’t go outside for multiple months of the year. I know that Halifax and Toronto are both colder than Seattle, but I don’t think they are as cold as Minneapolis, even though they are further North. I have noticed that neither city seems to have many bridges and tunnels to avoid going outside like in Minneapolis. Lucy asked about winter at King’s College, and her tour guide said she just needed to invest in a really good coat and boots and she would be fine. I asked the U of T tour guide about whether people go outside in the snow. She said yeah, it snows a lot, and everybody just goes about their lives in the snow. Both of these answers seemed much more reasonable. Lucy and I looked up the average high and low temperatures in Seattle, Minneapolis, Halifax, Toronto, and Chicago. The average low in Minneapolis was around 10, so I don’t know where the Macalester tour guide got multiple months at -30. (Maybe it hit -30 once and traumatized her, or 10 felt like -30 because she was from Miami.) The average low in all the other cities we’re visiting was around 20, and in Seattle around 30. (We checked multiple times that all these temperatures were in Fahrenheit, even for the Canadian cities.)
We debated whether to even go to our tour at UT Scarborough, but decided we should. We grabbed a quick lunch at a random food truck and it turned out to be some of the most delicious Chinese food I’ve ever had. Then we took a Lyft to Scarborough, which is a suburb of Toronto that is pretty far away. It was about 45 minutes by car, and 1 hour 20 minutes by bus. The architecture of the Scarborough campus is exactly the opposite of the architecture in the main campus. All the buildings are super modern and everything between them is concrete. It was pretty apparent early in this tour that this was also not the kind of school Lucy wants. Their largest lecture hall only holds 500 students, but it was still clear that most first-year classes are large lectures. Even fewer students live on campus, and everything seems geared towards business, internships, and getting jobs, rather than enjoying your college experience. Lucy pointed out that as we walked around campus, she didn’t see a single student smiling. They had a lot of fancy new buildings and technology that had clearly cost a lot of money, but as an education researcher who tells people how to design physical spaces to support learning and collaboration, I thought that they had made all the wrong choices in the design of these fancy new buildings. Their newest building had all these weirdly themed lecture halls, like a coliseum-style lecture hall where the professor stood in the middle surrounded by students and literally could not face them all at once, and lecture halls with random themes like clouds. (Later I looked it up, and they do also have a few active learning classrooms, but they did not mention these on the tour.) They also had study spaces throughout the campus, but they were designed for solo study rather than collaboration. I saw students studying all around campus, but always by themselves. After the tour I told Lucy I thought this would be a great school if you wanted to study business and get a job at a big tech company, and she said, “Mom, I think it’s just not a very good school.”
We took the bus and the subway back to our new hotel downtown. (We stayed in two different hotels in Toronto because we got in so late on the plane last night that I wanted a hotel close to the airport, and we’re leaving so early on the train tomorrow morning that I wanted a hotel close to the train station. This meant we had to carry our giant backpacks around all day, and we were very tired.) Lucy was not very impressed with Toronto so far because all we had seen so far was the airport, the university, and the suburbs. But as soon as we got out of the subway downtown she changed her mind. The subway and the tall buildings downtown felt exactly like New York, and she said, “OK, now I see why you like Toronto, and I wish King’s College was here.” I was about to say that it was like New York but cleaner, and then I saw a giant pile of human poop on the ground, and I changed my mind. We saw lots of advertisements for theater show, and almost got last minute tickets to go to a show, but then decided that since we have so little time here, we should spend our time exploring the city. So we dropped off our bags at the hotel and walked around downtown. We went to the Distillery District, a cute little open air market area, and had dinner outside. We stopped at a grocery store so we could see all the signs about Canadian-made products that had popped up since Trump put tariffs on Canada. Then we walked to the water and sat on a cute little fake sandy beach with chairs and enjoyed the view of the tall buildings on one side and the lake and Toronto Islands on the other side. It would have been nice to walk around more, but we have a train at 6:50am tomorrow and are exhausted, so we headed back to our hotel to sleep.
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