Have you done any college campus visits yet? Many high school juniors — even sophomores — and especially seniors use the summer to travel to the schools to which they're thinking about applying. Prior to visiting, thanks to the mail bombardment most colleges unleash on high school prospects, most colleges appear to be quite gorgeous. Those expensive, glossy, full-color brochures tout their respective institutions' images with unabashed glitz.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of them seem very much alike? If visitors from another solar system came to Earth and found a bunch of these slick marketing pieces, they would no doubt report back to home base that America's higher-education institutions have the following characteristics:

• students are tall and thin; they dress smartly and smile frequently
• most colleges and universities are located in “Sun-belt" areas where clouds are rare
• classes are small and seminar-like and held on lush, green lawns
• a beautiful lake is the visual center of most campuses; ducks and geese abound
• the architectural theme is “Gorgeous Gothic" with spires and arches galore
• and so forth and so on.

See where this is headed? The bottom line: Don't judge a college by its brochure. You must gather first-hand intelligence about the schools on your list by actually visiting. You must trod the sod to see what a college is really like!

Perhaps the most misleading impression that you might get about a prospective school is that one particular bullet point above that says:

– the architectural theme is “Gorgeous Gothic" with spires and arches galore

The truth may actually be more like “Sixties Reinforced Bomb Shelter Concrete." Which brings us to the point of my article: Ugly American College Campuses.

There are a number of “Ugly College" articles out there, but I stumbled upon one that is vying for premier status: The Daily Caller Presents: The Definitive List Of The 17 Ugliest College Campuses In America. Let's take a look at a few of the “sad seventeen," along with excerpts from the sometimes hilarious Daily Caller comments (and BroBible). Let this serve as fair warning to those of you who may have some of these schools on your list but have not yet have visited.

Boston University

Few universities located in big cities are much to write home about, but there is arguably nothing about Boston University that is aesthetically pleasing. Not for nothing does BU also stand for “big and ugly."

Even the folks at BroBible agree: “… The campus is rather enormous and takes up a number of stops on the T, but doesn't necessarily make anybody drop dead with awe. It's just kind of there, like a your very vocal Uncle. A much larger presence than it probably should be, and annoyingly in-your-face. …"

Carnegie Mellon University

The admissions people at Carnegie Mellon can hoodwink you with some pictures of pretty buildings on this campus. Do not be fooled. Too many CMU buildings are hideous. Some are ominous and bordering on inhumanely totalitarian.

BroBible: “Common reaction to a first time CMU visitor: “Boy, Hamerschlag Hall sure is one stately looking building!" Then you remember you're in Pittsburgh, where the architectural modus operandi is to make everything look like a turn-of-the-century train station. At CMU, there is still a sense of decorum in designing a campus like a 19th century industrialist would. …"