Is Our College Right for You? Get on This Bus to Find Out

James Wagner walks across the Hampton Inn parking lot with his father. The day is bright but windy, and both of them wear royal-blue athletic jackets. “See ya,” James says. His dad goes in for a hug.

Then James boards the bus that will carry him south through Indiana, from Fort Wayne to the University of Evansville. It’s Friday morning, and this is the first stop on one of six bus routes taking admitted students to the small, private university for a weekend known as Road Trip. Other buses are leaving from Kalamazoo, Mich.; Racine, Wis.; and Atlanta, among other cities. Students who are especially near or far can drive or fly in. All told, 246 of them will descend on the campus.

Road Trip is supposed to be fun, but there’s a lot at stake. The admissions office, which has put on some version of the weekend for more than 30 years, knows that the visit plays an outsize role in the all-important work of making the freshman class. Evansville aims to enroll 520 this fall. For many students, this is the weekend that helps them decide on the university.

Road Trip is Evansville’s most expensive recruitment event of the year — $50,000, not counting staff time. The admissions staff puts a lot of thought into how the weekend is designed, down to the level of which high schoolers are rooming together and which current students host them. But whether the students will click is beyond the university’s control.

The weekend falls in mid-February, an anxious time for Evansville’s admitted students. Many are still waiting to hear back from other colleges. None yet know how much need-based financial aid they will get. That means lots of students simply don’t have all the information they will need to make up their minds. Still, they’ll spend a few days trying Evansville on for size. Could they see themselves going to college here? Will they find any friends?

Giving them every opportunity to do so is a big part of Stacey Shanks’s job this weekend. As the bus gets rolling, Ms. Shanks, an admissions counselor, welcomes the first half-dozen students and hands them each a name tag on a lanyard. It’s purple, the university’s color. Then she has them introduce themselves.

Autumn Shomo and Leah Murray, who got on the bus together, are best friends from home. That’s unusual, Ms. Shanks explains. Most students won’t know anybody on the bus. But not to worry. While Road Trip gives students a taste of the academic side of college, “this is a social weekend,” she says. She rearranges the students, asking one to move seats. Then she divides them into groups and asks them to tell one another about their high schools.

Ms. Shanks has been on the admissions staff only since 2014. But with her energetic personality and a background in pharmaceutical sales, she’s a natural. And she can certainly relate to what the students’ parents are going through. She has one son in high school, and another who’s a freshman at Evansville.

She asks the students what they are expecting or anxious about. “I want to shoot a half-court shot,” says Corey Miller. This year the admissions office is doing something new, and prospective students like Corey are already talking about it. Tomorrow they will attend an Evansville basketball game where one of their names will be drawn. On this Road Trip, if that student can sink the shot — in one try — he or she will get four years of free tuition.

Ms. Shanks has learned that the bus on one of the other routes has a mechanical problem and hasn’t left its first stop, Atlanta. She tells the students she wants to send her counterpart on that bus a video of them over Snapchat, and struggles gamely to use the app. As she holds out her phone, clad in a purple case, the students behind her ham it up for the video.

About Fit and Friendship

All day long, the red-white-and-blue bus winds its way through Indiana, picking up groups of students in the parking lots of hotels, a Cracker Barrel, a Walmart, until the final rider meets it outside a pharmacy in the small town of Loogootee, about an hour away from the campus. At each stop, students load their suitcases and sleeping bags in the baggage compartment. Several have brought musical instruments; the weekend means auditions and scholarship interviews for some. One clutches a big stuffed Simba.

The bus sways back and forth in the wind. The driver, Charles E. Brown, is a retired high-school assistant principal. He’s been driving a bus for years, but it’s his first time doing Road Trip. Some extra weight will help smooth out the ride, so he jokes that it’ll be more comfortable after they all stop to eat.

By the time they do, in Indianapolis, there are enough students to overwhelm the small Blimpie’s. A woman walking out of the bathroom looks startled by the crowd of casually dressed teenagers who’ve suddenly filled the restaurant. “We’re actually on a road trip down to the University of Evansville,” one of the students explains.

The bus is pretty comfortable, as buses go, with TVs and colorful plush seats. It has a bathroom, though several of the students agree that using it is a no-no. Getting the bus’s temperature just right turns out to be a challenge. At one point, Ms. Shanks turns to the driver: “You’ve got to turn that heat down, Charles. We’re dying!” Mr. Brown complies but teases her a little: “Up and down, up and down.”

Throughout the drive, Ms. Shanks gives the students chances to find common ground and get more comfortable. She lobs icebreaker questions at them to discuss in small groups. What was their best-ever Halloween costume? If they could wear only one color for the rest of their lives, what would it be? Every so often, she asks the students to switch seats. They play a round of University of Evansville trivia. They play two truths and a lie.

Some of the students seem to be hitting it off. A handful of them start a group text so that they can find one another once they get to the campus. Once, when Ms. Shanks asks the students to change seats, a couple of them stay put so they can keep talking.

James, who got on in Fort Wayne, happens to sit next to Austin Schindler, who got on in Indianapolis. They discover that they will be roommates for the weekend.

As the bus nears the campus, Ms. Shanks hands each student a folder. She explains the schedule. There are a bunch of activities planned for that night and the next day, and students can decide which ones they want to attend. Some are at the same time, though, so they won’t be able to do everything. “Making choices,” Ms. Shanks says, “is part of the college experience.”

Still, there are rules. No leaving the campus without a member of the admissions staff. No breaking any laws. No missing the bus home on Sunday. And the rule that Ms. Shanks reiterates as the bus cruises past the buildings: no setting foot in the fraternity houses.

When they arrive, the students stream out of the bus, collect their belongings, and head off to meet the Evansville undergraduates serving as their hosts.

The campus is small, and many of the admitted students have visited before. Since Evansville emphasizes personal attention, some have even met with professors. This weekend is about fit, and a big component of that is friendship.

That focus has been carried down from the event’s earliest days, says Angie Dawson, director of student retention. She started at Evansville as an admissions staffer in 1986, one year after the program that became Road Trip was born. It all started when an admissions counselor took a 15-passenger van to bring in prospective students from Memphis, she says. Even then, part of the goal was giving students a chance to “bond with each other.”

“It eases anxiety,” Ms. Dawson says, for students to realize that “I’m going to know Johnny and Susie when I get to the University of Evansville.”

A ‘Gem’ to Discover

The event has had different names (North Meets South, Midwestern Mania) and particulars over the decades, she says. The logistics aren’t as tricky as they used to be, now that admissions counselors can communicate and get directions on their smartphones. What hasn’t changed, she says, is the guiding principle that Evansville is a “gem” that students should be allowed to discover for themselves, rather than relying on what’s presented to them in brochures or on formal tours.

On Friday night, Austin and James are sitting together at a long table waiting for karaoke to start. “I met a lot of people,” says James, who was already pretty sure before the trip that he’d enroll at Evansville. Austin is still choosing between it and Ohio Northern University. “I like both campuses,” he says.

Evansville plays basketball in an arena downtown, so getting to the game the next day means another bus ride. James, Austin, Corey, and another student from their bus, John Langmaid, sit together on the ride downtown and stick together during the game. Corey does not get a chance at the half-court shot. The student whose name is drawn misses it anyhow. At least the Purple Aces defeat the Southern Illinois University Salukis.

The four boys hang out together on Saturday night, attending a show put on by student organizations and playing shuffleboard in the student union.

Finally it’s time for what everyone has described as the highlight of the weekend: the hypnotist show. Current students and Road Trippers fill the bleachers in Evansville’s gym. During his introduction, the hypnotist, Bruce McDonald, says they will find lifelong friends here: “I’m just betting.”

John had struck Ms. Shanks as shy, but when the hypnotist asks for volunteers, he raises his hand. Mr. McDonald “hypnotizes” the volunteers, then puts them through their paces, singing, dancing, sniffing one another. The part of the show everyone will be talking about the next morning is when he has a group of boys pretend to be bodybuilders. He tells them they’ll take off their shirts but won’t realize that they aren’t wearing them until they walk out of the gym after the show. Sure enough, John leaves his shirt behind as the students exit. Right after getting through the door, he turns and sprints upstream through the crowd to retrieve it.

The next morning, Autumn and Leah are among the first students to get back on the bus. They sit together. Both are still deciding where to go next year, but Leah says that “this definitely made me more ready for college in general.” Even if both girls end up at Evansville, they don’t plan to be roommates. They might be too similar to live together, and anyway, they want to make new friends. Perhaps they’d live in the same hall, though.

James is once again sitting next to Austin, who says the hypnotist really was the highlight of the trip. James says that even after the show ended, their new friend John “was still acting kind of different.”

Corey gets on the bus. He sits in front of James and Austin, saving the seat next to him. When John arrives a bit later, he takes it. Being hypnotized, he says, felt “dreamy.”

Though it’s an early morning after a late night, it looks as if all 45 teenagers are on the bus, which pushes off from the campus ahead of schedule. But almost immediately, one student realizes she left her debit card and ID behind and starts to panic. Ms. Shanks says the university can mail them to her but then learns by phone that they have somehow left a student behind, so the bus circles back.

“I hope she’s not crying,” says Mr. Brown, but he is unfazed. On a previous job, he tells Ms. Shanks, he had to take a different group of passengers back 50 miles.

The bus pulls over at a corner, and T. Scott Henne, the admissions dean, hops on for a moment. “You guys didn’t want to leave, right?” he calls out. Then, with the missing student and missing cards in hand, the bus hits the road for real.

The trip back is much quieter. There are no icebreakers, just three movies — Step Up, National Treasure, and This Means War — and lunch at Wendy’s.

Though they still have time to mull things over, Road Trip gave some students what they needed to make up their minds. Some had already put down their admissions deposits before the weekend. Three of the 246 students who attended Road Trip made their deposits that weekend, and 47 more did in the following weeks. James was one of them.

Not so Corey, who was still weighing Evansville, where he’d have the small-college experience, against Indiana University at Bloomington and the University of Notre Dame, which have better name recognition.

The weekend didn’t reveal much about Evansville that Corey didn’t already know, but he’s glad he got to “bond with the three other guys,” he says. Corey still has some thinking to do. But “if we all went to Evansville, that would be really cool.”

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.