Interested in what schools you or your son/ daughter were accepted into without ever visiting the campus. Particularly interested in reach schools (I know, these days every school is a reach school!). Do you think visiting makes a big difference in college acceptance or rejection decisions?
Did you receive merit aid? Did you ever consider whether you would have received a better package if you had visited?
Eldest was accepted at Hopkins, but since she didn’t receive a penny in merit, we decided not to waste time visiting a school that would be full fees.
I was accepted to Temple and Depaul without visiting, but those were both safeties.
Accepted without visiting at Connecticut College, Denison University, Lawrence University, St. Olaf, all except St. Olaf with generous merit.
D16 was accepted to Fordham without visiting. S19 was accepted to UMass Amherst and Duquesne with no visit.
Many reach schools do not take a note of your school visit as a demonstrated interest (see CDS, sect C7). For these schools, therefore, your visit makes no difference in the admissions outcome. Many reach schools are also need based, not merit. Need to do research on each school you’re interested in. Even for those schools that take a note of your visit and are merit based, your visit will not make much of a difference.
We didn’t visit Williams, Amherst, Pomona, Duke, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Princeton. Too far, too costly and too time consuming to visit.
So far S20 has visited every school he’s been admitted to except one. The one school we didn’t encourage him to apply, the one school he missed talking to the rep when she visited the area, and the one school we didn’t visit is the one that’s given him the most merit money so far. They also admitted him directly to their business school and put him in their honors program. Go figure.
Accepted to Yale w/o a visit.
They explicitly state (as do many other schools) that they do not track demonstrated interest.
It depends on the college, but in general, I’d expect visits are not going to have much impact for colleges that check the do not consider demonstrated interest in the CDS. This includes the bulk of colleges that are most frequently described as “reach schools” on this forum.
One of the reasons for this policy is that traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to college campuses isn’t practical for many typical (not high income) families. I was accepted to Stanford, MIT, and Ivies without visiting. My first visit was during admit weekend, which related to the college sending out plane tickets.
It’s been a while, but my oldest only got into colleges he hadn’t visited. (Well he’d seen Harvard at a reunion, but they didn’t know that.) Younger son got in U of Chicago without visiting. All the other colleges were within a four hour drive, we’d have had to fly to visit that one.
D17 was accepted to several selective LACs. The ones she didn’t visit were: Vassar, Kenyon, Denison (with merit), Centre (with merit).
S19 was accepted to the following schools he didn’t visit: Brown, Vanderbilt, Colgate. Also received $25,000 merit from Pitt and hadn’t visited.
The answer will not be the same for every college.
You can look at the common data set for each school (google “common data set XYZ university”) and look at section C to see if demonstrated interest is taken into account at a particular school.
Even for schools that track demonstrated interest if a person lives far away the college does not expect that everyone can fly in to visit. There are other ways to demonstrate interest such as: requesting an alumni interview, going to a local presentation, taking part in online discussions with admissions etc.
FWIW I do know a number people who got into top schools including Ivies, Wash U, Hopkins without a visit.
Colleges do not EXPECT kids to visit if they are not within a reasonable distance. It isn’t reasonable to assume that a student will find a way to visit a college, even if that college considers demonstrated interest. Kids may not have access to transport, parents might not have the time or money to get a kid to a school, etc… Kids who can’t visit can demonstrate interest in other ways.
D was accepted to Kenyon and Whitman, no visits. Kenyon paid for her flights to visit after acceptance.
S was accepted to U Denver, Indiana U, and offered a transfer option to USC in So Cal, no visits.
It’s not uncommon or unusual to get acceptance without visiting.
Daughter was accepted to Oregon and Wisconsin without visiting - she chose not to attend either due to much better financial offer elsewhere.
Our senior has been accepted to University of Pittsburgh and to University of Toronto, sight unseen. We are waiting on their financial packages to determine if we need to visit.
So far my senior has been rejected and deferred from the two schools she’s visited, and been accepted with scholarships to six schools she hasn’t visited yet. Go figure.
Easy to understand. Finances can determine visits. Those letters of interest are easy to do so I can see why schools would not consider them (although they can and do figure out disinterest from the tone of essays). Schools should not discriminate in favor of students with the time and money to visit. It is easy for a large population of students in the Northeast to visit many schools while it is far less conveient for those living elsewhere.
The point of college visits is more about whether you/your kid likes the college, not vice-versa. The visit is much more likely to affect your kid’s decision as whether to attend (if they are accepted) than it will affect the colleges decision whether to accept your kid.
My younger son thought it was much easier to write the “Why ____ college?” essays when he had visited. But particularly after he lit upon a formula for that essay, he could do them just from visiting the websites.
Son accepted at Wisconsin, Tennessee and Kansas State without visiting
The other four schools he applied to, we visited (accepted at Penn State, deferred at Michigan, waiting for Purdue and Ga Tech)
There are a fair number of schools we visited that he did not apply to for one reason or another.
I agree that the visits were more about whether he felt a connection to the school than vice-versa. When all decisions are received, I’m sure more visits will be scheduled (especially for Wisconsin and Tennessee). That, coupled with financial offers, will likely settle the decision (unless he gets into Ga Tech).