<p>We've visited eight schools so far with my dd, who's a junior. And we've been quite surprised by what we've found.</p>
<p>From everything we'd read, we thought School A would be dd's number one choice. On paper, it seemed to be the perfect fit. Then we got there, and she didn't like it. No one in the family particularly liked it. Now it isn't even on her list.</p>
<p>We didn't expect to be particularly impressed by School B; in fact, dd argued that we shouldn't even bother to visit. But it wasn't far out of the way as we traveled, so we stopped. Now this school is one of her top choices.</p>
<p>And so it went. Of the eight schools we visited, four were eliminated by a one-day visit. Our extensive advance research gave us only a 50-50 chance of picking out schools that dd might actually want to attend.</p>
<p>This fall she'll be filling out applications, and I doubt we'll be able to visit all the schools still lurking in that "potential" category by then. So she might be applying to some schools where she's never set foot on campus. </p>
<p>What has been your experience with applying to schools that you haven't visited?</p>
<p>Eight schools applied. None visited physically. But some virtually. All were technical schools or have a strong component of technology. Probably a Guy Thing, he's not a touchy-feelly person.</p>
<p>Just a caveat. We visited lots of schools, and DD visited even more with boyfriend's family her Junior year. After visiting classes and staying overnight she wrote off a lot of them as not academic enough for her. However, she also wanted to write off a school that I thought was a possible option for her. We really did not have good feelings about the school when we visited... campus felt dead (Saturday morning - go figure!) admissions office wasn't particularly friendly, DD had major trouble scheduling interview, air conditioning was off due to power outage, the admissions info session person kept saying "like..like..." and did not impress us with her intelligence or language skills and she was an alumni.... Princeton Review had particularly negative comments about the political and social atmosphere of the school at the time, etc.etc. It would have been all too easy to write it off, also! Luckily, after heavy persuasion on my part, she applied, was accepted, and loved the weekend for accepted students. She is at a terrific school with strong F.A. package and a world of options available to her. So, if you feel a school has a lot to offer, a little persuasion may keep a good school on the list - even when the first impression is not so favorable!</p>
<p>Back in the dark ages many people applied to colleges without visiting first. The college I went to was 5,000 miles from home, and I had visited it as a 13 year old. </p>
<p>I think it's important to apply to enough schools to ensure getting in somewhere (love your safety). This is especially critical if you are applying to the most highly selective colleges, where no applicant is a sure thing. But it's OK if there are 3 or 4 schools on the list you apply to that you haven't visited. If, after you get your acceptances you want to check them out, that's possible to do. Remember, it doesn't have to be the "perfect" college, just the college that is a good fit, and with all the choices in the U.S. there will very likely be several that would be good fits.</p>
<p>I liked the rule one wise CC parent suggested: visits are <em>required</em> for safeties or ED schools. Those are the schools you can't afford to get wrong.</p>
<p>We visited a lot of schools over the past 2 summers. Son applied to some of them & rejected a lot of them. He applied to schools he had visited & several he has not visited. Once he's accepted, I want us to visit the campuses before choosing (he doesn't see the need). We shall see. He had no ED schools.</p>
<p>lgreen, my sons experience was so similar to your familys. We live overseas so needed to make all visits in one swoop. Because I didnt want my son to apply to any school that he hadnt seen and because there would be no chance of follow-up visits after acceptance, we had to do a lot of research and really make the visits count. We watched videos, researched on the web and asked a lot of questions.</p>
<p>Three schools that were at or near the top of the list pre-visit fell off.</p>
<p>The ones in the middle (9) stayed in the middle. Some were definite yess, some nos, some maybes but no real surprises.</p>
<p>Two that werent even on the list and became last minute add ons due to unexpected circumstances (fate?) rose to the top and my son is now attending one!</p>
<p>So much of the reaction is visceral, like love at first sight. Sometimes the arranged marriage like anxiousmom details leads to a happy ending, but quite often first impressions positive or negative -- are persuasive and indelible.</p>
<p>If your time is limited my advice would be to give priority to those colleges that may be difficult to fall in love with the safeties, the merit aid schools that dont look so good on paper. Seeing the campus, meeting kids, talking to administrators and students can sometimes help to visualize what it would be like to go that school and alleviate some of the anxiety. </p>
<p>On the other hand, sometimes a visit just reinforces the no way, jose attitude. Its better to find this out sooner rather than later so you can continue on your search for the best safety either selective safety or financial safety. They're out there, but it's more of a trial an error process.</p>
<p>I like to have visual image of the school and its surroundings when reading their publications or web site. But, a short visit can result in an all too hasty conclusion either way. Is the tour guide good looking? Or ill-spoken? If off-season (or Saturday morning), the student interaction element may be missing. The staffing and efficiency of the admissions office (and the admit weekend people) may have little to say about the way the professors and other administators act toward actual students.</p>
<p>Arranged marriage --- I like that image! It's just too bad that kids/parents can get turned off by little things like an airhead tourguide, snooty adcom, etc, and the first negative impression can prevent a more indepth positive impression from being made. I guess that's just life though!
Oops - I must have written this while the above poster was posting. Sorry to duplicate her thoughts!</p>
<p>My son says visits are so superficial he doesn't see the point & he will learn to love whatever school he ends up in (this from the boy who spent a day following a guide & eating lunch at each of the two private high schools he was considering before choosing which to attend). He's right as so many here have noted. It is tough to form an accurate picture of each school from a brief visit. Considering our visits were only over the summer for a few hours, the visits provide even less of the "real picture," but it's hard to come during the school year. Oh well, things work out one way or another.</p>
<p>Visiting a number of campuses, including large universities, LACs, in a city, small town, whatever, can give you an idea what that type of college feels like. It just doesn't prove everything, pro or con, about a specific school.</p>
<p>I know a girl whose first choice was Columbia. She attended admit weekend there and at a several other good schools. Concluding that the administrative incompetence of those in charge of admit weekend at Columbia meant something, she went elsewhere (also a good school). But, was that a good reason for the decision?</p>
<p>I know a boy who attended admit weekend at Stanford and a regional admitted students reception and concluded that Stanford and the attendees were insufficiently intellectual, too interested in good weather and fun. He went to a good LAC. I'm not sure if he made the correct decision (for him) or not.</p>
<p>I also agree that one cannot decide that a school is perfect or wrong for you on a short visit. It is quite easy to let truly unimportant factors sway you. I also think it is unnecessary and impossible to visit every school before applying. You may be eliminating some gems by not applying, either because you did not visit or because the tour guide kept twirling her hair.</p>
<p>You should visit a fair number and variety of schools, 8-10 was the number for us. Out of the schools we visited, D applied to about 4, and then applied to about 6 more unvisited schools. After all the acceptances came in, she decided to visit 1 more, loved it, and is now loving everyday of it.</p>
<p>Of all her friends and acquaintances, I would say that about 45 of them are really happy where they chose to go, and 2 are unhappy, even though they overnighted at those schools. Those 2 could be unhappy no matter where.....</p>
<p>There were two LACs that my daughter visited that she thought she'd really like. One, she felt, fit her needs and wants exactly. When we visited, she absolutely hated it. She was surprised at her own reaction and, I would venture to say, it was actually hard for her to let her romantic notion of it go. (This is a great school!) She did not like the other school either.</p>
<p>I would add (and this has been said often before) that there is a huge difference between what kids think they want junior year of HS and how they feel senior year. She was positive, initially, that she wanted a very small LAC.</p>
<p>She ended up applying to no LACs at all, and has not looked back.</p>
<p>Out of the seven schools to which S applied in 2000, he visited four. He did visit UCLA after getting accepted just to confirm his hunch that it was a good fit which it turned out to be. Because he majored in design, he focused on very few schools, so the visit list was relatively short.</p>
<p>Out of the seven schools on D's list last year, she visited five including her ED school and a discovery weekend at school #2. Because she was looking at LACs primarily, the visits helped to eliminate schools/areas that didn't feel like a good fit.</p>
<p>We visited four out of the seven schools on my daughter's list. We would have visited the other three, but she was accepted ED before their app deadlines. As a result of the visits, her priorities did change. However, it's so superficially subjective that I wonder how meaningful these visits are. We visited the school I thought would be her first choice on a dreary day during spring break. In addition to the terrible weather, the info session was overcrowded and we could barely hear the backwards walking guide on the tour. She was able to have a more personal session with 10 or so applicants, 2 current students and an admissions counselor at the school she decided to ED. I do think it worked out for the best, but I wonder what would have happened if those sessions were reversed.</p>
<p>It's true that the circumstances of the visit can affect the student's impression of the colleges. At School B, for instance, we were met by a very personable and well-spoken admissions officer -- an alumnus who could clearly articulate the reasons he had chosen the school and the growth he had found there. </p>
<p>At School A, the admissions officer was uncommunicative and gave the impression of snootiness. Frankly, I wonder why the school had this person working in admissions. I've asked dd whether she wants to reconsider School A, which still looks like a good fit on paper, since we may have been unduly influenced by our reaction to this admissions officer. But dd says she saw nothing during the visit that stands out to her as a reason to apply. This school is not known for good merit aid, so I'm not pushing it.</p>
<p>I can see that in some cases, a visit may give a misleading impression. At two schools that we knocked off the list, however, the visits revealed some deep philosophical differences between our family's values and the core values of the schools. I was glad we made those visits and learned about those differences before blindly applying.</p>
<p>I forced my son to apply to schools (which had strong programs in his field)....when one called offering $$$ He thought.....well I should go look. He like them both and they moved up his list.<br>
LAst year at trip to a Large State school in Central PA we were both UNDERWHELMED by the quality of the person running the GENERAL INFO Session...(she said "I dont know" as a response to approximately 80% of questions asked), that session may have tainted my son's desire to attend school there (although folk in the Dept were better).</p>
<p>I suggest GOING and sitting in on a few classes....thats where you get the best feel for the fit.</p>
<p>I agree with the others that visits to safeties and ED schools are probably the most important - a "safety" has some negative connotations no matter how hard we try to change that fact, anything that helps the student really like the school and imagine themselves there is a good result.</p>
<p>The other important outcome to visiting to me, is putting reality into choices between small and large urban and rural. For this, I don't think you necessarily have to go to schools on the final list, I think that visits to the most convenient schools will work fairly well, if you are on a time or money budget. Save the money to send the kid to visit to a couple of finalists as a senior.</p>
<p>HiMom, your son's reaction is interesting. We visited a large number of schools because DD said she didn't want to apply to any school she hadn't seen, and we were sending her across country and WE needed to see the schools to feel comfortable. After the process was over, though, she declared she would never take her kids to visit any colleges, they would just have to wait until after acceptances!
I think your S and my D changed their minds because they saw after the fact how visiting tells you more and less than you want to know.</p>
<p>I applied to eight schools (all RD) and in December I felt great about my list. Before applying, I had visited my first choice and my safety the summer before, and my dad's alma mater for a football game when I was 12 or so. I wasn't crazy about my safety, and I never really intended on going to my dad's school (it really didn't fit to well with my personality--I wanted liberal, urban, and artsy, and my dad went to Notre Dame). Come spring I was waitlisted at my dream school, but I still felt pretty good because I had gotten into five other schools one of which was my very close second choice. We started visiting the others, and one by one I was disappointed to the point that I may not have even applied to these schools. They all looked great on paper, and I had done extensive research, but I changed my mind after the visit. I was left with one waitlist, my not-so-great safety, and Notre Dame (ironically the three that I had previously visited) because all of these so-great-on-paper schools fell through. I had to send my deposit somewhere, and I chose Notre Dame, but I was so anxious and pretty upset about my college prospects. Luckily I did get in off the waitlist, but I was so close to going to a school that was really the opposite of everything that I had always wanted.</p>
<p>...and the moral of the story is, visit as many as humanly possible before applying, even if it means taking a week off school, driving 16 hours, whatever. It's a miserable feeling staring down the barrel of four years at a school you don't like. Schools may look perfect on paper, but they don't write about their flaws in the viewbook.</p>