<p>I wouldn't do it for ED, but its perfectly okay for RD. You can learn enough to get a decent idea from guidebooks and CC. When they get accepted, then visit those schools.</p>
<p>Did a lot of visits from beginning to end some schools got multiple visits. </p>
<p>There were schools she was really crazy about about until she actually went on the vist. </p>
<p>There was schools that she saw on paper and read about that she would not have considered (including the school she is currently attending and a few that she applied to) that the visit did make the difference.</p>
<p>when she began whittling down her list, she did not apply to any school that she had not had the opportunity to spend the night and attend classses.</p>
<p>Did the admitted student days at 4 schools chose 1 .</p>
<p>Mine visited about a dozen colleges. Rejected some for poor reasons, or possibly inaccurate impression, others for very good reasons. I think it's hard to think of every possible factor to consider and evaluate perfectly from afar; when you're there sometimes something will come up that you know you don't like, or really do like, but didn't think about before. Like the campus culture, for LACs. What the kids who go there look like; dress like.</p>
<p>So I think it's better to visit if you can.</p>
<p>Mine only applied to colleges she visited. Slept over at the two finalists (and another school that was far away). Chose one of them.</p>
<p>We felt it's a lot of time and effort to visit, but it's an important enough decision for her that we thought it was worth the effort. I still think that.</p>
<p>Visits were crucial. School at the top of the list went to the bottom. School near the bottom flew to the top.</p>
<p>If I had to do it all over again, I'd try to figure out a way to do a Thursday night overnight at every school.</p>
<p>Sometimes its just too difficult though, especially if you aren;t from the area. </p>
<p>I actually eliminated two schools on my visits (MIT and JHU), but my regret is not having visited more schools (especially Dartmouth, Duke, Amherst). I think I left out a category of schools I would have liked much more than many of the schools I actually ended up applying to.</p>
<p>I would go so far as to say, make sure you make a visit to your safeties a priority! If your safety school is a rolling admissions state school that admits strictly on stats, then you are pretty safe in ignoring this advice. However, kids who thought they were shoo-ins to certain places were rejected if they hadn't visited and showed a high level of interest(especially if they lived within 150 miles or so). There was just a recent thread discussing the addition of demonstrated interest as a factor in the Common Data Sets of many colleges.</p>
<p>Sometimes visiting after admission is better....the tables are turned so to speak. The student no longer has to worry about making a good impression--the school does! Nothing like being courted. </p>
<p>We've done it both ways...my DS selected a school he visited only after admission and my DD selected a school she visited only before admission. Both work.</p>
<p>Would advise applying without visiting to places that are perhaps too far away or have just one college to visit in a disparate geographic area. Tulane for example.</p>
<p>With CC, college web sites and newspapers and sites like WWW.Campustours.Com there is far more information available than back in the dark (pre-Internet) ages.</p>
<p>We waited too long to start our college visits: spring break of Junior year. As a result, it became a whirlwind trip. For D2, we will start earlier, visit all possibilities, narrow down the contenders and then make return visits, after acceptances (if not ED) if necessary. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually looking forward to going through it again. I loved bonding with my older daughter during the process and it was great fun.</p>
<p>On-campus visit/tour is what turned me from Harvard EA to MIT EA. I wasn't even considering MIT before then.</p>
<p>I never toured the universities I applied to--husband didn't either. We thrived despite that miss.</p>
<p>As parents, we took S1 to tour 7 schools in the US. He applied to 4, 2 of which he hadn't visited. He added the 2 based on the depth of course offerings listed on the web--and their similarity to the 'type' of school he liked on the tour.</p>
<p>As another CC parent noted, (mini?) thousands of passionate Phds have been created in the US. Many are now teaching at colleges and universities. </p>
<p>Put a student in a city/location that Phd's enjoy, and bingo presto, it's hard to miss the education at hand.</p>
<p>I applied to 18 schools and only visited one before the applications were in. I will visit other schools if I am admitted. Sometimes, it is simply not economically feasible to visit colleges before applying, especially if one is applying to schools in various regious of the country.</p>
<p>Applying to 18 schools might not have been as necessary if you had visited enough types of school to narrow your range of interest.</p>
<p>Financial aid is a huge concern for me, so I thought it wise to cast a wide net. Also, the common app makes it very easy to apply to many colleges at the same time. If I had it to do over again, I would not do anything differently.</p>
<p>Are you in a position to judge the results in a historical prospective already? Once the process is over, please share your conclusions as to whether the financial and intangible cost of all those applications was worth it.</p>
<p>Whereas, as I've noted before when this subject came up, D found a huge value in visiting before applying, as it totally reworked her application list, dropping her previous #1 choice (among others) and adding new ones in their place that she wouldn't have considered. The cost of visiting, while expensive, as a fraction of the four year total cost (investment) was relatively insignificant, certainly less than five percent.</p>
<p>S applied to MIT, which he'd visited at the age of 12, and CalTech, which he'd never visited. He was applying out of his junior year, so we had another year if things didn't go his way. He made the point that "I'm not going to get into both, so visiting doesn't matter." He chose the schools based entirely on what he wanted to do with his degree, ignoring the four years he'd actually spend there. My husband, who'd chosen his college (RPI) the same way, thought this was fine; I was horrified (as was his sister).</p>
<p>In the end, he got into MIT and not into CalTech, and he's mostly been happy there, although the weather was an enormous shock after his high school in Hawaii.</p>
<p>I think visiting matters most when there are a large number of possible choices. My D visited about 20 schools in the end---although some of them were just "is this the kind of school I want?" visits, during fall of her junior year.</p>
<p>On waiting until admitted:</p>
<p>After my daughter got her admissions she wanted to go back and re-visit her "finalists". We found that this was not convenient for her/us during this period due to her school obligations at that time, and our work obligations. She only made it back to one school.</p>
<p>That was enough for her, but others who put all visits off until admitted please recognize that this could cause some inconvenience at that time, and the number of schools you have time to visit by that time may be quite limited due to your other obligations.</p>
<p>When visiting earlier, we could plan the trips at our own convenience, eg during a school break, not bound by the reply date deadline, irrespective of whatever else might be going on at the time.</p>
<p>Reading the replies, I am thinking it greatly depends on the child's personality. Research types can read descriptions on the internet, make lists of pros & cons, assign each a number value and decide from the total. The touchy-feely types will need to see the school, "feel" the atmosphere, talk to students and maybe spend a few nights in the dorm. Some kids can be happy anywhere and others will be more particular. So again, it comes down to fit and the practicality of making the visits.</p>
<p>We visited eight or ten schools over a period of several months. In September, when we visited the last school, DD scheduled an overnight at her top choice (at the time) school as we would be passing through that city on the way back from another school visit. When we originally visted that school on one of the junior days last spring, we all absolutely loved it. For almost a year, we really thought that was where she would go to college. When she overnighted in September, she removed it from the list completely. It was totally different than what she had expected or hoped, and having just overnighted at another school the night before, she realized what had been her first choice for months was no longer a choice at all. She applied to two schools only, was accepted to both, has overnighted at one (loved it) and will overnight at the other in a couple of weeks. I can honestly say that the visits, and especially the overnights, gave DD some real insight on a place where she will be spending the next four years. Good luck.</p>