So for those who visited colleges soph year, did you do the whole formal info session and tour or did you just informally give yourselves a self-guided tour and leave the more intense touring for later?
We did a couple of drive-throughs last year and earlier and sat through a few info sessions, including one for a distant university. Only one tour, I think. Now we have learned that the tour is usually the best part.
Many colleges won’t let you interview until junior/senior year.
When kid was home for spring break, He, for the first time, expressed a slight bit of interest in college. Thinks he wants to come closer to home (goodbye, mom’s Ivy League dreams), absolutely no military (goodbye mom’s west point dreams), and thinks he might like to look at X. So, we drove around X one day. It could’ve been their spring break or it could’ve been that everyone was in Orlando watching them play basketball, but the campus was DEAD. He was not impressed.
Wanna trade? 
We signed up and did the full Info session and Tour. Again it depends on the kid. DS19 didn’t mind it. DS17 hated info sessions as they begin to sound the same after a few. He just wanted to do the quick tour and hit the road.
I chose Monday and Tuesday of fall family weekend, so the campuses were busy when we visited. We did spring break tour with DS17 and several small colleges were empty. We prefer visiting when the school is in session.
How do you select each college that would be appropriate for visits and kids have a realistic shot to get admission? Do we ask the high school counselor input that where kid has a chance to attend or do we select based on kids thinking. We are thinking to visit some southern colleges this year but no clue how to look where there might be a chance.
Is it too early to ask high school counselor at the end of sophomore year of HS?
As you know, @infinityprep1234 , I have opinions about a lot of things. One of them is that you shouldn’t be looking at colleges until spring of junior year. Your kid is closer to the beginning of the BS experience than the end; why start shifting the focus now? Kids at BS don’t need to visit colleges to get motivated. I know kids who changed their preferences dramatically from the end of junior year (when many were looking for a repeat of BS) to the end of senior year (when something very different was appealing. )
You can learn a lot about colleges online. One of the most important things you get from a visit is the vibe, and really, what a 10th grader picks up on is likely to be irrelevant by senior year. A colleague’s sophomore son liked a school because it had a pokemon club. That triggered the end of tours for her family at that point.
If you are vacationing and near schools you might consider, it’s fine to visit, and for athletes in certain sports who may need to focus recruiting decisions, it might make sense. But for now, keep your kid in the present. It doesn’t all need to be about the next phase of life.
@gardenstategal your suggestion is very good. Actually change of plans and we will visit colleges after 11th grade. I have talked to daughter and she has no interest in college visits. She did an internship in a prestigious university in last summer, She received another offer to do summer internship so she is all set for this summer internships. Her BS friend has invited her to travel to few weeks in summer where she can stay with her family as stay is totally free, so we will take that offer.
Most of the kids in our daughter’s middle school are the children of immigrants and qualify for a free or reduced cost lunch. Every spring, the 7th graders are split into groups and each one visits a different area college or university. These are kids whose parents might not have even finished high school. They call them “Field Trips to the Future”!
imo, the first step in the college process should be picking up a copy of the Fiske Guide. My family found it very helpful and quite accurate in its descriptions. Good way to start thinking about schools and narrowing down a larger list of options.
@infinityprep1234 – don’t you love it when everything works out that way!!!
At Loomis, although the college office has a few presentations for sophomores and their parents, my impression is that they really don’t want to do individual meetings with student or parents until the student is at least a junior.
I bought a Fiske guide last week and I’ve been taking a few casual peeks at the college-related threads on CC. It is scary over there – so many threads! (Does anyone have any recommendations on good overview threads on beginning the process or on financial aid/financing options?)
It seems like college admissions is so much more competitive now then when I was applying 30 years ago. I wonder if I would have gotten into the same schools I got into back then if I had applied today…
No. There is no way I can get in the same colleges today.
Even my friends who are teaching in selective colleges think they cannot make it in today.
I think what the sophomores can do now is keeping up good grades in “rigorous” classes. Also, reviewing a little before PSAT in October if testing is their thing. There are many benifits to having good GPA and high test scores although those will not guarantee anything these days. I would not obsess over them unless the child is into those but would not underemphasize them either.
I have kids in '17 and '20. College admissions is nothing like it was 20-30 years ago. When schools have admit rates of 5-10% there are a lot of admissible kids who get turned away. And often hard to tell why. Each year has been historic - high # applicants, low admit rate.
For highly competitive schools consider early applications. Some are ED some are EA. ED can be tricky with FA. EA (or restrictive EA) gives you more flexibility to compare offers.
Colleges have different formulas than HS and most here have reported needs based to be less generous from colleges. But with good GPA/grades there can be merit $.
I was speaking with someone not long ago who went to famous boarding school with me, attended a wicked snooty and selective and famous liberal arts college, was part of sports team at college and now holds a top job at a famous boarding school, and they said that today they could not into the boarding school they went to, the college they went to, or make the team at the college they went to, even if they were their own kid. This person has children who go to/went to boarding schools and attend/attended private colleges. At each school they were the first of their family to attend.
The director of admissions from one of those highly selective schools came and spoke to parents at our school. The discouraging part is that the stats that would have guaranteed admission 30 years ago are now essentially required to simply get further consideration. The admissions department is essentially asked to best itself each year, so the kid who won the school chemistry prize 30 years has been replaced with an Intel winner.
At the same time, all the schools are markedly better than they were. All those PhDs from top schools need jobs somewhere, and the prestigious university where they did their doctorate doesn’t need more staff, so “lesser” schools have been the beneficiaries. There are very impressive departments at schools that would not have been considered impressive a few decades ago.
And many schools have realized that one of the fastest paths to being a better school is by “buying” better students with merit money. (Denison, for example, has been doing a great job on this front.) That’s a tide that lifts all boats.
It doesn’t make it less stressful, and if you are from a family that has always gone to “good” schools, you will have to repeatedly readjust grandma’s view of where her grand baby may be going to school, but the rhetoric around there being more than 15 good colleges in the country is indeed based in fact. The hard part is getting your head (and heart) wrapped around that reality before it’s time to start coming up with “the list”. And recognize that not everyone in your family may settle into reality at the same time. (Hint: You, the CC parent, are likely to arrive first!)
What @gardenstategal says is so true. I found the most challenging part of the whole process dealing with “the grandmas”. My mother and my mother-in-law don’t agree on pretty much anything, except how S was looking at schools that were “beneath him”, that the Ivy League is going to hell in a handbasket, and that they can’t understand how S could possibly not have been admitted to every school he applied to. Exhausting.
We just didn’t discuss it with extended family, grandparents included. As I’ve probably said on this forum some point in the past, when grandma can’t distinguish between Penn State and University of Pennsylvania, I didn’t really feel the need to make them part of the college discussion as all it does is add another layer of stress and unwanted opinions. Sorry, Mom. 
Life becomes so much less stressful once you let go of the selective school admission goal, both for you and your kids. And that decision might even increase overall college admission chances.