My neighbor spent > $10,000 in college trips to east and west coast and in the end kid went to a school in Midwest because he didn’t get into targeted ones on coasts. I was wondering if one really gets much out of it? I would rather just do a post acceptance trip to top two three choices before making a decision. Is there any benefit that I may miss?
$10,000 sounds like a bit much (IMO)
but visits are essential again IMO.
you are going to spend 4 years at the school you should take a tour first.
you may not even apply to a few after seeing them.
They went as a family of 4 so airfares, hotels and dinning out must be adding up. They have no reason to give me an a wrong figure.
Applying to colleges is much cheaper then a visit and then again, getting into top 20 colleges is a lottery so why bother flying out unless decision is in your hands.
We just did a trip and we learned a great deal.
For example, D really liked CMU based on the local info sessions but hated the place in person. The buildings were shabby, the tour guides were lifeless, and there was a real difficulty in taking classes outside of the specific college you were admitted to. D is interested in majoring in science but is also a talented artist. They told her she would be able to only take entry-level art classes, assuming they still had open spots. Big turn off.
“They went as a family of 4 so airfares, hotels and dinning out must be adding up. They have no reason to give me an a wrong figure.”…
I was not questioning their honesty in the cost. I was just saying I would probably look to spend a lot less and get the same trip accomplished.
I believe that college trips are definitely worth it. I visited 5 colleges on the East Coast (I’m from the midwest) over spring break, and I was able to eliminate 3/5 colleges. This would have saved me so much time in applying that it was totally worth it. Mind you, I was in a family of 4, but we drove, instead of flying.
A lot can be learned in your surrounding area. Within driving distance, visit a couple of large universities, a couple of small colleges and a couple of medium size colleges just to get the feel of the size of the potential schools. Visit public and private, urban, suburban and city. You can then help to narrow down the comfort level of size. Get your child thinking about if they really want a highly spirited school (which would typically have a division 1 top sport like football or basketball) or if class size and access to professors is more important (a small to medium size school, or an honors program at a larger university). Also, potential intended major: engineering or math or maybe interested in a more liberal arts direction. If you are interested in introducing your child to another part of the country for consideration, you can do a long weekend tour of several colleges in a collective area, minimizing costs.
Sounds like they were visiting all reach schools. For reach schools, it can make more sense (depending on your disposable income) to wait until after receiving acceptance to visit. Elite schools don’t track level of interest so whether you tour or not does not impact likelihood of admissions. And rejection may be even harder to bear if a kid has fallen in love with a campus.
With my kids, the target was merit aid - they applied to all schools that were safeties or solid matches. We visited ahead of time to make sure we had a solid list of schools that were good fits. We knocked a lot of schools off the list that way, and some we thought were long shots moved way up. Only one school was guaranteed aid, so the kids needed to make sure they had enough other schools so they would have good odds of enough merit aid from at least some of them. We then went back for admitted student days at the top 3 schools. These were all schools that tracked level of interest, so there was benefit in admissions from visiting as well as for our own benefit.
We traveled very frugally, and only one parent went with the one kid on the trips. We also clustered schools for efficiency. I would have preferred to spend that money on a real vacation 
but I don’t regret the trips - both kids ended up with great choices.
I probably spent $4000 on visiting colleges but my D and I considered them “vacations”. The one that was most expensive included airfare and car rental and 4 hotel nights but it was a lot of fun and we were able to see Amish Country (PA) and the Gettysburg area. We visited a total of two dozen schools, including our home state of MA, ME, VT, Upstate NY, CT, and RI. The only school D applied to but did not visit was in TN.
My feeling is that, even at some highly selective schools, interested is considered. Two years ago, when we were on the college tour, only Harvard, MIT, and Yale didn’t take record of visting students. All other schools took down students names. So I am of the opinion that it is more important to visit selective schools for the purpose of showing your interest.
It’s extremely useful to visit a broad range of schools prior to application, but it certainly isn’t essential to visit all the ones you’re considering, nor is it essential to drag along the whole family. We did most of our visiting within driving distance of our immediate area (easy where we are, not easy everywhere), generally speaking one parent with the prospective student, or if we had traveled to another area for some other reason (family vacation/visit). The one exception was a trip to Ohio involving airfare and hotels, party of two. That was because there were so many potential schools there within driving distance of one another we felt we could get a lot of bang for our college visiting buck, and indeed we learned a lot and considered it well worthwhile.
In the end, my kid had only visited half the schools he applied to, and his acceptances and rejections were evenly distributed amongst the schools he had and had not visited. (Interestingly, so were his top contenders.) But visiting informed all those choices – once we knew what TYPE of schools he liked, we could pick the rest out of the book.
I think not visiting a school within driving distance would be a strong strike against an applicant. Not so much with schools that require a significant travel investment.
And when all the decisions were in, we did four more visits: Two to schools he’d never seen before, and two revisits. Decision still pending, but that’s how it shook out.
It is worth it if everyone going on the trip actually wants to be on it. Don’t drag anyone. I tried to do this with my younger kid, thinking it would save trips later and it ended up being a downer for the rest of us, having someone there who didn’t want to be there (she also felt gypped at having to do them early). We have only visited schools within driving range so our costs were pretty low–a few nights hotel, gas, and meals. I can’t imagine spending 10K on this however, it must have been discretionary income and they must have treated these trips as a family vacation. I myself treated them as bonding time with a particular child once I figured out only the two of us had to go.
We did visits to schools that were driveable. Would not spend 10k on visits. We did not fly to visit schools. I would try to visit different types of schools that you can drive to. We took our younger child to some, not all, of the trips (we tried to mix in something fun for her at each stop) and she was a great sport. Through the visit process we learned a ton including…
–Both kids were able to better target what types of schools they preferred (ex. size of school, urban/suburban location etc.). This helped us to create a more targeted list of schools to apply to.
–I considered college hunting to be the last great road trips we would take and loved spending time together. I learned a lot about both kids in the trips…what they want, how they process information etc. For example my D would quickly dismiss schools (“too preppy” “too artsy”) while my S took everything in, mulled it over before making any comments.
I think it is important but there are ways to do it more cheaply. $10K seems excessive as is taking the whole family along unless they are treating it as a vacation.
We probably spent $2000 per child visiting about 15 schools each, some short trips and some week long trips. We mainly drove (and drove!), used Priceline most of the time for lodging and got some very inexpensive rates, ate well but not expensively often asking students working in admissions where they liked to eat (think that great little Pho place) and checking out campus dining, had a cooler in the trunk with snacks and drinks for the road trip. Most visits were just the two of us. It was fun despite some long days. Good bonding and, as @happy1 says above, I learned a lot about my kids through the process. We were focused on building a balanced list of safeties, matches, and reaches of pretty much all LACs so I think visiting was a very important part of the process both to measure student interest and to show demonstrated interest. Since we are full pay, it seems like a small, wise investment before laying out $250K over 4 years.
One child was able to discern a favorite and got in ED. The other actually wound up at one of the schools applied to without a prior visit. It was a good fit on paper and was added to the application list fairly late in the game when all the other visits helped narrow down the type of school this child wanted. Upon acceptance, that school was kind enough to fly the student and both of us parents out to campus including hotels and rental car. Smart move on their part to not only get my kiddo but my big chunk o’ money. 
@WorryHurry411 It would be helpful if you said where you are from, whether this is your first child going off and whether the child is male or female. Also what geographical areas are the target.
We thought it was well worth it, and both kids ended up at colleges far from home that were a great fit & experience for them. The time frame is so short in April, students who don’t visit schools before applying often just drop them even if they are admitted because the logistics of visiting are too daunting.
We had just one parent and the kid travel, which reduced costs. We always stayed in the same relatively inexpensive hotel chain where we have a points credit card and they have breakfast, and we often ate on campus in the cafeteria for lunch. We often combined visits with other travel we were doing anyway.
Sounds like this family may have visited a bunch of reaches. Use trips to visit more matches & safeties – the kid is more likely to end up at them.
I agree that it is very helpful to visit campuses though not necessary to visit all of them. D16 thought she wanted the same thing as D14- mid sized school close to a city and originally didn’t want to check out smaller LACS but ended up loving them and applied to several so it was very helpful to get a feel for big, small, city, and rural. We did a 5 day drive to see 4 schools this past fall, and flew to see a few others for the weekend. In each case it was one child one parent to cut the costs. For admitted students visits we switched parents so both got a feel
Two schools were far enough away that we decided to visit only if she got in AND got enough money and since the latter didn’t happen, we are glad we didn’t see them and have DD fall in love for nothing.
So yes, visiting campuses are very important to get a feel for what your child really does want (versus what they think they want) but one doesn’t need to spend an arm and a leg to go to far away places, unless you have the money and want to, unless/until those schools become serious contenders and your child has to make a decision…
I’m not sure if it was mentioned but highly selective schools generally have traveling information sessions and many are multiple school sessions. This is one way to express interest without having to fly out to Houston/St Louis/Chicago/etc if you feel the need to “express interest”.
Did you are your students end up at a college that they never visited?