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<p>LOL. That would make a great movie—Clark dragging Rusty and Audrey kicking and screaming through a whirlwind tour of 25 colleges in 7 days, inadvertently sewing mayhem wherever they went, with a stop at Cousin Eddie’s thrown in for a change of pace. Schmaltz, you should see if you can sell someone in Hollywood the concept. I’ll bet there’s a market for it.</p>
<p>Schmaltz, I’m glad you and your family got something out of the tour. My observation would be that a lot of people want to tell you about the “right way” and “wrong way” to visit colleges, based on their own experience. But kids are different and families are different. People can only speak to you from their experience, and their experience isn’t universal. We’ve done a lot of college tours with our daughters, including some when they were quite young. Some of those trips have been a bit of a whirlwind because there were a lot of colleges we wanted to see, and limited time. Never just strictly drive-bys in our case–though we did intersperse a few drive-bys and/or walk-arounds of low priority colleges among the more substantial visits, and often learned something from them. We never tried to do nearly as many as 25 in a week (or whatever this trip ended up being), but we’ve done as many as 9 in a week, most of them real visits with at least a tour or, when workable, both a tour and info session and some hanging out time on or near the campus. We’ve found this very informative and productive. And we’ve always gotten resistance from some people on CC: “No, your daughters are too young, they won’t be interested.” “Don’t visit colleges in the summertime; you won’t learn anything if the students aren’t there.” “Don’t visit more than 1 a day, or they’ll all blur together.” “Don’t visit more than 3 or 4 in a trip, or they’ll all blur together.” “You can’t possibly see colleges in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England in a 1-week trip; too much driving, the distances are too great, the traffic’s bad, it’s impossible.” “You can’t schedule a tour at Wellesley in the morning and at Brown in the afternoon; that’s logistically impossible” (but in fact, it’s about a 45-minute drive and entirely doable). Most of that advice turned out to be nonsense. Or perhaps more charitably, not nonsense insofar as it was well-intentioned advice based on some other family’s experience, but it was not the best advice for my family, given the time and money constraints we had and the level of our daughters’ interest in colleges in general and certain colleges in particular. And given our Midwestern tolerance for driving longer distances than Northeasterners are accustomed to, and our savvy about how to get from point A to point B in the Northeast efficiently, and to find efficient alternate routes when confronted with traffic delays, based on years of having lived in the Northeast. </p>
<p>It’s easy enough for people in New England, for example, to say you should visit colleges in the Fall, and one at a time. But for people in the Midwest wanting to visit New England colleges, the Fall usually doesn’t work at all for scheduling purposes, and seeing far-away colleges one at a time would consume enormous amounts of time and money; and New England colleges are very close together, making it quite easy to string them together. It’s easy enough for parents to think that because their own kids had no interest in colleges as HS freshmen or sophomores, that must be universally true; but that thought, however well-intentioned, would be in error, because some kids definitely are interested and ready to begin thinking about colleges, and what appeals to them and what doesn’t, as early as HS freshman or sophomore year. I know, because both of my daughters were.</p>