@cptofthehouse , Staying in Texas is an option. I was just noting that it takes a long road trip or airline tickets to visit schools outside of Texas. We are in Austin so she is familiar with the U of Texas campus. Southwestern and Trinity are not that far. Either is Rice but Rice is extremely hard to get into. U of Texas Austin auto admission for now the top 6% makes is unlikely my daughter would get in since she goes to a very competitive high school.
At this point she hasn’t narrowed it down to a field of study and I certainly don’t want to push that this early I. High school.
I took my older son on a spring break tour on the opposite coast junior year. He was a good sport, but he hates traveling and in the end he said, “all dorms look the same, I only care about CS programs, I’m done with visits.” Come spring senior year he got into a bunch of colleges (but none of the California ones!) and he was much more invested in actually imagining himself at one of the choices. It was a bit hectic that April, but it worked out. He’d done three years of CTY so he’d been on smaller campuses, even if not when college students were around.
Younger son really enjoyed visiting. We went to two nearby ones during the February break, two more during spring break, and three in DC fall senior year. He also went on a couple of day trips with friends. I think sophomore year would have been early for us. This kid had been on his older brother’s college trip when he was in 8th grade, but they had no overlap in school as he was not a STEM kid at all.
During my twins freshman and sophomore years in HS we started by bringing the family to alumni reunion events at my and my spouse’s colleges. During those trips we also did some drive throughs for other schools in the area or along the way. We didn’t do official tours until spring break junior year and then again over the summer. Perhaps you too could combine a college visit with other travel. For example, if you go visit a relative or vacation in New York, tack on a college visit or two.
We started sophomore year but then hit it harder summer before junior year. We started even before that going to Detroit to visit family and stopping at Michigan for lunch and just walking around. My wife went there so we visited her dorm. Then we used several different sized colleges local to us (Chicago) to walk around and lunch. Quickly we could see a small lac for my daughter and a large university for my son.
While visiting if time we tried to do something on campus. For my daughter seeing a play or musical performance was important. We also kinda tried to make this more vacation like but there was a few days my daughter felt dragged around. But it was the east coast so that was a win for her.
The more important thing was not the school but the “fit and feel” of some sized colleges.
If you do this takes notes. All the schools seem to blend at some point.
We worked college visits into summer vacation, spring break, and school holiday trips starting sophomore year. We did an east coast swing with stops in Philly, NYC, and places in between. We did a California swing with stops in LA, Malibu, and at the Claremont colleges. We also spent time at Disneyland. We did a midwest swing with stops in Chicago and STL. In all of the major cities, we did fun things as well as tour colleges. We toured a variety of schools from Ivies, research universities, to LACs in urban and suburban environments. My daughter knew she did not want to go to college in a small town/remote area so we avoided those places. We have family in Atlanta, so we combined a visit to Emory with an Easter weekend family visit. We also took a driving trip to Dallas and checked out the schools in that area. My daughter ended up in our hometown at Rice. At first she did not want to tour Rice because it was too close to home. We convinced her to go take a look on Presidents Day holiday from school junior year. Once she toured the campus, she was sold.
@Houston1021 just reminded me. We did try to see 2 colleges if they were close enough in a day. So Georgia Tech admissions talk was in the morning and Emory was in the afternoon. Lots of people from GT were at the Emory talk. The AO gave one of the best most realistic and humorous talks of any school.
You can get some idea of what a kid likes from local school visits before investing the big bucks on OOS faraway trips.
But kids change their minds a lot and quickly. Quirky too. I’ve seen kids who insist they hate Big State U , love another Big State U, and as an adult we do a ??♂️
I suspect it can be helpful, both in setting aspirations to motivate extra effort and in ruling out some possibilities.
But, one of our experiences was quite different – we did everything during a gap year after HS. ShawSon was having a medical issue and was also severely dyslexic albeit ridiculously gifted. In order that he make it through senior year, I suggested we wait on college apps and standardized tests until his gap year, when he would have his surgery. He had time to do his apps and standardized tests. Moreover, he told me “I don’t want to do college visits because I don’t want to fall in love with a school with a 10% probability of accepting me.” So we did two college visits total. He said he would use his time to apply to extra schools and visit his top candidates after they accepted him. It worked – he got in to very good schools, did well at the school he chose, and is doing very well in life.
S16 started visiting schools the summer before Junior year and visited 7 or 8 schools in total by end of junior year. D18 visited 7 or 8 schools all during junior year. Both kids had a pretty good idea what type of school they wanted which was a relatively large research university with a liberal arts focus for undergraduates. Both kids wound up applying only to schools where they had visited. Both were fortunate to be accepted EA to their top choice so we didn’t need to visit any other schools after December of senior year. Overall, we enjoyed our college visits; they were fun and good family bonding experiences. They were also a good opportunity for the kids to compare the different schools where they were applying and to decide on a top choice for EA.
I just thought of something. We did our first tours the summer before sophomore HS year. And good thing. One college of interest to DD, required three years of labs science for all applicants. If we hadn’t known that before 10th grade started, DD might not have met that requirement.
Of course now you can find out those required courses for admissions on most of the college websites…but that wasn’t the case always in 2003.
@ultimom
You might want to check with the school counselor. Good school sends more than 6% to UT Austin. There are a couple of them in Austin have 20%+ admittance rate. I am not talking about magnet schools.
Back in the pre-2003 stone-age we had this thing called “books”. And colleges had things called “viewbooks” and “catalogs” that they were quite willing to send off in the mail, free of charge.
This meant that after my non-college-visiting son had selected his college and enrolled, I had several boxloads of stuff printed on paper that ended up in the recycling bin.
I even remember back in 1968 knowing exactly what my top choice college would require of me for admission. It’s really amazing the things I could find out and figure out back in the days before the internet had been invented.
I think it’s worth getting in some visits early to get a feel for how they’re structured, allowing time for questions to develop in the student’s head that only comes with time, etc. But before Junior year, I wouldn’t make a substantial investment.
My older D visited a couple of local colleges as a Sophomore, when we had free time, to get a feel for types of schools. Those visits helped her know what to expect and what she wanted to know/see/ask about when we started traveling/taking time off to visit Jr/Sr years. She had much more focused expectations and specific questions at that point.
Fortunately, my younger D went along and has learned a lot through observation. She’s also had competitions/workshops/etc at CMU/MIT/Princeton where they weave in information sessions, so we’re much better prepared for the second iteration.
So “start visiting or hold off”? I’d start low-key local visits and hold off on big investments of time/money until later.
I would say that if your child doesn’t know what they want to major in yet, that I would in sophomore year visit a Big State School and a smaller school. She which she prefers. Then I would wait until junior year to see what she is taking APs in (that will give you a clue as to her major area) and what her SAT is and then see more schools in the type she likes.
Hm. S19 was undecided when he was looking and I expect D21 will be as well. And something like 70 percent of kids change their majors. I’m not big on looking at schools by major. Even if we did have a child who was leaning towards a major, I would be checking out what else the school offers and how easy it is to change majors. Visits can help narrow down a list even if it’s just by location and vibe. Major doesn’t have to be the starting point.
Our kids are 4 years apart and it made it fairly easy. For S1, who had enrolled in early (4 year) college, there wasn’t much to do. He stayed at his early college school and finished at 19. He would have lost most of his college credit at other universities, so he decided to stay. S2 was more both easier and more difficult - a near perfect student, 36 ACT, loved sciences, and was convinced he wanted to study Chemistry. (At this point when S2 had finished 10th grade, S1 was looking at grad school) . We showed him salaries of Chemistry vs Chemical engineering (about a 40K difference!) so that narrowed down the college visit list considerably.
We started out with our state flagship (Michigan) , which he really liked. We combined family vacations with college trips for the next 2 years, visited a bunch of Ivys & MIT, Vandy, Rice, Bama, UT, GT, and some California schools (Cal, Stanford, CalTech). We had relatives almost everywhere so he got to see them too. Dad (me) went crazy on the BBQ - (which the whole family loves) as we headed south- that’s about the only thing we ate. He quickly knocked a bunch of the list, did his apps, and got into almost everywhere he applied except the Ivys & Stanford (no surprise, Asian family)
Where did S2 end up? Michigan. So did most of his friends. S1 went to China for grad school. But we had a great time on those family trips. And I finally lost the BBQ weight, but I still dream about Archibald and Woodrow’s in Tuscaloosa.
We started visits soph year. Local (within a few hundred miles) could be done on a long weekend, or school vacation. Other visits took planing. I did most of the preresearch to find schools with kids majors, etc. With one kid we did a 2 week road trip (well D and S did), with kid #2 I did most of the traveling. Kid #2 was a D3 athlete and we needed to not only find academic fit but a team that appealed to her and a coach that wanted her. Her visits cost a lot. We flew all over, drove many hours and spent a lot of money. The earlier you start looking, where you will get merit/FA, where is a good fit etc, the more you can narrow down the schools. I suggest doing the urban/suburban/ big vs small school visits in the fall. Start with local schools, go to football games, attend theater productions, etc and see what she likes. Go to schools within driving distance, make a weekend of it. Definitely have her take SAT/ACT now. Work on the areas you will get the biggest bang for the buck. Good luck
I agree that sophomore year is probably too early to be doing college visits per se, although even before that, we did send our son to a couple of summer college sports camps, primarily because we live outside the US and wanted him to get some general idea what a US college would be like. All of those camps were at large universities, and in the end it was very helpful because the first time he set foot on a smaller LAC campus, he had this immediate reaction like “Ah, this is more like it!” so by the time we started looking seriously we were able to narrow the focus to smaller schools. But I think that’s probably all you can really hope to accomplish before junior year, when you will start having a better idea about GPA and SAT/ACT scores and your daughter will start thinking about college more concretely. We ended up doing all of our targeted visits in two bursts during Spring break junior and senior year.
