<p>I'm trying to get a sense of what is necessary to get the actual "feel" of a school.</p>
<p>Do students apply to most colleges without visiting them? With students applying to 5 or 8 or 10 schools, it seems to me it would be impractical to visit "most" schools, especially if they are geographically far apart.</p>
<p>Do you find that, on visiting a school, it generally matches up to the impression you already had from their mailings, web sites, etc.?</p>
<p>It's sort of interesting to me, for example, that Skidmore and Vassar get such different reviews after people visit, although "on paper" it seems they might be in a similar category (although Vassar is more selective).</p>
<p>From what I've heard, many students apply to schools they have not visited, and save the visits for those to which they get accepted.</p>
<p>This could be a mistake for those schools that consider visits a show of interest, and consider such in admissions, but those schools are a minority, IMHO.</p>
<p>I also think visits are one of the more overrated criteria for choosing. There are so many subtle factors that should influence one's choice. Most of these factors can't be teased out in a day visit, or even an overnight. Instead, it's a good idea to read the guides, quirky and anecdotal though they may be, read comments on websites like this, and connect with students that are attending. </p>
<p>For example, what tour will tell you about a college's endless red tape or inflexibility? A tour will show you the newest, nicest dorm, if they show any at all (many don't), not the dump most of the first years end up in. </p>
<p>A tour may be valuabe for some kids, and certainly can't hurt (unless a school gets dropped from the list for superficial, irrelevant reasons), but is hardly essential. In fact, I'd like to hear from others about experiences enrolling sight unseen and the eventual outcome.</p>
<p>I think it's fine to apply to schools you have not visited but I also think that once accepted it is a good idea to visit if at all possible before you make a commitment to attend. How a school feels really can be womewhat different from how it looks/sounds on paper and on screen. It isn't so much the buildings but the more subtler things, like interadtion between students, or tone and approach at admissions offices and sample lectures.</p>
<p>I have hard time figuring out sense of the school out of books. Yes, I read the stats but once you figured out which type of school is your preffered one- how do you differentiate? My D applied to several small LAC and they all same on papers- similar stats, rates, small classes, lots of attention from profs etc. I think only by visiting we can really get a feel.
When I read visit reports here on CC I would like to caution everyone to remember that it is only personal impressions and what one family finds great other can see in totally different light.
When you do decide to visit, make them count. Arrange for meeting faculty member, coach, fin aid, sit on classes, spend some time in library, ask LOTS of questions, look at school magazines/ newspapers- be your own sleuth, it is surprising how much info one can discover. Sure it takes initial preparation and your child probably is not going to be the one who is going to do all that work. Well, that is what parents for. For the last year I have been secretary/ personal assistant to my D and we learned to work as a team. Have some good memories about it too.
You are not going to buy a house unseen, why choose a college specially so expensive nowadays without seeing it? Plus all those trips could be great fun and lots of something you and your child could do together- wonderful projects. Very little investement compare to price you going to pay over 4 years.</p>
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You are not going to buy a house unseen, why choose a college specially so expensive nowadays without seeing it?
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<p>Who suggested not seeing or visiting? I suggested that the visit was overrated, not that it should be skipped, although I know there are satisfied students out there who never visited.</p>
<p>The weaknesses of your analogy are (i) there is a lot more info on a college than on a house, including a lot of objective third party info; (ii) transaction costs are a lot lower with college i.e. one can transfer if one is unhappy (and a lot that visited end up transferring...) and (iii) the investment is usually lower?</p>
<p>Nonetheless, your points are good. The problem is, to use one example, that the class one visits may not be representative; a faculty member mmeting may not tell much, etc. </p>
<p>This is very much a personal matter, your mileage may vary! I've just seen too many cases where extensive analysis still didn't prevent unhappiness, and haphazard approaches that did, to think there is one best approach.</p>
<p>We see a lot of pressure on these boards for extensive visits. I just think we need to see alternatives.</p>
<p>Our experience is that a school on paper, and in reality can be very different. Last summer we were on the East coast for a family celebration and decided to visit several schools that my son was interested in. Only two of the five were as attractive in reality as they were on paper, college fairs, web, etc. This fall, I dragged my son on a visit to a school he didn't connect at all to from their literature, and web site. (Risky business, since he doesn't change his mind easily). The school clicked with him, he felt at home there and it is now his first choice. Had we not visited, he wouldn't think about applying. So at least for us, visits are really important.</p>
<p>That said, I suspect that we will end up applying to at least one school that we haven't visited first. It is too costly for us to visit schools that are no where near us or each other. And with SAT IIs and AP exams in the spring, and the importance of 6th semester its the wrong time to miss school for college visits.</p>
<p>In an ideal world, I'd prefer my son visit every college on his list. In real life, that isn't possible, especially if you're from Texas and are looking at schools in other regions. Son applied to eleven schools in Georgia, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Conn., New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Mass. </p>
<p>Of these, he attended classes on two campuses, had visits to five, but didn't see the final four schools that were hastily added in late October, when his SAT scores increased sharply. Our two-week marathon along the east coast the previous summer had purposely skipped places like these (despite son's desire to see them) because of limited time and the fact that his list seemed top heavy. If son is accepted at a lottery reach (still a long shot), he'll have to visit. He will not accept a college sight unseen. </p>
<p>The visits did help solidify choices and knocked certain schools off the list. But it would have helped more if it hadn't been summer. Unfortunately, he could not do his classes and EC's plus go off in eleven different directions during the academic year. </p>
<p>I suppose one should ideally have a list of four to six schools and visit each one (finances permitting, which is another important question). But if you have a kid who's genuinely interested in some schools with low admit rates (or a family that needs to play the merit lottery game), it's hard to keep the list down in size. And I do think that the number of schools a student applies to may be a factor in whether he/she gets to visit them all.</p>
<p>Ask me again next fall and I may be able to give you a real answer to this!</p>
<p>In hindsight, based on the experiences of my two kids, I think it is useful for kids to spend some time on <em>types</em> of campuses -- anyone considering a very large urban university or a very small LAC should spend a little bit of time on the campus to get a realistic sense of whether those environments are overwhelming or leave them bored out of their minds. These visits can be done fairly early because they tend to eliminate entire types of colleges from the list. It doesn't necesssarily have to be a specific college, just a consistent type in terms of size, location, and prevailing campus culture. </p>
<p>Beyond that, I think that a lot of the early visits shed very little information of importance. The problem is that too much is left to chance -- a poor tour guide or an interview that doesn't click could lead a kid to reject a good fit college. If the kid happens to arrive on campus on the one warm and sunny day of the year.... what will happen when they arrive there later and experience the more prevalant climate? </p>
<p>My son didn't visit any colleges before being accepted -- and that was fine for him. My daughter insisted on visiting all -- that worked for her, too - but her college app list includes several campuses that she has never visited - she prioritized visiting her top choices, but has had little interest in seeing safeties. The interesting thing for my daughter is that I sent her on the east coast visits on her own, and her top choice ended up being a college that wasn't on her list and she didn't plan to visit -- but where she ended up staying a night simply because she could arrange accommodations there by staying in the dorm room of a student friend. I have a feeling that if she hadn't been hosted by the friend, her view of the campus would have been very different ... so you never know. The reality is simply that if she hadn't taken that trip, or stayed with that friend, then she would now have a different top choice in mind.</p>
<p>I think visiting is important. For example, my parents have regaled me with stories about their alma mater for as long as I can remember. When I actually visited, I had a hard time matching up the place they had been gushing about to the place I was seeing...seemed like it has gotten more conservative/preppy/athletic over the years.</p>
<p>I also always imagined myself in a small school, but the size of UT-Austin didn't faze me, while I felt claustrophobic at Scripps.</p>
<p>I still remember how much my daughter liked Amherst from their website and other materials. Then we drove onto the campus and she wouldn't even get out of the car. And she wasn't sure at all about Reed until she visited there.</p>
<p>OTOH, my son visited MIT once before he applied--when he was 12.</p>
<p>Depends on the kid and the school, I guess.</p>
<p>I shouldn't plug another website on here, but if you look at the guides published by <<strong><em>sorry,can't give a competitive website address</em></strong>>, you'll get another whole insight into the school. (If you Google "college reality guides" -with quotes- you'll find it.) Things that are important, like, "How hot are the guys?" or "how friendly are the students?" To see the sort of info that's in the book, you can pick a school and look at sample pages. Anyway, take it with a grain of salt, but we found it interesting and entertaining (and fairly accurate).</p>
<p>My son didn't visit before applying--too many schools and too far away. After acceptances, he visited the top four choices, staying in dorms where possible. Being a music major, he also arranged a lesson with the trumpet teacher at each college--something vitally important for performance majors, since that will be an important relationship once college starts. He also visited some classes, where he could arrange it, as well as some orchestra practices. These gave him a good feel for the music program at these schools.</p>
<p>The campus visits also changed his mind about college size. He had thought he would like a small college. After visiting, however, he realized he wanted a bigger college, because there is so much more going on there--for him, that meant lots of music performances, where he could hear good music, among other things. He found he did not feel overwhelmed by a large campus, but excited about the possibilities. Without the visits, he would have had a difficult time making up his mind, so I am glad he went, despite the expense. (He went alone, both for financial reasons and because he didn't want to be influenced too much by parental reactions.)</p>
<p>I should add that he was able to learn a lot about colleges through websites, mailings, and talking to his trumpet teachers and band teacher at school. Through them--as well as books on colleges we looked through--he was able to make up a quite reasonable list of schools to apply to. Had he not been a music performance major, he probably would not have visited so many schools.</p>
<p>To OP- go on the livejournal community of the school, connect with kids. See if the admission office can give you a student to phone or email with questions.</p>
<p>The feel of a place is important and you can glean some without visiting in person. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the college's publicity dept's spin.</p>
<p>For my son visiting the schools before applying made a huge difference. When we first talked about colleges my son truly believed that the major should be the only consideration and that he wouldn't care about anything else; urban, rural, preppy, Greek, LAC, State College, etc, none of that was important. </p>
<p>Our first school was Drexel. He thought it was great. Technology looked first rate, dorms were okay, programs sounded fine. A couple of weeks later he visited a small LAC in a semi-rural area and he started questioning what he wanted. One more visit to a technical kind of school that had all the computer bells and whistles that he thought he wanted (RIT) and he realized what he didn't want. He decided that he wanted a Liberal Arts education at a smallish school. Of the 9 schools he applied only two have more then 2,000 kids.</p>
<p>If he had not visited before he applied I can pretty much guarantee that his applications would have been to all Drexel/Rit type schools. As it turned out he applied to neither one.</p>
<p>Just the process of the college visits was important to both my kids because it gave them the visual picture of what it would be like to attend that particular college and made them become a little more introspective of what they wanted out of a college. Also, the college applications were fairly painful and it was only the first hand knowledge of the place that gave them the motivation to fill them out. My son's first and second choice colleges had particularly hard essays and I don't know if he would have done them if he hadn't really wanted to go there. In fact, I'm pretty darn sure he would have picked out his college by major and ease of the applications if hadn't visited the ones he chose first.</p>
<p>In addition to web sites that offer student and alumni impressions of particular schools, you can also go to your local bookstore and read through some of the "what these schools are like" books. I don't mean the ones that are largely statistics, but the ones that tell you what student life is like, etc.</p>
<p>You can always order videotaped campus tours from <a href="http://www.collegiatechoice.com%5B/url%5D">www.collegiatechoice.com</a>. We didn't have time to visit all the schools on my son's list, so we ordered five of these. He ended up decided against three of them and applying to two others, in addition to schools we physically visited that he liked. It turned out his final choice, once acceptances were in, was between the two places he had only seen the videotapes for. He then visited ...</p>
<p>I think at least some visiting is important because it can clarify what you child's preferences are. My kids said they had no preference about location or size. When we visited some schools, it became clear to them that they did have preferences!</p>
<p>There is often someone around who is an alum..S or D can them out for coffee and simply listen and ask questions..can be invaluable especially since Alum Interviews are sometimes elusive.</p>
<p>Certain colleges really benefit from a visit, especially women's schools. Take Smith, for example. There are a lot of stereotypes of Smith students as politically outspoken liberals intolerant, to the point of rudeness, towards non-PC points of view. If you spend time getting to know the campus first-hand, however, mostly what you find is a lot of hard-working, idealistic young women who are mainly at Smith to learn and find out what they can do to make the world a better place. And, yes, there IS a healthy contingent of Republicans at Smith (we might not have believed it had we not seen them in person on one of our visits). </p>
<p>I myself was leery of Smith partly because of things I had heard about it, partly because of lingering prejudices against single-sex education because of 6 years in a private girls' school before I went to college, but my daughter had no such prejudices so we put it on the list. I have to say that I was completely won over myself after our first visit there during an 8-colleges-in-6-days sweep of the northeast. My daughter had two more visits there -- one for the fall Open House and one for the Accepted Student Weekend in the spring (during which she spent a night) -- and each visit only confirmed her first favorable impression. She couldn't be more different from the stereotype described above; rather she saw in Smith a place where she thought she could blossom. And blossom she has, because of the many many ways in which Smith supports its students. </p>
<p>So while I would agree that there are many places (and perhaps many students) for which (or whom) a visit is not necessary, or where one could save the visit until after acceptance, there are some colleges that can get a fair shake only with first-hand experience.</p>
<p>All I can say is that from our visits, Smith went from the bottom of the list to the top, and that several other schools went from the top to the bottom. </p>
<p>And yes, it is always possible to hit them on a good day or a bad (either for the school or for the kid), and get a mistaken impression. BUT, to put such responsibility on a teenager without any firsthand impression would seem to me to be a recipe for problems. We want our kids to own the decision, whatever it is.</p>
<p>But, since my d.'s needs were rather specialized, she made appointments with specific profs and program advisors she would be working with if she were to attend, and these made a big difference (and also made it easier to choose).</p>
<p>I think many students might follow KathieP's son's path: you don't know what questions to ask, what's important to you, until you've experienced some schools first hand. Columbia had been at the top of my D's list on paper. She wound up not even applying.</p>
<p>I am a big fan of visiting campuses ... the strategy I am going to suggest to my kids is that we visit a bunch of local colleges to get a feel for which attributes my kids seem to prefer ... urban, suburb, college ... big or small ... LAC or research university ... preppy or quircky liberal ... etc. With that knowledge and also using guides applying to schools far away is not as much of a "fit" crapshoot ... for example, CAL and Stanford are 2 great schools with a lot of similar stats and majors but they are VERY different places ... and difference that can be understood before applying.</p>