<p>This is my third and last time around with my D. DS1 is about to graduate (yay) and DS2 is a happy sophomore at an undisclosed west coast location. Visits give nothing more than first impressions. Useful to give the wide-eyed 17-18 year old a big picture view of type differences, big-little, rural-urban, private-state, etc. Visit one close by from each category and repeat as necessary. Then in March or April, go to the admitted students weekends for the contenders. There might not be more than a few.</p>
<p>DT123, surely suggestion is better than not visiting at all. But in my experience, schools that look very similar on paper can feel very different in the flesh. And, imo, the differences are significant enough that one could wrongly write off an entire class of school based on one or two datapoints. Okay, we were gluttons. Over three years, we visited something like 15. Don't regret a bit of it. Relative to the expense of four years of college, the investment of dollars was down in the noise. And it made a difference to where D applied in the first place, something that visiting after acceptances were in could not have done.</p>
<p>Visiting a college gives a logical reason to an emotional decision. Or is it the other other way around" Visiting a college gives an emotiion reason to a logical decision. </p>
<p>Then to others its the $500-$3000.</p>
<p>Ours, as an high school jr, senior, no. But now as college senior he has the opportunity to visit schools on his way home to OR. But he is still always looking at the capability of the school rather than the environs.</p>
<p>TheD, I see you invested a lot of time in visiting and had a great time doing it. What's not to like about taking time off with your kid and touring college campuses? But consider for a second the possiblity that you can't say for sure what difference the visits made. It's the old "road not taken" syndrome.</p>
<p>In my neck of the woods, there is not that much difference between Oklahoma, UT-Austin and LSU. Flagship state schools. A great education and experience, or bad, can be had at each. Same for SMU, Baylor and TCU. Same for Austin College, Univ. of Dallas, Trinity (San Antone). There are differences at the nuance level for sure, but a reasonable appreciation of nuances is not apparent from an afternoon's visit. Just as likely is a misapprehension of nuances. You can for sure see most of the buildings and open spaces, hear the dean-of-the-day's canned propaganda and share an hour or two of face time with a couple of students there, but what is that worth, really?</p>
<p>One thing I have noticed talking to my sons' friends who went to college in every possible direction, type and level of institution: 99.9% say where they go is great and they couldn't be happier. But what that is a reflection of is that going to college anywhere is a lot more fun than living at home and being a high school senior.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But consider for a second the possiblity that you can't say for sure what difference the visits made. It's the old "road not taken" syndrome.
[/quote]
I do not know about the road not taken ... but I do know my visits solidified my preferences for the attributes for my college experience and switched my #1 choice from the most prestigous school to what before the trips was my #2 choice. Looking back, I am absolutely sure picking the school I did was a better choice for me ... I can not know what would have happened if I went to the higher rated school ... I'm pretty sure I would have liked it and I'm also pretty sure I would not have loved it like I did the school I picked to attend.</p>
<p>Ah, remember days of yore when very few ever visited a prospective college or even the one ultimately selected? I treked off from the Southern Tier of NY to OSU sight unseen and never having even been west of Pennsylvania. No internet online tours, no view books, nada.</p>
<p>The day the University Catalogue arrived I was amazed. It was much bigger than our telephone book and must have had over 200 pages of course descriptions.</p>
<p>And I was not alone. I can recall only one classmate who did any extensive travelling to visit colleges and then visited only two-NDU and Duke. And almost all classmates I kept up with were happy and graduated in the 4 years allotted.</p>
<p>I think we grew up in a simpler time, where we were grateful just having the opportunity to attend any college, where the concept of fit was not in the lexicon, where Cornell(that college up the road a piece) was considered a high cost alternative to the likes of Penn State.</p>
<p>Fast forward to 2003-04 and yes we traveled, visited, toured and gathered info. Did it payoff? Perhaps. Our DS is happy, made good friends, and is doing well. Kinda like what my wife and I experienced in those innocent days of yore.</p>
<p>Hmmmmmmm?</p>
<p>
[quote]
One thing I have noticed talking to my sons' friends who went to college in every possible direction, type and level of institution: 99.9% say where they go is great and they couldn't be happier. But what that is a reflection of is that going to college anywhere is a lot more fun than living at home and being a high school senior.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well put. I suspect that, because these forums tend to attract the more activist parents, we're just not hearing from the folks who packed their kids off to a college sight unseen, so we're missing a good chunk of the dataset. </p>
<p>What bothers me most about the college visiting process is the superficialilty of it all. Yes, even the faculty visits, for the truly intensivist parents, are not going to be reflective of the college on a broader basis. The jerks will not take the time to meet with parents or prospies, for instance. And we just don't know how many jerks a department has. </p>
<p>It is just so difficult to capture the essence of a place in a one day visit, I fear, especially a one day visit that is scripted and guarded by the sales department (sorry, meant admissions, wearing their other hats.) (you think those faculty suggestions admissions gives out come at random???) The fact that the outcome from choosing a college leads to so many satisfactory outcomes may be in spite of, not because of, the visits. Hmmmm.</p>
<p>Now, there is a very good reason to visit:</p>
<p>IT IS FUN! At least it was for us.</p>
<p>newmassdad - i know at my college for tours they take you to the library, to the computer labs, through the halls of the classroom buildings, to the gym area, to the student union and cafeteria, and they also take you into a freshman dorm and show you an actual persons room. They pretty much hit every location on campus with the tour. and the tours are all done by students. (i'm not sure if that's how it is at all schools or not) and they do their best to answer all of your questions. </p>
<p>I also think another thing about actually visiting is you should drive around the area that the college is in.. for example, what is there to do.. is there a bank close by.. is there public transportation.. is there a place for your kid to get a job if they need/want to... etc.. those are some things that it's easier to see in person than online...</p>
<p>DT, I can absolutely say that the actual experiences are qualitatively different from the road not taken. However, the universe of schools you suggest is narrower from an outside perspective that you might think. Against, oh, Smith & Georgetown, the differences between Oklahoma and UT-Austin narrow due to parallax. None of the school you list might have fit my D's criteria at any time. Now, if you had visited Oklahoma, UT-Austin, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Stanford, I bet you darn well would notice significant differences. Similarly SMU, Baylor, Tufts, Smith, William & Mary.</p>
<p>NewMassDad, I agree with one implication of what you're saying: it helps to have a b.s. detector when you visit. It also helps to have multiple sets of eyes & ears to collate and compare info at the end of the day.</p>
<p>
[quote]
What bothers me most about the college visiting process is the superficialilty of it all.
[/quote]
I only visited 2 schools and spent about 1 1/2 days at each including an overnight stay with students ... the tour was a VERY SMALL part of the visit. I believe the time I spent hanging out on the campus and with the students at night gave me a solid read on the students and the culture of the schools ... info that even if I had read would not have been as impactful as experiencing it first hand.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It is just so difficult to capture the essence of a place in a one day visit, I fear, especially a one day visit that is scripted and guarded by the sales department (sorry, meant admissions, wearing their other hats.) (you think those faculty suggestions admissions gives out come at random???)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I dunno how it is everwhere, but the admissions office had little to do with my daughter's contacts with her school. One professor was chair of a department she was interested in, so she e-mailed him and asked to sit in on a class. He invited her to his office, chatted for a while, and set her up with a research assistant (a senior at the school) to show her around and answer questions.</p>
<p>The other professor just happened to be teaching a course that looked interesting. So she e-mailed again and asked to sit in the class. The professor e-mailed back, gave her the reading assignment for that day's class, and chatted with her for a while after class.</p>
<p>The third staff member was identified by searching the school newspaper and website. Spent two hours with my daughter.</p>
<p>The other contacts were a random admissions interview (by a student), a random student tour guide, and a random overnight host, along with a couple of alumni she stumbled across, totally outside of college channels.</p>
<p>Her experiences as a student have been exactly as expected based on her pre-application contacts.</p>
<p>Lots of interesting feedback here, thanks.</p>
<p>I'm intrigued by the idea of using the videotaped campus tours as a first cut.</p>
<p>I'd also be interested to hear what it was about an actual school visit that changed the view you had developed of the institution based on your research.</p>
<p>Was it that the school was supposed to be friendly but no one looked you in the eye? You thought it would be quirky and everyone was dressed the same? or...?</p>
<p>interesteddad, you obviously took a great approach and talked to people outside of those giving any kind of sales pitch. Did your daughter have well defined academic or professional interests? I wonder how this approach would work for kids who are more of the happy-go-lucky type, undecided about what they want to study in college.</p>
<p>I do sense a danger of visiting a perfectly good school, only to get it knocked off the list because of a random incident. </p>
<p>TheDad gave one memorable example, a visit to Smith where a potential applicant was dismayed by the tour guide's description of a dorm vote concerning appropriate bathroom behavior. If this same applicant had had a different tour guide, she might be happily enrolled now....</p>
<p>My daughter's a HS senior. We did a tour last year, knocked some off, put some higher on the list. It gave her a general feel of what she wanted and yes, some of it is superficial. But if you want to be in a certain environment, why not? There are certainly tons of schools to choose from. We'll go back and visit once we know where she got in, but even that won't be exact. It won't be the friends she has, the classes she has or the living arrangements she will have. If any of those are "wierd contacts", like TheDad mentioned, it can change a great school to knocked off of the list.</p>
<p>Here's some more on this, from a past thread. (Easier than repeating)</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'd also be interested to hear what it was about an actual school visit that changed the view you had developed of the institution based on your research.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I can give some examples --</p>
<ol>
<li><p>My kids each thought that going to a large university would be OK. But when they saw some and actually walked around, both decided they would like something smaller, if possible. </p></li>
<li><p>My son was interested in a particular school. But all the bureaucracy and rules that came across in the informational meeting turned him off completely.</p></li>
<li><p>Another school he liked until we visited. It was cold to us but students were walking around in shirt sleeves. There were flags on top of the fire hydrants. When he found out this was so they could be found under the snow in the winter, that was that.</p></li>
<li><p>My daughter was interested in one school from everything she read about it. But with the visit, it became clear that many of the students were commuters. There wasn't much to campus life. Also seeing the rules sheet for the dorms, we found out that certain things (like microwaves) weren't allowed because the wiring was old and they would be a fire-hazard. So they actually have periodic room inspections to make sure the dorm won't burn down ...</p></li>
<li><p>My son decided against one school because the students just seemed to be interested in partying and athletics (it was an overnight visit, so he had the time to talk to a number of folks informally) and there seemed to be nothing in the town of interest ("about in the middle of a corn field," is how he put it).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Great examples, DianeR, they make real the value of visiting!</p>
<p>I think visiting is a great option if you can but I think with a lot of research, soul searching and visiting other schools similar to the school that you can't visit can help, you can still get a sense of a school. For example, with some of the things DianeR mentioned, they could be found out by reading a lot of the reports of the schools and scouring the school's websites for things such as rules and other info. It'd be better to get a sense of it in a visit since you can make your own observations but it's still possible to get a sense without it. </p>
<p>I visited a few schools after researching them and they turned out to be mostly what I expected. It also may be that I'm not the type of student that needs to visit to feel sure that it fits me as I didn't get a strong reaction either way but liked most of the ones I checked out. I think it can depend on the person on how integral the visit is to make sure of. With a lot of source and time and research of schools, I think you can still find the right school for you without visiting. But in the same vein, I think its important to spend enough time visiting and checking out multiple things on campus including people to get a reasonable sense of it. If you don't in either case, it can be inaccurate, messing up your perception of the school and wrong choices can develop.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'd also be interested to hear what it was about an actual school visit that changed the view you had developed of the institution based on your research.
[/quote]
For me there were a bunch of things
1) It made my preference to be in a college town a dominant preference (where it used to be a slight preference)
2) I absolutely fell in love with the physical beauty of the campus and city (again I had a slight preference before the trip)
3) I realized what a great place it would be for a distance runner
4) I formed an opinion on the feel of the student body and which was a better fit for me ... quirky intellectuals vs regular folks who happened to be smart and work at it</p>
<p>My daughter figured out that she wanted:</p>
<ul>
<li>dense urban</li>
<li>classic style architecture (example: Chicago Gothic)</li>
<li>lots of cute boys</li>
</ul>
<p>Looking at the above criteria you might be able to discern why I figure we could have managed ok without the visits, though it certainly caused a major shift in her college list.</p>
<p>This might only apply to LAC's, but using Myspace helped me so much in getting a feel for some schools students. I would simply search for the school, look at some profiles, and bam, I got an idea of what most kids are like. This proved to be a valid method when I visited schools after looking at students myspaces. I got the same impression in real life that I got online.</p>