New member to this board, and to the process of researching and visiting college. I’m finding that as we identify colleges for our two HS kids, the best way to do our “due diligence” is to visit the school. But planning these trips is tedious, and becoming like mini family vacations.
It would be helpful to hear other perspectives on how you went about planning college visits, announced or unannounced to Admissions, and whether the visits were worthwhile.
Thanks
Thankfully my kids already had a good idea of what they wanted in a college as far as size, geographic location, rural/urban, and so on, so I felt they had a pretty good list to begin with. We tended to not take everyone along to keep costs down - H and I took turns taking each kid to visit schools. We did our visits while schools were in session, as you can get a better vibe that way.
We didn’t do any unannounced tours - we always did the official tour, and then wandered around on our own some after. We visited most every school before the kids applied, as we were targeting merit money so we had confidence they were on the higher end of acceptance and we weren’t taking lots of time visiting schools that they might not get into. Some kids who are applying to lots of reach schools prefer to wait until acceptance, so they don’t fall in love with a school and then not get into it.
For my kids, the tours were immensely helpful. They both knew it when they stepped on the right campus. They also were able to skip applying to schools that didn’t feel right, which gave them more time to focus on the schools they liked. There is a risk that bad weather or a lousy tour guide will turn them off a school that is really a great fit - but I’d rather than than apply to a bunch of schools only to visit later and find out none are a good fit.
We did revisit top schools on Accepted Student days. The hardest part part for us was the long wait to find out what the final cost of each school would be. While need-based aid and many merit awards come with or near acceptance, other, competitive merit awards sometimes don’t announce until into April! If we’d waited until then to visit we never would have been able to get to the schools, with Prom and Senior Class Trip and such.
One word of advice is don’t try to cram too many visits in at once - they start to blur together after a while. Taking notes and pictures will help you remember which schools offered features you liked. It’s like looking at houses - you start to forget which house had the nice cabinets and which one had very limited closet space.
If your kids aren’t sure if they want a large university or a smaller LAC, you might try visiting some nearby schools just to get a general feel, to help refine the list of schools you need to visit (if the kids are looking to go far away).
Thanks Inigo. Great advice. College visits are so different than from when I was at this age, where you had fewer choices, and visits were more informal. The time off from work, expense, etc., is considerable. Taking notes and photos is a must, as you don’t want the trips to blur.
Accepted Student Visits are something I hadn’t thought about (being early in the process). How important are those, in your opinion, vs the initial visit prior to acceptance?
College visits are like family vacations. In fact, if your budget is tight or time is limited, they may have to substitute for family vacations once or twice.
It’s very worthwhile to visit colleges. Sometimes, students get impressions from those visits that they can’t get in any other way. On the other hand, a savvy student won’t make a decision on the basis of the visit alone. For example, my daughter absolutely loved Columbia when she visited the campus, but she later decided not to apply there because she didn’t like Columbia’s Core Curriculum. On the other hand, she visited Cornell on the hottest day of the year, and walking around its huge campus was a miserable experience. But the combination of what she learned during the visit plus what she learned from other sources led her to make Cornell her first-choice school. Similarly, my son greatly preferred the University of Delaware to the University of Maryland after visiting both campuses, but after he was admitted to both, he chose Maryland because it had a much better program in his intended major.
Although it’s ideal to visit during the school year, sometimes this isn’t practical and you may have to visit in the summer. You can still learn a great deal.
If the college considers “demonstrated interest” in its admissions decisions, make sure to sign up for the tour and information session. This proves that your child actually visited the campus – a sign of interest. Try not to ask questions at the information session that can easily be answered by visiting the college’s Web site. It irritates the other people in the room. Also, don’t wear your just-purchased Princeton sweatshirt when you tour Penn (or vice versa). It’s tacky.
Some people here will tell you to try to arrange for your kid to attend a class, eat in a dining hall, and/or meet with professors in their intended majors. All of these things can be valuable if you can manage them. My two cents worth is that you should walk or drive around the area near the campus to see what it’s like. The neighborhood matters, especially if your child is likely to live off-campus at some point.
Marian, LOL with the Princeton Sweatshirt. Huge red flag to admissions, I’ll bet. Thanks for the input, and agreed that “demonstrated interest” is high on my list of why I plan to visit. And fully agree these trips are additional (or replacing) family vacations.
May I ask how you actually planned your trips? I’m spending a ton of time Google around to learn where to stay at all these places, where to eat, etc, and even what to do in between tours. I’ve also learned that my son is very interested in the community around the college, and that that’s (in some way) equally important to him as learning about the school itself. Did you find that to be the case?
We concentrated visits to our state and a neighboring state. Most of our state visits were on the weekend and was during events the school put on for visiting HS seniors. The other visits were limited to just a few. It took place over 4 days and we visited one a day. The only other visit was in a state and was a 8 hour car ride away but we paired that to coincide with a planned family trip. We never did any unannounced visits. Most of the schools required us to register for a tour and an opportunity to speak with admissions or financial aid.
Our daughter ended up choosing a school that wasn’t on her radar before in the neighboring state. Her top school dropped out after the tour because the campus was huge (over 5,200 acres), it was very rooted in sports culture, and very big on greek life. She wasn’t sure what she wanted in a school and I was the one that ended up choosing where we visited other than that one school. Her other top school was the one 8 hours away and stayed in contention until she decided to apply ED to another. Her plan was if she didn;t get in ED she would then expand her applications to outside of our state and narrow down to a top three of acceptances and visit after to decide.
We planned our trips the way we would plan any other trip, except that in one or two cases, we took advantage of the list of suggested motels on the college’s Web site. I don’t remember worrying in advance about where to eat, although that might be a good idea in isolated areas, especially if you don’t rent a car. I suspect that a kid with a smartphone can find the nearest source of pizza anywhere on the planet, though.
My kids weren’t overly interested in the communities; that was my interest. As prospective freshmen, they weren’t thinking ahead to moving off campus as upperclassmen, but I knew this might happen (and it did, in both cases).
I have done this now with an athlete kid and a drama kid. The processes were very different. I am assuming yor son is not an athlete, so will refer mostly to how things went with the drama kid. We started our process by picking a cluster of schools that were different from each other, but were all within the general academic range where we felt our daughter would ultimately fit. One in a city, one in the middle of nowhere, one kind of large, another very small. Each also had somewhat different strengths/reputations. We alloted a day to each school, and also interspersed some non college events so as to avoid visit fatigue. We schedluded a tour and info session at each school in advance. The idea was to give my daughter a cross section of schools so that she could figure out what factors were important to her. From there, we went on two other long trips to visit schools. Once in the fall of junior year sandwiched around her brother’s football game and then again spring break junior year. We also did a few day trips here and there. Over all, I think we visited 16-18 schools.
It does take a bit of time to do all the prep work. We didn’t worry so much about where to stay, I just found a chain hotel on our route and close to our destination. We got some good food advice here, but not unlike your son, our daughter thought the greater area around the college was important. So we would generally schedule a morning tour/info session and then sort of just bum around the college town looking for a place to grab a meal and people watch before heading out to the next destination. This place is a great resource, and you can cut down considerably on the “grunt work” if you are not afraid to ask advice and ideas.
I think the real key when you are planning things out is to not rush from one school to the other. I am a firm believer in one school a day. We only did one visit where we intentionally saw two schools in one day (Bryn Mawr and Swat) and even with those being very small and close together it made the day feel rushed and more work than play. You are not wrong that this really becomes kind of a family vacation (for good or ill) so you might as well take your time and enjoy it. Plus, for the most part we were driving a fair distance to look at these schools. I wanted to make sure our daughter had enough time to be comfortable she had a sense of the place before moving on. No point in rushing through somewhere that is eight hours away from home.
The night before each visit our daughter cursorily looked through the web page/interactive maps of the school to kind of mentally orient herself. And then after the visit, she took brief notes on her iphone of pluses and minuses of each school, and then once the trip was over she kind of discarded some schools and kept others in the running as it were. That turned out to be really helpful, as even after that first trip, patterns started to emerge as to what she liked and didn’t like. So those lists informed her college search from that point on. We started this process in the summer before her junior year, and now as a senior going through the application process she still refers to those lists of pluses and minuses when deciding where to apply. FWIW, she is applying to two of the first four schools we visited.
Best of luck to your son. Although it is hectic, I really enjoyed the time I spent with both kids doing college trips. In a very tangible way it is one of the last times you are going to pile in the family truckster and do a road trip. Have fun with it.
With benefit of hindsight, having done 20+ college visits, I would have tried to break up the trips with more side trips or in-trip breaks. Doing 2 tours per day can get old quickly after 3 consecutive days. On our new England trip, we did spend the weekend in New York, so we had a nice break between the Friday morning tour of Williams and the Monday morning tour of Columbia. We should, for example, have spent more time sightseeing in Boston or DC rather plowing onward with an afternoon tour.
Also, we did really well with getting hotel and restaurant recommendations from Tripadvisor. Sleeping and eating well definitely made the trips more tolerable! Good luck.
@aDadofTwo - Accepted Student Days are typically big “rah-rah” type events where the schools do their best to woo you. However, they do often give you an opportunity to mingle more with faculty and students and get a better feel for things. If it comes down to two or three schools and your kid is having difficulty deciding, accepted student days can help.
As for the community around the school, for my kids that was important. They wanted to be somewhere where there were lots of things to do off campus, but not be in the middle of a city. S was deciding between 2 schools, one had very little within 20 minutes of campus and nowhere to live off-campus, the other was in a small city with most juniors and seniors living off-campus (but within walking distance) and lots of ethnic restaurants, coffee shops, record stores, thrift shops and the like nearby. He chose the school with the more active environment - for him is was totally the right choice. He already felt that way after meeting with the head of the Honors program and the department chair for his intended major, but then the little coffee shop we stopped in, and the record and antique stores we found, cemented things for him. D already knew where she wanted to be - accepted student day was more for me to feel sure too, as she was the first going off to college.
Parent with two in college so we’ve been through this with two very different kids. Generally, we started visiting “types” of schools which were close enough to be a simple day trip or just one overnight. That helped each kid identify important factors in their search. Once they identified some key factors, we branched out geographically. With the older one, that meant one trip was a mini family summer vacation (to Iowa, no less). With the younger one, that meant spring break in 11th grade, 4 schools in 6 days (day 1 and 6 were full travel days). At the end of every visit, kid reported on what his impressions, and we kept notes in research file (he was also a potential athletic recruit, so we were tracking details about recruiting process). To make it more “vacation like,” I had a list of restaurants to try in each town and tried to mix up B&B stays with chain hotels to make it a little more fun for everyone.
I am a big fan of starting with closer visits to minimize the impact on the entire family, and then build a list from there. I also recommend identifying and visiting safeties and matches first – no good reason to have a kid fall in love with Princeton, and then scoff at Lafayette as not measuring up to their expectations.
Good luck, take notes, and try not to do too much at once!
@Midwestmomofboys @Marian (and all posters), thanks for all the great input. I think what has resonated most with me was MidWestMom’s “mini vacation” comment and the need to plan more things to do while on these trips and to find all the best places around the school.
My own experiences with towns like Nashville (Vanderbilt) and Amherst, MA (UMass/Amherst) is that the community is VERY important, as you’ll be living there for years. Some schools have no “College Town” per se, and are self-intact (UConn a good example), but most are situated in a town, and I’ve found that as interested as I am in where my kid(s) will be going to school, I’m equally interested (maybe in some cases more so) as to where they’ll be living and recreating. Partly selfish, as I’d have loved one of my kids to go to Vandy as I love Nashville, but also could envision my kid enjoying that city. And as @Marian said, I too plan these trips like I plan actual vacations, with lots of research ahead of time.
So, researching the towns as well as the schools is, for me, very important, and I find myself on Google as much as I’m on any particular college website. Anyone else share that feeling?
Welcome @aDadofTwo You may find this thread interesting as it is tangentially related to your questions. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1883008-colleges-your-child-crossed-off-the-list-after-visiting-schools-that-moved-up-on-the-list-why.html#latest
My daughter and I ended up touring, driving by, or having very quick walk arounds at 20+ colleges. (Many of those happened because we were already in the area seeing other colleges.)
First, I STRONGLY advise against visiting a lot of reach colleges. Kids fall in love quickly, especially with reach schools. There are usually pretty obvious reasons why they are so popular, and once these colleges are seen, it sets unrealistic expectations for other colleges. It is most likely your child will end up at a match or safety school, and you should focus on those. I will certainly be doing this with my son. Wish I had done so with my daughter.
Second, I recommend three colleges a day, if possible, and if you aren’t turning it into a vacation. I know, most people say two a day. We were on a mission though, and college visits were no one’s idea of a holiday. We visited one first thing in the morning, one midday, one late afternoon. It worked often. Sometimes we could only tour two a day. We Avoided info sessions, as they were rarely useful, with a few exceptions. Sometimes it’s very difficult to skip the info session, but they are usually pretty boring and not that useful, especially when one parent starts monopolizing the QA.
Thirdly, even though we were lays on the move, we always made a point of stopping for a break/drink/food wherever we saw students congregating. We would sometimes leave tours (by saying we had to be on the road by a certain time) if they were heading to the gym, or other area of non-interest.
To answer your questions specifically, always make sure the AO will be open when you visit, so your kid can sign in. Some AOs will be closed for a short time in the summer. Yes, visits when students are in session are much more useful. My D eliminated many schools this way. Drive bys are not super useful, with a couple of exceptions, at least for us.
We planned routes once she had a reasonable list. We grouped geographically. All the colleges in the Bosotn are were done in two days, all the colleges in Pennsylvania also done in two days. Same for colleges in Upstate NY. Some colleges she wasn’t able to visit, and once accepted, she then visited one of them. I would never, persoanlly recommend paying for flights, etc…without planning to make a proper vacation out of it, especially to see a bunch of reach schools, but that is just my opinion.
Tours are best, for sure. There is no substitute for having a student give you all those juicy tidbits that you will not hear if you just walk around yourself. If you do your own tour, be sure to sign in at the AO.
Once acceptances come in, don’t feel obliged to rush back and revisit. Only revisit the serious contenders, or visit the ones you had been unable to visit before, if your child is really interested. They have a few weeks in whihc to cram in visits, and it’s during the time of AP exams, spring sports, etc…
Finally, I highly recommend either Hampton or best western because they have free wifi, usually free parking, and free breakfast innthe hotel. Saves a ton of time and money. (Don’t know if I am allowed to say those chains:-)
Me too. Easy visits for a day or afternoon first, also to get a feel for what they liked. Official visits, with a tour and info session, but low pressure and just nearby or near where we happened to be for some other reason, were the soph-junior visits. We did further away in the summer between junior and senior (no students on campus but it was the only time we could fit those in), and then a couple of senior year fall visits.
Kids did 2-3 accepted student visits. Wish we could have done more but time was tight by then.
Rookie here. But just figure out your budget before you even remotely start visiting campuses. If your EFC, say, is $40,000 per year and you know you won’t have $40,000 per year then don’t casually stroll by say…a famous college in Boston that costs $60,000 per year and respond to your enthusiastic sophomore “sure…that DOES look like a fantastic school. You should apply!”
(not that we did that or anything lol!)
I agree with visiting “types” of schools. Make them start local and see what is in your own backyard or state. Visit different types…urban, out in the middle of nowhere, large and small and get a good feel.
Then have your kid take a practice ACT or SAT at home and get an idea of what is reasonable and reachy for them.
And THEN go visit. We’ve made our visits a fun mix of road trip and tour (Segway tour in DC? SURE!).
Also, dig around a bit on the schools website and see what types of special visit days they may have. We didn’t do that and some of them looked like a great day.
Have fun doing it!
We found visits extremely worthwhile. Agree with visiting different types of schools. The visits helped both kids figure out what type of school they untimely wanted to attend and then allowed them to figure out which schools they really wanted to target.
-Figure out your parameters and don’t look at schools that don’t meet them. (ex. price, geography etc.)
–We always visited schools while they were in session – otherwise you just see the buildings and campus and don’t get a good feel for the place.
–We always made appointments for information session/tour (or Open House or whatever we did). If the school tracks demonstrated interest it is best to do this and have your kid sign in at the school But even if the school doesn’t care about demonstrated interest having the organized tour etc. was helpful.
–We generally used hotels recommended by the school although I checked ratings on tripadvisor before making reservations.
–Never worried about where we would eat. That was something we played by ear. Often college websites list recommended restaurants, the hotel always knows some places close by etc. Sometimes we ate in the college dining hall.
–When our younger daughter came we tried when possible to do one or two things to break up the college visits (ex. when looking at colleges in Phila. we went to the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall etc.)
–Two colleges a day was our max – otherwise they all seemed to blur together.
–Write some notes after each visit.
–Never give your opinion of a school until you ask your child for his/her opinion. This way you will get their gut reaction and not a reaction they create to please you.
–Set up some kind of organization at home (a filing cabinet, a plastic box) to keep materials and notes from schools you are considering.
This is the last great road trip you may take with your college bound child. Enjoy it. Listen to him/her.
We first spent a lot of time researching universities for admission stats, size, cost, and majors, etc. Once we found the schools that best fit our kids’ interests, that they had some shot at getting admitted to, and we could afford, we visited them in clusters. A long weekend visiting 4 schools in the Boston area, a weekend visiting schools in PA and DC. (or MD), etc. We held off visiting the “dream” reach school and another school in a remote location until after learning the admission decisions. (Schools did not consider demonstrated interest).
A couple of times we did two colleges in one day, but those schools were very close together and we went to one around 9 am and the other around 2-3 pm. I think squeezing them any closer would lessen the impact of the visit.
None of our 3 kids had very extensive lists so we were able to do the visits in 2-3 weekends each.
Agree with @happy1 that those road trips with teen can be great fun. We made some as a family but, because of scheduling, I was often the lead parent traveling solo with our kid. We had some hilarious and heartfelt conversations (along with some monster fights in the parking lots of schools) – good memories all around.
Although this is the ideal, a high school student can only miss a limited number of days of school, especially if the school considers college visits unexcused absences. Summer visits are better than nothing, and it’s also possible to apply to schools without visiting them first and then visit on accepted students days if it turns out to be necessary. Waiting for accepted students days can be an appropriate strategy for the student’s fourth or fifth choice schools, say, or schools that are an expensive plane ride away from home.