Thanks! At this point, it’s more about seeing what kinds of schools he’s interested in. We can do private, so he has a lot of options, depending on if he keeps up his grades. I HIGHLY doubt any Ivy League schools, but I think he will end up liking smaller LACs, and there are a lot of them.
We live in Chicagoland. Plenty of schools close. Started Fall Junior year at Loyola Chi. This was a visit to see what a college looks like and what they have. Later in the year we did UChicago. D19 wanted to visit Pitt so we made a driving trip to see it in the Summer. Also visited Carn Mellon. Fall of senior year we took a trip to Boston and visited BU and Brown.
Acceptances started to roll in. Put D19 on a train to visit MO S&T as she had good scholarships. Wife and D19 made trip to a small LAC in Iowa.
Oddly D19 ended up at MiamiOH. It was the last place we visited. D19 didn’t want to go there. I made her apply. She loved it.
We drug D23 along to almost every visit. I think the key is to understand the size of the college the student might want to go to. Also urban or rural. A few visits give you that.
I wouldn’t bother visiting Ivies. If you get in and money works you are going to go pretty much no matter what.
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My eldest played basketball and during her freshman year she was invited to play in a tournament in SoCal, so we flew out with all three kids from CO and made a point of touring a big state school (UCSD), small privates (the 5Cs), big private (USC), and a medium sized religious affiliated private (Pepperdine) so they could see a good mix. Between the three of them with different and changing interests, visiting relatives, travel for their sports, specific serious tours and recruiting visits, we ended up touring 51 colleges over 7 years. It all just added up gradually over time. My favorite was going alone with my middle kid for her serious trip. We toured Wake Forest, North Carolina, Duke, Georgia, Michigan, Notre Dame, U Chicago and finally Northwestern (my alma mater). Fantastic trip!
Sometimes I think the parents like the trips more than the kids. I even stay, for work, near colleges when I can - and get my morning exercise walking around. I did UF this week.
If I could be a kid again, I’d try and be really smart and go to Duke. I’ve been to many colleges and it and Virginia Tech take the cake for being nicest. Wake Forest…not so much!!
I went to Syracuse which I think is really nice - but I know others disagree.
Perhaps that’s another thread - nicest campuses - but I got giddy reading about touring 51 colleges - love that.
My kids hate me for it though.
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Oh, wanted to add, if you are able to swing a pre-college summer camp on a college campus those can be very valuable in terms of seeing what dorms are like and college food, campus, etc.
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Agree. One of my kids did a two week thing at UMD-CP. it was a chance for her to see what living in a dorm, eating in a cafe, etc felt like. Plus she got to see a BIG college campus.
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My daughter was able to “tag-along” a few college visits by Sophomore year, joining other friends whose parents wanted to show them “their” colleges, all within a few hours driving range.
Later she and a few friends went to Boston and then to Virginia - touring about 4 colleges each per trip. Again, that was good because she got to see a bigger variety of schools that she otherwise might not have investigated.
Those 3 “scouting” trips were actually helpful, because she started to develop some sense which type of setting she cared for, and which one less so. I believe, out of all those early visits, she ended up applying to 2.
By Junior year, she had narrowed down things a bit, and we went on two trips to tour 5 NE LACs over the course of an extended weekend, and another weekend to tour D.C. and area schools. Those trips yielded 4 candidates.
At this point, nothing more would have been gained by any more travelling. She felt confident enough to apply to a bunch more, based on the online information available.
Once the acceptances came in, she went to the accepted-students days of her 3 top choices, some of which she had never seen, or were just a “blur” in her memory.
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Another strong agree. S21 stayed 2 weeks at Syracuse for summer film camp before junior year. He loved it and got a good taste of college food and dorms.
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I did too many college visits with my D. Saw over 20 schools. Some were just drive-by’s, especially if we were in a town with a couple of colleges. We always did something interesting to make it worthwhile. She visited three colleges after she was accepted, but one of those was an EA decision so it was do-able in Feb before things got crazy.
With my son, we visited far fewer. Seven total, all within four hours drive or less. Of those, he applied to three. Of the four colleges he didn’t visit before applying, he visited two after acceptance.
If I were to do it again, I’d do fewer visits, as I did with my son, and have kid visit one or two after acceptance. That’s a lot of work as it is and kids are really busy with school in March and April. They still have to keep grades up. With daughter, it was mostly me going crazy, but she enjoyed it too.
I loved spending that time with my kids. My hubby took my son to see one college after son was accepted and they did a bunch of fun stuff, including taking in a March Madness basketball game with two arch rivals. Definitely try to fit in something fun if you can.
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Replying to myself here about the summer camps. D22 did a one week residential camp this summer at a school that is on her final list and it was fairly expensive (though definitely not as expensive as college!), but another camp we did summer after freshman year was just a daycamp and was FREE! So look around and see what you find.
A lot of colleges participate in the Splash! program one weekend in the spring and fall where college students teach classes to high school students. Some of them are serious and some are silly like Philosophy from Harry Potter or something along those lines. Check out colleges with Splash programs here: When & Where? :: Current Programs A lot of them were impacted by COVID last year but hopefully they will be up and running in person again soon. They are free or cheap. I think the one local to us was $20, $30 if you wanted a t-shirt.
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We would have done things really differently had there been no COVID. We would have done a rising junior tour in the summer of 2020, probably some nearby tours during the fall of junior year in fall 2020, and definitely a week long trip over winter break in Feb. 2021. None of that happened, other than a few self-tours over the summer of 2020. I really regret losing that - I had been looking forward to it. In the end she toured four of the 6 schools schools she plans to apply to. She saw five others on self-tours where she chose not to go back & do a formal tour (she also did self-tours first at 3 of the 6 on the final list & went back for formal tours, so it wasn’t that she rejected all schools she self-toured); two schools where she did formal tours also fell off the list in the end. She did not visit the two schools she’s applying to that required a plane ride, one is her safety & one is a target, but she wouldn’t choose it over her ED school so we can wait to visit if it becomes necessary. We toured the other four, including one that was an 8 hour drive, including her planned ED school and her second choice. If she had more reaches on her list we likely would have tried to go to more, but once it obvious she was okay with any of the schools on her list and that she was likely to get into several of them, it seemed okay to leave it be.
Yeah - I had decided beforehand that those discontinuous road-trips would serve as the “annual” vacation of the Junior-year summer (instead of a traditional 2-weeks vacation that year.)
Certainly, we had tight schedules - but it also allowed us to see parts of the country we otherwise might have never ventured to. Each college tour was a bit like sight-seeing. Occasionally, we had half a day to explore downtown areas, or window-shop, and at night we splurged on good food. There were actually some good memories I have from those trips.
And because, those was really “her” trips, there was no “are we there yet” attitude - in fact, each triggered more sharing of first impressions, likes and dislikes, during the long car-rides. After all those teenage years with declining opportunities to have “nice, long talks”, this was a great chance to have enjoyable, forward-looking, adult conversations, that didn’t come across as parents lecturing. I distinctly remember having a nice one-on-one dinner, and actually being asked my opinion/guidance by my teenager. 
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We only toured colleges that my kids were interested, had a good chance of getting into, and we could afford. In some cases we combined tours with a vacation. We didn’t do official tours at every school but at most we did. We tried not to schedule too many tours in one day. We learned that the hard way with our D when we schedules two in one day…we had to rush across town to make the second one…