<p>The kid's counselor advise him to visit some top universities. Both he and I do not think it is necessary. But the counselor insists. Now the question is when you visit a college what you look and what you try to learn from the visit?</p>
<p>Yes, campus visits are most definitely helpful. You’ll pick up the campus vibes right from the time the information meeting starts. You’ll also pick up tips about what’s important there…their mission.</p>
<p>Be sure to eat in a cafeteria. Pick up a newspaper. Talk to your tour guide…ask lots of questions.</p>
<p>There are whole books on this subject. I suggest you and your son read those. This year will be a process for you, a learning process. Sorry, but being the best consumer will help you find the right match.</p>
<p>Read some visit reports here on CC to get an idea of what kinds of things people look for. I think visits are very useful, although probably not absolutely necessary. There are some schools that want you to demonstrate interest, and visiting is part of that.</p>
<p>The most important question your child can ask on a tour is one they ask themselves, “Can I see myself here?” </p>
<p>The most important thing you learn from visiting a campus are things you can’t learn online or from reading brochures - mainly, the campus atmosphere. Sometimes its not easy to quantify or put a finger on it (other times it is very easy). What one student will see as a big plus will be a big turn-off to another student, so you can’t always rely on the opinions of others who have been to see a campus, you need to see it yourself.</p>
<p>And visiting a college and speaking with an admissions counselor is a way to show interest in the school. That DOES make a difference in decisions in many cases.</p>
<p>Look at the Common Data Set (CDS) for each school to see if they consider ‘demonstrated interest’ in admissions. Many tippy-top schools don’t track visits. For those schools, visiting helps your child figure out if they’d like to attend, or if it feels wrong.</p>
<p>If you are on a tight budget but want to show a school you care, your student can do that by going to talk to the college rep when they show up in town. Phone calls and emails to admissions officers or departments can also demonstrate interest, if they’re for genuine questions and they’re from the student. </p>
<p>I believe it’s most important to visit potential safety schools. A safety isn’t a safety unless your kid would be willing to attend.</p>
<p>Campus visits were very worthwhile to my son. On one summer road trip, in which we visited a fair range of colleges just in California, he formulated most of his opinions about what was really important to him in a campus environment and a student body. He found out very quickly that some of the things trumpeted by colleges as “unique” (e.g., student honor codes) were… trumpeted by many colleges as “unique.” And some were really “more unique than others.”</p>
<p>He noticed differences in the personalities and attitudes of students, faculty, and staff at different colleges; this was the most important aspect of all, and ultimately what made his decision.</p>
<p>After that road trip, one college slipped from “first choice” status to “well, maybe for grad school” and didn’t even get an application. And he found his dream college, where he now works himself to exhaustion and is happy as can be.</p>
<p>Visiting colleges made college real to my son. Being there, meeting students, eating the food, spending a few nights in dorm rooms, all helped him to picture himself in the setting and decide whether it was the place for him… and it gave him confidence in his decision and even took the edge of “fear of the unknown” off of his search.</p>
<p>A few thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Don’t forget to check out the community as well as the college. Especially if students tend to live off-campus as upperclassmen, the surrounding area is important. Penn and Cornell, for example, have much in common academically but could not be more different in terms of their surroundings. </p></li>
<li><p>Although the experts say that it is best to visit a campus while classes are in session, a summer visit is much better than nothing. </p></li>
<li><p>It is not necessary to visit every college on the student’s list in advance, but it’s probably a good idea to visit both the student’s likely top choices and his/her safety school. If it turns out later that the student ends up seriously considering accepting an offer of admission to a school that he/she didn’t visit, a visit after acceptance would be helpful. For example, my daughter applied to Northwestern without having visited it, but she certainly would have visited the campus after acceptances came out if Northwestern had been one of the schools she was considering at decision time.</p></li>
<li><p>Students often cross schools off their lists on the basis of a visit (sometimes, even before you park the car), so if your student’s list seems too long, visits are an especially good idea.</p></li>
<li><p>It can’t hurt to start by visiting a local college, even one that is of no interest at all to the student, just to see what the usual visit routine is like. </p></li>
<li><p>You can look on the College Board’s site to see whether a college considers “demonstrated interest” as an admissions criterion. If it does, make sure to visit – visiting is an indication of interest – and make sure that the visit is officially recorded (you do this by signing up for the information session and tour). But not all colleges care about demonstrated interest. If a particular college doesn’t, your decision about whether to visit can safely be based on other considerations.</p></li>
<li><p>Trust your student to use the visit as only one of multiple pieces of data when making choices about where to apply. My daughter absolutely fell in love with Columbia when she visited the campus but had a horrible visit to Cornell because it was a 100-degree day (yes, they have them in Ithaca). But in the end, she didn’t even apply to Columbia because she had strong reservations about its Core Curriculum, and she applied to Cornell Early Decision because it had everything she wanted (and she knew that its climate did not ordinarily run to 100-degree days).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>There are quite a few students happily attending colleges they never visited before they moved in. But it is a good idea for the student to visit and absorb the atmosphere, feel if he fits in there–if you can afford the trip. The student will want to attend a class if possible, stay in a dorm–or at least tour one, talk to students/professors, eat in the cafeteria, notice what kinds of activities are happening and available on campus, and check out the area around the campus.</p>
<p>A school can look just right on paper and feel completely wrong in person. It’s like buying a house–there are those that seem to meet all of your requirements/preferences, but for some reason give you bad vibes when you walk in the door. Or the house is great, but the neighborhood is all wrong.</p>
<p>Another analogy: A lot of people have no problem with arranged marriages because they are determined to accept that spouse and make it work out.<br>
So, your kid has to ask himself, if he doesn’t visit the college–Would I be willing to stay at this college even if it doesn’t “feel” right? Am I determined to accept the school, look for the positives, and make it work? Maybe the student isn’t so concerned about the social scene and is looking at academics only–still, a feeling of belonging there and enjoying the atmosphere will make his college years more pleasant.</p>
<p>I believe it’s pretty pointless. No school I visited has ever surprised me; I knew pretty much exactly what they would be like before I ever got on campus. No campus visit ever changed my mind. Although I suppose if a kid has never been felt a particular climate/season, it might be worthwhile to experience them.</p>
<p>“I believe it’s most important to visit potential safety schools. A safety isn’t a safety unless your kid would be willing to attend.”</p>
<p>I strongly agree, and I would add that the smaller the school, the more important it is to visit and meet current students.</p>
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<p>It’s also important if a student has never been on a college campus and doesn’t know what one is like or if a student from a rural background is applying to a city college or vice versa, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Thank you you all for the information.</p>
<p>There are a few Ivies, Northwestern, Washington U in St. Louis, and U of Chicago. Since the safeties are close and in state, we did visit them. Visited Northwestern twice, when he was young (11 and 12). As Ray192 said, we do not expect anything surprising to visit any University. Both my son and I think we do not need visit any Ivies, because we know Ivies must be good. </p>
<p>From what the information your guys mentioned, I think we might visit Washington U, and U of Chicago. We do not know much about them, especially their surrounding environment. May be Northwestern again.</p>
<p>We live in a college town, he takes several dual enrollment classes, he knows college campus looks like.</p>
<p>My older son did not like visiting - he really cared only about the academic offerings of a specific department. He visited a few very different schools junior year and said he could see attending any of them. When he actually had to choose a school he did want to visit and, by the way, ended up turning down the Ivy for a much lower ranked school for a school with a top computer science program. The presentations at the accepted students events made it quite clear which was the better school for him, though many would rightfully have made the opposite choice. </p>
<p>All Ivies really aren’t the same and I don’t see not visiting them on principal. It’s silly to apply to all of them. However I also don’t have a problem with leaving a fair number of schools to visit after you are accepted. A word of warning though - 3/4s of the schools will pick the same two sets of days for their accepted student events. Attending more than 3 or 4 accepted student events is likely to be impossible.</p>
<p>It sounds like you are interested only in educational quality and reputation, and not the softer stuff like “fit”, social ambiance, culture, finding one’s sense of home and belonging around certain types of students. It is understandable and nothing wrong with that if it’s not your priority. Sometimes I think these culture/fit things are crazily overrated, very hard for us to discern these differences in advance, or know if they really make a difference in the long run. Beyond small LACs, maybe it really doesn’t matter; that one can find ‘their people’ in any sufficiently large and diverse environment (any college over say 2000 students), and in reality, most students will be equally very happy and have an equally wonderful developmental experiences at any of them. </p>
<p>As an aside, perhaps, I think these soft factors are much more strongly related to the American approach to college which is quite different than most other parts of the world. I only fully appreciate this now that we live somewhere else. Unique perhaps to Americans is that one tends to ‘go away’ to college after choosing the perfect fitting ones, where one is seeking not just a very good degree and great classroom education, but also seeking to have a life changing, fun, growth experience (a special time in a special phase of one’s life). Whereas in most other parts of the world (including Canada, where we now live), the focus is more pragmatic, on academics, and students tend to go to one of the large, public university in their own province and the schools themselves are not that different. There isn’t the search for the ‘whole college experience’ like you find in the states.</p>
<p>My only concern for you would be if your son doesn’t yet realize these differences will be important to him (maybe they won’t of course, but maybe they will but he has no idea yet). It could be he will be genuinely happy and develop just as much at any of these schools, or it could be that he would have a better experience living for four years at one college over the other because of these softer factors.</p>
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<p>Good, yes, but there’s more to think about than that.</p>
<p>For example, Cornell is HUGE in comparison to the other Ivies, and visiting the campus would show just how big it is. Five of the eight Ivies are in urban settings, but the degree of urban-ness varies among them. Brown, for example, feels much less urban than Penn does. The areas surrounding some of the Ivies (e.g., Penn, Yale) are sufficiently downscale that they might make some students feel uncomfortable. The area surrounding Princeton is so upscale that other students might find that to be a problem. The difficulty of transportation in and out of Dartmouth and Cornell might be an issue for some people. Seeing and learning about the housing arrangements might be particularly important at those Ivies where everyone, or virtually everyone, lives on campus all four years (e.g., Columbia, Yale). On the other hand, seeing the housing options in the surrounding area might be particularly important at those Ivies where practically everyone moves off campus as an upperclassman (e.g., Penn, Cornell).</p>
<p>Lots of colleges are good. Not all of them are well suited for a particular student.</p>
<p>You can always visit after an acceptance. Getting into some of these schools is like rolling dice so there’s no great reason to get excited before something is definite. </p>
<p>BTW, I don’t think the areas around Yale or Penn are that “downscale.” The central part of New Haven, for example, has improved quite dramatically. It’s not Cambridge or Princeton but it isn’t what it was in the 1970’s.</p>
<p>Is the counselor providing a stipend? We did not look at the college my daughter is attending until after she was accepted, but we looked at many others before the application season. I think that looking at colleges lets a student know whether they like urban or rural and the size of campus they like. </p>
<p>The funny thing is that before the whole process started, she thought that she wanted a small, liberal arts college and as the search progressed, she decided on a larger city school. I would also add that she did not “fall in love” with any school. That was a good thing because then it was much easier for her to follow the money.</p>
<p>^I like this idea of post-acceptance, for lots of reasons. How much time is usually available for visits post-acceptance? I just realized I don’t have a clue.</p>
<p>Starbright, if a child applies to schools for EA or rolling, they can have months to look. If it is the April 1 decision, only a month.</p>
<p>I did not have time to take my son on a college tour, and I also did not want him to get his heart set on any of the very selective places he was applying given the likelihood of rejection. He is fairly adaptable, so I think he could fit in most places. He was happy to make his choices on where to apply based on academic reputation and what he could learn from the schools’ websites, friends who were attending, and so on. I have cleared some time this month in case he wants to visit his options post-acceptance.</p>