<p>I am not an anti-visit fanatic. I think somewhere in this thread I called them a “necessary evil”. I took my kids on visits (and loved it); I visited the colleges to which I applied. My main point is that visits produce a lot of extremely vivid information about things that may not matter as much in the long run as the things that are less easy to suss out on visits. Also, that making decisions based on all that very vivid, but trivial information is not really rational.</p>
<p>Visits are great when they help get a kid excited about the future, focused, and feeling comfortable about a college that, objectively, meets his or her needs and goals. Visits are less great when they produce irrational responses based on how things look, not how they’re lived. I think visits should be taken with few tablespoons of salt, that’s all.</p>
<p>Also, while we’re at it, thanks to the poster up thread who said plainly why “isolation” is not necessarily negative. That’s one of the problems with a visit: it’s easy to see that there’s nothing around a college, and much harder to see the rich internal life of the place.</p>