We did a New England tour last summer and I also vote for car - it will be cheaper and more efficient, especially if you want to visit more than one campus in a day. We did cover Tufts/Harvard in one day using the MTA but it was very tight. You might also consider flying into Providence, renting a car, and flying out of Philadelphia. If you’ve booked on SW, this is easy to change with no fees.
I know that the OP didn’t ask, but I will reiterate the advice offered here because had I known to follow it, we’d have taken a very different trip. We were not well informed about financial aid policies or how selective that many of these schools truly are. So we visited campuses that aren’t really viable for our family as we won’t qualify for need-based aid but can’t really afford them. In retrospect, that was a waste of our time, at least in part. D1 got a sense of what she liked and didn’t like (open vs. core curriculum, contained or expansive campus, urban/rural, LAC vs. university). But if we had to do it all over again, we’d have opted for Mt. Holyoke over Amherst, and Northeastern and Brandeis over Tufts and Bowdoin. The only safety (increasingly more of a match these days) we visited was U Mass Amherst.
I would strongly urge a range of schools in terms of affordability and selectivity.
Whatever you do, have a great time! The art museum at RISD is well worth a visit as is the culinary museum at Johnson & Wales. Harvard is a tourist attraction in its own right
Rent a car and do Brown–>Harvard–>Yale–> Dartmouth–>Columbia–>Princeton–>UPenn. Fly back from PHL.
As a legitimate recruited athlete your daughter should be invited for unofficial visits with overnights with the team. This experience is much more valuable than just visiting the school. They all are different. I cannot imagine talking to 7 schools at once - she should be able to narrow her choices down to at least 5 schools and then explore them in more depth. They are all different in academic requirements for recruits, athletic level and in finaid as well as location and campus vibe. You can get a sense of this without visiting.
I think everyone has covered most of the bases. One tiny correction - the Philly Amtrak station is 30th Street Station - it’s about 6 blocks from UPenn with Drexel University in between it so don’t get confused.
As a city person that doesn’t own a car and takes PT/Trains/Flies I would suggest renting a car and driving the trip. You’ll save tons of money over the various Amtrak fares - you’ll be able to stay in hotels outside the cities with free parking - and it’ll be so much less stressful trying to make all the scheduled departures, etc. NYC should be the only pain/uber expense in parking and if you do your homework shouldn’t be too bad around Columbia.
Just wanted to put one more thing out there. If your daughter is visiting these schools, or at least some of them, as a recruit be aware that your visits are likely to last quite a bit longer than a normal college visit. Also, in my experience, the length of the visits will be variable, and it might be hard to keep on train schedules when your daughter spends more time walking through the weight room/training facilities with a coach. Just something else to think about.
DD was at MIT for the summer and had already visited Harvard (hated it) and Tufts (loved it) while she was there. I flew to Boston and picked up a rental car and picked her up in Cambridge. We drove to Brown next, then Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn. We had arrange to return the rac at PHL and flew home from there. We took 3 days to do it and signed up for tours in advance.
It was not a bad drive with schools only about 60-90 minutes apart.
She had been to Cornell before, and was not interested in Dartmouth primarily because she is a city girl with no interest in remote New Hampshire.
Regarding Dartmouth - there’s no Amtrak to Dartmouth from Boston (there is from NYC) but the Dartmouth Coach is a bus service that leaves from South Station and Logan Airport every two hours daily. It’s around $30 one way and stops in front of the Hanover Inn (at the corner of the Dartmouth green). If you can stay at the Hanover Inn, the Coach makes it pretty easy and very walkable once you’re here in Hanover. The Coach also has a couple of trips to New York City each day. Information is here: http://www.dartmouthcoach.com/
It’s pretty easy to visit all of these from Providence except Dartmouth. You can go to Boston, and then to NYC, and from NYC it’s easy to visit Penn, Princeton and Yale (and Columbia of course). Dartmouth and Cornell are the most rural of the Ivies. I don’t know why your DD has ruled out Cornell, but if it because of its rural nature, she might want to cross Dartmouth off the list too., Good luck!
We did two trips somewhat like this (although no Dartmouth), and I also think it probably makes more sense to rent a car. Having a car gives you more flexibility to change your itinerary, too. A couple of other tips: give yourself enough time for the visit and for getting to the next city. Have some fun along the way. As others have noted, in several of the cities there are other colleges that might be worth a visit. We found it quite useful to visit Tufts, for example. That can be done the same day as Harvard.
@Falcon1, not all National Championship
participants in all sports (or non-sport activities, stuff like History Bowl & Quiz Bowl have nationals too) are recruitable athletes. Example: a pretty significant number of kids get to fencing nationals. Not all are of the caliber to fence for all Ivy teams.
Plus, what if the kid is a recruitable athlete, the kid gets injured in the next 12 months? Or wants at least the option to not play the sport (I have seen recruitable athletes drop their sport when they went to college). Options that are an academic and financial match for the student should be identified.
The other question to ask if the OP’s child wants to continue in college is do all the Ivy schools have this sport? A little googling revealed a National Championship in Providence in mid-June 2016; however, not all Ivy League schools field a team in that particular sport.
OP, you DO realize that the colleges will NOT have colleges kids on campus during the summer, with the exception of Dartmouth, correct? Most will be filled with HS kids at various “camps”, so the only benefit will be to see the physical layout of each school.
If you can afford the time and $$, then have fun. But your $ might be better used IF and WHEN your DD is invited to come by the coach or when she is accepted.
ymmv.
That is probably the best circuit. We hit over 20 schools on a similar trip last year, and tried to see as many campuses as possible. While we did the official tour at a couple of Ivy’s, we also made a point to spend time at schools that might be considered matches and safeties. It was tremendously helpful in identifying types of schools each kid would be interested in (small vs large, urban vs suburban vs rural, research focused vs undergrad teaching).
If you drop a school, make it Dartmouth. It’s campus is very similar to a number of smaller LACs in the areas, except all of the buildings have some amount of green paint. You can get the same feel from someplace like Vasser or a similar LAC. Beware that driving though NYC will take twice as much time as you planned for.
Many of the smaller sports start recruiting in the sophomore year before coaches are legally able to contact athletes directly. You either have to travel to camps on school campus, play in regional or national tournaments, or attend all-star camps to get noticed by a coach, and if you wait until junior year, many of the best programs have already filled their recruiting class.
I like the idea of getting a car, but I would do one thing a little differently.
Don’t drive into NYC unless you’re a very experienced city driver. Instead, I suggest staying an extra day at the hotel you pick near Princeton. Take a taxi to the Princeton Junction train station (because you can’t count on being able to find a parking space at ANY train station in New Jersey), take the train into NYC, and take the subway to Columbia. Allow at least 2 hours each way for this trip. It’s time-consuming, but it beats trying to drive and park in Manhattan.
Also, huge numbers of people visit Princeton and then Penn. Don’t wear your newly acquired Princeton T-shirts on the Penn campus. It’s tacky.
Columbia is very accessible from the Henri Hudson Parkway coming from upstate. After getting off at 125th street “City driving” consists of 9 short blocks along the Broadway. Columbia athletic facilities are at the very tip of Manhattan on 218st. You better have a car if you want to take a peek. It will involve taking Henry Hudson again and then a few more city blocks. You can park on the street there or even inside the athletic facilities. You can cover Columbia in half a day and then hop over the George Washington Bridge towards Princeton.
I have no comments about t-shirts but recruits usually do not buy them until they are committed.
I wouldn’t try to visit colleges before the competition – that seems like a recipe for disaster.
While all of us here in the Northeast probably have ideas about the most efficient route through all these colleges (and more), it’s worth while recognizing that the furthest distance between any two colleges on the list is under seven hours by car, and every single one has at least two others within a three-hour drive. So it doesn’t really matter whether you see them all in the absolutely most efficient order or not. If it saves a lot of money to drop off the rental car where you picked it up, it’s a five-hour drive from Philadelphia to Providence, and maybe an hour and a half from Cambridge.
And yes, it’s true that the campuses will not have many real students in late June. But they will be super-pretty, and there will be tour guides.
Re: Marian’s suggestion about Columbia. I really don’t think you need to stay extra days in Princeton or New Haven and train into New York. If you book a hotel on the Upper West Side, it’s not horribly confusing to drive there from the George Washington Bridge. Just don’t plan on using a car to get around Manhattan once you are there. Park it and forget it until it’s time to leave.
There’s a parking garage just north of the Columbus campus that I have used. And in general the closer the garage/parking lot is to a river the less it will cost you. I don’t think driving in NYC is that bad. GPS is your friend. The streets are numbered and mostly one way. Just don’t drive in Times Square that IS a zoo! I also agree with JHS, that none of these colleges is so far apart that there is only one right to make the circuit. And I do think if you have time you should looks at some of the marginally less selective colleges in the area as well.
2008 spring trip: We visited as many Ivies as possible after college counselor said D was his “rock star” and could/should apply anywhere. I gather you may be in the same boat, so safeties & reaches may not be an issue. We
flew to Philadelphia & visited Penn; rented car and drove to Princeton; returned car & flew to Providence; train to New Haven; train to Boston; flew home. Did not need to visit Dartmouth since D had been there most of the prior summer (6 or 7 weeks) at the Debate Institute & Workshop. The train service was excellent. You can take the Dartmouth Coach from Logan to Hanover. It has WiFi but it’s a three-hour trip. You can drive it in two hours or less depending on the traffic, so I’d go that route. If you want driving tips for Boston to Hanover (assuming renting a car at Logan), PM me.
I think a competition and touring schools on this magnitude sounds exhausting. you don’t list a timeframe for all of this but honestly, I think you may want to narrow your focus a bit and consider coming back a second time.
to give you some perspective, we went to an (organized) open house yesterday. very cool and well worth going.
I drove roughly an hour and a half to get there. we were actively doing stuff on campus for just under 6 hours. I must have climbed 83 flights of stairs in that time. the weather was unseasonably warmish, so most of us were overdressed and sweating to death. the line was a mile long for the cafeteria, so we passed on that and looked for a nearby mcD’s. then we had the hour and a half drive home.
I was so exhausted by the whole thing I fell asleep well before the end of downton abbey.
so multiply all that by competing, unfamiliar drives/public transportation, the beginnings of tourist-headed-to-the-shore traffic, luggage hauling and whatever else happens along the way.
^ This is why it would be helpful to have more information from the OP. If the OP’s daughter will be recruited she’ll have to add in time to meet with coaches at each school. If she’s not a recruiting prospect it would make sense to add a few match schools to the trip. Tufts, BC, BU, Brandeis and Wellesley would all be high quality schools within a 1/2 hour of Harvard. Trinity and Wesleyan would be easy stop-bys on the way to Yale.
A side note,
If the OP’s daughter is trying to figure out which school to apply ED to as an athletic recruit it makes sense to restrict the trip to Ivies, but if she will not be heavily recruited by Ivies and/or her academics are not top-notch, she should be aware that it’s much more important to visit the likely and match schools than her reach schools. The Ivies know everyone wants them. They don’t need candidates to show them the love. Schools that may fear they’re being used as backups will want evidence that she’s serious about them. Yield management (aka “Tufts Syndrome”) is not as prevalent as people seem to want to believe, but it does happen, particularly in cases when the applicant is not an obvious match for the school.
