In short, yes.
@AboutTheSame, thanks
Pure logistics answer, assuming you are in Providence and then visiting colleges after the competition.
(based on my experience living 10+ years in NYC and over 6+ yr in the Boston area).
Tour Brown - since you are already in Providence.
Day 1. Take the 45 min train to Boston, visit Harvard. Rent a car & drive to Dartmouth (I believe it’s 2 hours?), stay overnight somewhere along the way
(Day 2)visit Dartmouth in the morning. From Dartmouth to Yale 3 hr drive - should be no traffic. Overnight somewhere cheap on the way to Yale/New Haven
Day 3. Visit Yale in the morning. Overnight somewhere between New Haven and NYC.
Depending where you are flying out from either …
(Day 4) Drive 2 hours to Columbia. Park at 108st/Amsterdam Ave /Columbus Ave garage for less than $17 (24 hrs) per day (think it’s $12) - goggle discount parking New York. Drive 2 hrs to Princeton, NJ. (Day 5) Visit Princeton in the morning. (either Day 5? 6) Drive 1 hr to UPenn (never lived there so don’t know about parking). Fly out Philly.
OR
(Day 3 still) Drive to Princeton from Yale via the TappenZee Bridge 3 hours. Overnight in Princeton/nearby (many hotels on Rt 1?) . (Day 4)Visit Princeton. either take train to Philly or drive (I’m sketchy on this part). (Day 5) Visit Penn (day 6) Visit Columbia, fly out from NYC.
Traffic around NYC and Philly is pretty horrendous. Do not try to drive into/out of any city during rush hour (am??7-9a? 4-6:30p?)
Depending on the info session/campus tour schedules of each college: You might be able to do Harvard and Dartmouth in 1 day. You might be able to do Yale and Columbia in one day. You might be able to do Princeton and UPenn in one day.
Nuts. Hope someone earlier in the thread mentioned that ANYONE thinking they’d be a GREAT FIT at any Ivy League school is crazy. They are different in terms of rural vs. small town vs. city, and in terms of academic focus and campus feel.
Any person who thinks that they’d be equally happy at Cornell and Dartmouth as they’d be at Columbia or Penn is smoking something or really just wants the Ivy degree.
But getting back to the nuts OP/OP’s kid, and seeing as much as possible, I’m thinking that the necessities are seeing Harvard and Yale for any “gotta try to get into all 8 Ivies” student. So that means Boston is a must, and New Haven is near NYC, so Columbia wouldn’t be too tough to add in.
Cornell and Dartmouth are far afield in comparison, and people should really think hard about whether the applicant would be happy there.
I’d amend the plan in post 102. On day 3 spend the night in NYC. Do something fun! You’ll be right there so it’s easy to get to Columbia in the AM. Traffic in NY can be weird. I drove to DC from north of the city a few years ago on a Friday morning. There was absolutely no traffic outbound on the GW bridge. The whole trip was a breeze.
I loved both Barnard and Cornell when I was visiting colleges and could have easily seen myself at either. My kids loved Cornell- not Dartmouth, but liked Penn a lot.
I think the whole “the ivies are all so different from each other” are nonsense. Yes, Hanover NH isn’t Morningside Heights. But the differences between Brown and Princeton or Harvard and Penn are pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.
A kid wants to study Classics and is looking at University of New Haven? This I don’t understand. A kid wants to study Classics so needs to understand the (subtle) differences between Brown and Harvard? Puleeze. A kid wants to study history and join a debate team? Pick one. Kid wants club-level swim team or friendly intramural competition of a variety of sports AND study math? Parsing the differences between Cornell’s math department (strong) and Harvard’s (very strong) and Princeton’s (world class) or Browns (very strong in applied math, less so for highly theoretical)- now you are counting angels dancing on the head of a pin. Yale for history? yup. Very, very strong for undergraduates. But it doesn’t mean you are “slumming it” by studying history at Cornell if the department is a few rungs down on somebody’s ranking system.
My youngest liked both Brown and U of Chicago - he saw pluses and minuses to the core vs no core issue. OTOH he hates NYC so didn’t apply to any school there. Ithaca is a mall city, a lot more going on there than in Hanover I suspect. I gather though that if you want to end up on Wall Street Dartmouth is as good as Harvard.
I think it’s possible to like, or be indifferent to, urban vs suburban vs rural.
@rhandco, referring to the OP as “nuts” because they want to check out the Ivies is incredibly rude. They aren’t all identical. No two schools are identical. That’s why people want to visit, for heaven’s sake! Moreover, the constant refrain from some people on CC that no one could possibly like both an urban and a rural school is beyond tiresome: it is grossly misleading. Kids like different schools for different reasons.
The assumption that anyone who is interested in exploring the Ivies is interested in nothing but prestige? Odd that when a student wants to look at Cal Tech or Stanford or the U of C or Duke or Northwestern or MIT no one accuses them of being a prestige hound, even though the schools are equally “prestigious.” And the Prestige Police rarely level that charge at students who are only interested in Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst, Pomona, Wellesley, Bowdoin, and other elite LACs. (Because in their limited world LACs aren’t prestigious?) Please, just give us all a break.
What I think is a mistake is just driving through a campus or trying to “do” more than one school in a day. I think that a campus visit should at the very least include the info session and the tour, and if AT ALL possible sitting in on a class. Otherwise you’re just looking at architecture.
We did two small schools in one day, doing both tour and info session. One was a school I was pretty sure my kid wouldn’t like, but I wanted him to know what he’d been rejecting out of hand. (Smaller than my high school, rural. LACs in general.) In the end he kept the bigger LAC we saw that day on his list, but otherwise had medium sized research universities. I worry that the proposed trip will be exhausting, but it is doable!
Some colleges lend themselves to a “two in one day” set up. Princeton’s campus is pretty compact; you can get a good picture of the little stores and stuff in town in ten minutes; it’s easy to get in and get out and you can be on your way to U Penn if you plan it right. Ditto for Brown and Harvard even though there’s a reasonable amount of traffic around the Harvard campus which makes parking (if you’re renting a car) a little time-consuming.
I think the early college visits need to be in-depth. After a couple your kid will quickly figure out how to manage the day.
There is no way I would visit two Ivys in one day if I lived anywhere but the northeast. First, traffic in and around Boston, New York and Philly is simply too variable to count on. Second, none of the schools are closer than an hour and a half from each other at the very best. So, if you live in Cherry Hill, by all means take a quick gander at Princeton and Penn in the same day. If you like either it is a short ride back for another visit. On the other hand if you are flying in from Montana, take the time to get a good look because you might not be coming back.
We do live near Boston, but did a driving trip with two colleges per day on some days. Important to note the weather was excellent or there would have been delays:
First day- leave Boston at 7am, see Yale, Princeton, and Penn, and drive further south to Baltimore area to stay. To be fair, Yale and Penn were drive throughs because it was Sunday. But we had a tour etc at Princeton
Second day- Johns Hopkins, tourism, and second night in same hotel
Third day- UMD and drive to Pittsburgh area to stay in hotel
Fourth day- Pitt and Carnegie Mellon and drive to update New York
Fifth day- Cornell, planned on RPI but were too tired, stayed in area
Sixth day- U Mass Amherst and home
It was a bit rushed, but for our family, it was more important to visit the matches and likelies in depth. I figured that the differences between Yale, Princeton, and Penn would be largely observable in passing or by reading programs of study.
Or, as has occurred, differences can become apparent in later student visits. And in principle we can visit Harvard any time, but in practice we have not unless you count my daily commute. 