If only more of the discourse on CC acknowledged this fact!
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Interestingly, UCLA and Berkeley have pretty much the same number of students.
I also think the Claremont consortium is suburban and boring.
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Claremont consortium also fell from interest after a tour there as well. You have to absolutely adore the school, the culture and the environment. It’s in the bucket of highly-rejective schools that are difficult to gain acceptance outside of ED and that list is, sadly, only getting longer.
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Claremont consortium: I kept hoping one my of children might be interested in applying since it seems like such a great place (to me)!
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Also, I never really bought the idea that you could have all those kids crisscrossing each other’s cafeterias and classrooms all day long and still contend they’re having a typical small college experience. To me, if you don’t recognize half the faces in the library on a Sunday night, it’s not a small college.
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So this is off-topic because it’s a question about the entire idea of visiting colleges.
I’ve been following the “real” thread since it started in 2016, primarily because we had a 17 HS grad. I found it really interesting to hear the variation in experience and was honestly a bit surprised by the expressed impact of visits. We all carry biases and histories of our own to every campus, so I never really “used” them, but it was fun to see how other people reacted, especially to the ones we had visited.
Fast forward to this year, and the thread gets about half of the posts this year as it did in 2017. I appreciate it could be for dozens of reasons, but it go me wondering… do people travel less now to see schools than they did 5 or 6 years ago? If so, is it all pandemic related, or is there something different about the process now that makes touring a bit less necessary/appropriate?
Seems like there’s quite a bit of pent up traveling this year.
Did some areas being closed down hurt Fall 2021 and 2022 apps and yield? We visited Wisconsin in the summer of 2021 and couldn’t enter many buildings but my kid still applied. It feels like a sunk cost to have visited and figure you might as well apply if it was solid.
Southwest universities don’t get mentioned as much. Much farther apart and less density of highly rated ones. Does Rice get get the fewest visits of the “top 20” or could that distinction go to a rural Ivy like Cornell or Dartmouth?
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I also think college websites, webinars and virtual interactions have improved significantly since 2020.
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My experience with my children:
1st CHILD in 2010s visited a ton of schools throughout high school as a motivating factor - mostly small NE LACs, SUNYs and nearby state U’s. We signed in at the admissions office at every campus we visited whether for formal tour or not. (At Dickinson my child had arranged an overnight visit directly with a friend and they had sign in sheet outside the office to complete for instances like that). - Accepted to 9 out of 12 mostly with money/Merit.
2nd Child - Late 2010’s - initially had mid-tier D1 athletic dreams, wrote letters to college coaches and had intro letters from club coaches and built their list accordingly - had some official NCAA visits. Lost interest in the process. Applied to about 8 schools all of which were visited before applying - accepted to about half. One college coach who was brand new called out of the blue and asked if child had applied to school X (1st choice school). My child answered that they had but had not yet received an acceptance yet (I believe Mid-December). 2 days later acceptance came. After visit to meet the coach and team large merit scholarship was offered.
3rd Child and cousins - applied right into pandemic 2020+2021. ALL of this group seemed to rely on websites and videos to make selections of where to apply even before pandemic - I tried to insist that they sign-in to virtual visits, but in the end, I believe they ignored this advice. We tried to visit some small and big private and public schools to get a feel for what they liked. Generally, their attitude was apply to a large number of schools than kids in the past, then visit if they were accepted. (They all applied to a large number of schools they had NEVER visited in person and were NOT accepted at most of those.) They were however accepted at most of the schools they physically visited.
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We toured a lot when my daughter was looking (she’s a senior now) starting when she was maybe a sophomore. For instance, we were in Boston her sophomore year for the marathon so we hit some schools while we were there. We live in the Midwest and planned a few road trips where we could visit a few schools over a long weekend. One holiday weekend we stayed in Chicago and visited Chicago and Northwestern. But Rice was one of the few schools we did not visit that she applied to because it would have been a longish trip for just one school. We told her we’d go if she was admitted and then found ourselves quickly arranging
a trip to go to an admitted student day in April. I wonder if that’s a fairly popular option for students/families like us who don’t live nearby
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One datapoint of yes to your question: We’re from Alaska. My D19 ended up going to (and thriving at) Mississippi State. The first time she set foot on campus (the first time she set foot in the state of Mississippi, in fact) was freshman orientation.
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i am unsure if there are less people traveling to campus, especially highly rejective colleges. Between DS18, DD20, and now DD23 I’ve visited some top schools multiple times and I didn’t see any difference in number of students in the tour group. I mean if you are already in Boston, why not check out a few more?
Rice: definitely gets less in person tours due to its location. Even though it was on the list of all three of my children, you can’t just tack it on to your east coast tour or California tour. I have never did a tour there (two of my children did visit without me). For what it’s worth, the school went way up after the tour for both- it was very informative for them to physically visit in person.
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I went to one of the Claremonts back when the earth was cooling. I didn’t take a lot of classes at the others, and my school definitely felt small! Small such that study abroad was a respite but it was also great fun to come back afterwards. For more extroverted kids I think they partied all over the 5cs and probably it did not feel small at all.
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Note that by a standard measure of climatic extremes (average January low temperature), Rochester is 3 °F warmer than Worcester.
(Information from bestplaces.net.)
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Responding to the person concerning UIUC engineering. This is 10 years old as my D has graduated and is working but we went on tours of UIUC and Purdue. We had the same feeling about Illinois. It felt like they really weren’t interested in whether or not the students applied. The leader of the information session was apathetic at best and the campus seemed worn out. Then we went to Purdue. The engineering information session was the best we had been to. They seemed to genuinely want you to apply. The campus was one of the cleanest we had been to. These two campuses that were very similar on paper were very different in feel. D graduated from Purdue and was very happy with her experience and education.
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Strategy😉. For some kids, it really helps them figure out what they want and feel grateful when they find it! It can also help to schedule a visit to a terrific safety after a school that lacks some of the features kid would love but doesn’t know it.
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And I would suggest that it’s less important to visit specific colleges to gauge interest in them than it is to visit a range of types of colleges (e.g., SLAC, hyperselective, public flagship, directional public, regional private, commuter, and so on), to see at the very least how differences in mission are reflected in things like physical plant.
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Thanks so much for your feedback on the school visits @LisaMBA, very helpful info!
Just wanted to comment on one thing, though. Connecticut College has a 41% admission rate (source). Even if you have a super high-stat kid, I’d be nervous at considering that a safety. Likely? Sure. But I’d want something with even better odds of acceptance…at the very least a school that accepts the majority of applicants, but preferably at least 60-80% of applicants. I just can’t see a school that accepts less than half of its applicants as a safety.
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Agreed 100%. But, given the reach-heavy list that my son’s college advisor helped him to develop, it “seems” like more of a safety with his stats. His only true safety in line with your suggested criteria is UVM and that’s a crap shoot, too. I guess there just aren’t really safety schools any more…
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Touring frigid campuses in the winter is a good test. When my son was an undergrad at McGill he was a tour guide. He often led tours that started with 25 or so students and parents. The temperature was often around 10 F and sometimes it would be snowing. (Snow days are an American concept). By the end of the tour half had dropped off. He told those who remained that they just passed the first admission requirement to McGill! The tour would end at a campus cafe and he would hand out vouchers for a free hot cocoa or coffee.
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