I would not recommend summer tours. We did one and it really turned my daughter off of the school because it felt lonely and desolate. (The school was in a rural area). I kept telling her to imagine hundreds of kids on the quad, and we tried our best, but it’s just not the same looking at a ghost campus.
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I think it depends on the college / university. We visited several in the summer that seemed busy and we could get a good sense of the campus feel. Many schools have a well attended summer session. But if the school doesn’t have a summer session, it might seem pretty dead there.
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I think it is worth it if that is what you’re able to do. We did summer tours for 3 schools last year and fall tours for another 3. We didn’t notice much difference. The grounds were less crowded in summer, but it didn’t affect our opinions.
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I never really understand this advice.
What difference does it make whether the place is crowded with students or not? Maybe it’s because we live so far away from everything that touring a college requires some serious travel time and so the summer is really the only meaningful option for college tours, but I always thought that the purpose of a college tour is to see what the physical plant and resources are like, how the place is laid out, whether the campus is hilly or flat, and so on.
I’ve been on at least four dozen college tours over the past eight years, of which precisely two occurred while classes were fully in session. The only difference is that those two had more students walking around. But the content was the same either way, right?
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Ideally, you want to visit when students are on campus so you can pick up the vibe. You might be able to attend a class. You can eat in a dining hall. This is all probably especially helpful and important if you are considering ED and probablymore criticalat a LAC, where there tends to be a dominant culture. .
Having said that, we ended up doing summer visits because of distance and sports schedules and found they had some advantages of their own. The students and faculty who were on campus were generally available and chatty. It is much easier to schedule an interview. At a few, areas that might have been off limits (dorms) were available.
There were a couple of schools that got a second look in the fall because they were ED candidates or were re-visited as an admitted student. In one case, the feeling about the school changed as a result. For the others, not so.
If your option is summer visit or no visit, go in summer!
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Thank you all! We’re in midwest and my D24 wants to visit all east coast schools and it’s hard to cover all those (5-6) during school time especially now is a busy time with school and obviously gets busy in the Fall with the applications. I think our main purpose is to get a feel of the school, academic opportunities, community and motivate her. The colleges we’re visiting are big campuses so I assume based on your responses, we should be ok to get some idea.
My main concern is I still do not see the visit schedules for most colleges for Summer. Do they update little later?
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My D was an athlete so summer tours was what worked for her schedule. We had difficulty signing up for a tour at Clemson (they all seemed to be full immediately) so I found a student via Facebook who gave us a tour. I offered to pay her but she said she loved her school and was happy to show it to us.
I would call the schools
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I don’t agree with this. Any school we saw out of session either moved down or stayed the same. For both of my kids it was seeing the bustle and crowds on campus that made them excited about a school.
That said- the logistics of seeing all the schools during the school year are pretty impossible and you prob do need to pick some to see over the summer or other school breaks. We avoided summer visits and it was a mistake since there are schools now that are far away and my daughter has to eliminate them without ever having seen them.
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Definitely best to see schools while classes are in session. We went to see one school in the summer and there were a bunch of older folks on campus doing something and that one immediately got struck from my daughter’s list. I’m sure that wasn’t the deciding factor but it didn’t help that it was giving off retirement center vibes.
High school Spring Break is typically a big time to see schools in junior year. We went to see a lot of schools in the fall of senior year too. It’s better IMO to see them in a fall weekend than it is to see them in summer.
Check the calendars of the colleges she is interested in and see when their fall semester starts. Around here some colleges are back in session before the high schools so you might be able to go in August and still be on your summer vacation but also hit it when there are students on the campus.
We went to see several schools in the summer but only one of those got an application from my D22.
And it was totally an excused absence from my kids’ high school to go on a college visit so don’t be afraid to make a long weekend to visit if you need to.
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We tried to go when school was in session but it was impossible to get them all in. What we did was try to hit schools on a quarter system first because we had about a month window after D’s last HS final and when schools on quarter ended. Then we tried to do summer visits at schools that had summer sessions (for their college students, not HS camp programs). We saved the schools that we could get to easily by car for the school year.
There was one school that we toured where campus was dead but D got to meet with a professor and was able to get a much better feel for their program.
We felt that any visit was better than no visit.
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I really think that one visit we did where the retirees were on campus and no students completely sunk that school. It had some other drawbacks too — it was really hot that summer day for one, and we were doing a self-guided tour for another. I think if we had not visited that school at all there’s a good chance my D22 would have applied to it. I doubt if it would have been where she ended up but it might’ve been in the mix. So I don’t know if that means any visit was better than no visit.
Ultimately I don’t think it was the right place for her so maybe that bad visit was good that she was able to eliminate it early on. But I think if she had seen it when students were there she might have given it more consideration.
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Amen.
Go when time and finances are available. Remember that junior year is generally a tough year, and the first half of senior year is taken up by applications AND school. Don’t underestimate this.
If you are doing just a handful of visits that are all nearby, then, sure, it makes sense to see the school when it is in session. But in our kid’s case, there were many schools spread out through a wide geographic area.
And even if school is not in session, some key issues in your student’s mind might get resolved. For example, in our case, a particular school was leading the pack until DD saw the campus (or lack thereof). She removed that school from her list immediately.
Planning ahead is the key.
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Thank you all! We did visit few schools in VA during spring break. Unfortunately the Midwest calendar doesn’t match that of east coast. My D21 who is NY never has the same schedule our schools. We thought of having her in our CA tour but my younger one’s schools spring breaks starts right after she left. So I am finding it hard.
More than all, my D24 can’t take too much of stress if I disturb her during the school year. She is very unplanned and undecided kid. So I am just trying to encourage her and motivate her to pick a right college.
We’re just looking for some target state colleges and few reach schools. We’re planning to move to east coast to stay closer to both the kids. So thinking of considering some state colleges too in east coast.
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Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Colleges vary wildly on how far in advance they print their tour schedules. If for some reason you’re limited to one particular week a few months out you can call, but no guarantee you’ll get a useful response, because often they don’t know their own staffing that far in advance.
I’m a fan of college tours, but even so it’s worth remembering that the idea that college tours are a necessity (or even highly useful) is a fairly recent—meaning within the past few decades—phenomenon, and is generally limited to a particular socioeconomic stratum.
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My two cents: I’d maybe visit a university in the summer, but not a college. I’m of the opinion that you want to visit a school on a normal day when it’s in session in order to really get a true sense of the place and what a day in the life may be like for your student. (So in addition to not looking at school when it’s on break, also avoiding times such as reading or exam weeks, and big “spirit weeks,” festivals, or other special occasion weekends that aren’t indicative of what the college is like on a “typical Tuesday.”)
Ideally for a solid visit your student is able to sit in on a class, and possibly have lunch at the dining hall and check in on different buildings and areas they’re interested in while they’re in use (e.g. what’s the music building like, are kids talking and interacting with one another in the dining hall or are most on laptops and phones, what’s the vibe in the student center like, etc.).
Looking at buildings and grounds will give you an idea of what the buildings and grounds are like - but not a sense of the day to day life of a school.
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Counterpoint: No college tour ever will give you an actual sense of the day to day life of a school.
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I’ve mentioned this before, but I always checked out the bathrooms in various campus buildings (dining hall, dorms, gym, academic buildings, etc.).
How bathrooms were maintained (or not) and people in them gave me a reliable indication of both campus life and operating budgets.
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I actually found it easier to visit during the summer or off weeks. It was a little more laid back and it didn’t feel quite as awkward walking into a dorm or dining hall. I figure if my son really wants to see a school in action, he can do that after he gets in. Until then, we’ll make do with summer tours and whichever tours we can sneak in during breaks.
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