It’s all over the board. A few years back, I did a 14-colleges-in-three-weeks tour across the Midwest, midAtlantic, and New England with my C17 and C19. A couple of them (including the one my C17 ultimately went to!), we couldn’t reserve a tour slot until after we’d actually started the trip.
In my experience, the larger the admissions office, the more likely you are to have tours easily reservable well in advance—and that’s particularly so for state flagships and similar (which, BTW, is why Washington State is your exception). SLACs, though? They’re better with a personal touch, so you might be best off calling to let them know you’ll be traveling a long distance to get there, and can you set something up yet. They might not be able to—the smaller the shop, the less predictable staffing is on any given day in the future—but it’s worth a shot.
S25 is a recruited athlete and has hit the mark for the most competitive D3 schools and I expect he will improve more this year. Given that, we are anxiously awaiting his spring season to see if his performances will be a spike for T20 LACs or allow him to compete D1. I can’t decide if we should look at colleges this spring and risk missing some practices for an already short season or just throw caution to the wind and get those visits in. I’m afraid that this coming summer and fall will be insane if and when he starts getting attention from coaches at schools he hasn’t visited and has no basis for comparison. He has toured one school so far (we don’t live near many strong options) and it is at the top of his list but he may not make the academic cut. If anyone has thoughts, let me know.
You could go to a city like Boston where you can visit a lot of types of schools in a few days - you could even throw in a Middlebury and/or Amherst in there. If you focus on the type of school, not the school itself, he can then do virtual tours/read books/read up here on the schools that come his way.
I’m assuming he is already in contact with coaches. Many schools hold Jr days and I found those to be much more valuable than just a regular tour. I’d encourage him to attend a few if invited.
He is T&F. I had a basic itinerary outlined for spring break in Ohio, he has communicated with several coaches there that would love to have him visit. Most will be on break, though, which adds to the question of whether or not this will be worth the effort and time away from the track.
Incidentally–UW is aligned with other Washington State private and public schools. They almost all have booking options through mid-March. I don’t think it’s a flagship thing.
We sign up through College Board here. And my daughter’s school has announced they will no longer be hosting the SAT after December. So I’m getting worried about when we will be able to sign up, and where the closest testing center will be.
I wonder if WA state stuff knows folks have gotta fly out here, so they offer dates far enough away to allow them to buy plane tickets, etc. While East Coast schools, well most folks drive, so they figure 2 weeks notice is fine…
I mean, local folks will still drive around WA, but for the bulk of visitors, it’s a plane flight most of the time…
(b) Flagship is usually an unofficial thing, anyway—some states designate them, but most don’t. And in a state the size of California, it’s completely reasonable for both Berkeley and UCLA to be flagships. (Heck, San Diego State could reasonably make a case for tri-flagships, if it really wanted to.)
I can’t speak for the other schools, but the UCs are on the quarter system. Fall quarter runs from Sept-Dec. Winter quarter is Jan - March and spring quarter is March - June. Tour guides are students and don’t know their course schedules for winter and spring quarters yet.
I did some looking at what the pattern was (i.e., tours at 9 on Tuesday and Thursday, 1 on Monday and Wednesday, or whatever it is) and when there were school breaks. Then I took an educated guess at what there would be.
I’m guessing if you had your student call or email the admissions office, they already have a pretty good idea of what their March schedule will be, even if it isn’t official yet. Better to have that come from the student than you though.
We were at a college fair last night and a lot of them said their spring schedules come out around Thanksgiving. Fall schedules in mid-August (for next year).
My kid is the test optional kid in this thread and got an email from the school’s college counselor that said, “TESTS ARE BACK.” The email proceeded to tout a testing service and state that 60%+ of students who got into U Mich and Notre Dame submitted test scores. (Not clear if this stat is from our school, district, or accepted freshman globally.) Not acknowledging that the only kids who are submitting test scores to UM and ND are kids who are above the median. Or that one kid who gets a near perfect score and submits to offset an imperfect GPA. So, I screen shot her top choice schools and circled their test optional policies. She’s aiming for large public schools and we’re in California so we are solidly in test optional land. I told her that if she really wants to go to ND, we can cite that we have a family member who used to coach football there, lol. She will not be applying to uber-competitive UM and only doing so for the in-state UCs because why the heck not. And USC because if I can keep her a $49 flight away, I will.
Of course then I was reaching Large Public Universities that are in warm climates because she is concerned about living in lots of snow, which cuts some great midwest and upper midwest schools. I fell in love with Univ of Florida. I was telling her about it and she balked at the state. This is the same kid that has previously begged to go to WDW. We’re super progressive, but I am besides myself with this objection to anything that isn’t California or the pacific northwest. She is not trans and we can implement serious birth control prior to stepping foot in the state if needed. So I don’t get it and feel like there is a lot of spouting of ideals without doing the work to back it up. You want to live in the Bay Area of California or Vancouver BC for the rest of your life? I hope you like and will excel at STEM. And have a trust fund I don’t know about. And this place is no panacea. Literally, a kid in her school just got in trouble for using the n-word. Racism and hate are everywhere. I don’t for a second deny that there are not real life concerns in some states about safety for some groups but this turning one’s 16 year-old nose up at whole swaths of the country when we are in the information gathering stage is annoying. I feel like she sounds like my MSNBC-parroting inlaws and find it frustrating.
If I am not mistaken, UF requires test scores. It is quite competitive for out of state applicants.
According to the common data set for 2022-2023, 50th percentile was 1400 for the SAT, and 31 for the ACT. The average unweighted GPA was a 3.93.
While I appreciate that you think you can keep her “safe” since she’s not trans, and you can install quite effective birth control at home, perhaps she is more concerned about what she would be taught at the colleges in Florida, with their determination that slavery was a job training program that left people with useful skills, etc.
The kids understand solidarity much more deeply than I do. I figure we should let them make the world they want to live in.
