<p>My kid is a rising 11th grader, but he has a preference to leave the Mid-Atlantic area for college. Many schools being considered this early are West, SW and South. </p>
<p>We don't have the $ or time for many visits. I am looking for reassurance the visits before applying aren't necessary. Of course, I refuse to let him go to a school that he hasn't seen in person, so after any "far-away" acceptances, I would need to suck up the costs and send him to accepted students day. I was just hoping that by then I'd have FA pacakge and a more manageable sized list then he has now. He'll visit a variety of schools in the Mid-Atlantic to get a feel for size, urban/not urban, etc. </p>
<p>Any advice or opinions?</p>
<p>He'll have junior year spring break to see schools in the Carolinas. He'll have next summer to see a few schools as well, but I can't afford to fly him all over.</p>
<p>I think it really depends on the kid. My older son really didn’t care about the surroundings so it was pretty easy to just look for the best curriculum for him. (Comp Sci) Accepted students weekends helped him sort out what was important to him - though in fact, ultimately that was what he’d said all along - the strength of the Comp Sci department. </p>
<p>With my younger son we sorted out what was “too big” or “too small” or “too urban” or “too rural” from mostly local visits. If we hadn’t visited almost all his choices there might have been one or two schools that stayed on the list which ultimately got rejected - Brandeis, for example, was “too office parky” and probably suffered also from bad timing - I thought we’d gotten there before Passover, but the campus was already deserted.</p>
<p>In case it’s not clear, I think you can do some visiting locally and wait for seeing where a kid is accepted later. My older son only visited California colleges ahead of time and didn’t get into a single one of them!</p>
<p>Agree that it is very difficult/expensive to visit far-flung schools. I would check their visit website or with your hs GC to see if their rep visits your son’s hs. If the rep does - he should try to attend the rep’s visit during senior year of hs - during junior year if allowed. </p>
<p>If there is a college fair in your area - he can attend that and meet reps and learn more about colleges that are further away from home.</p>
<p>Also- some colleges have their reps travel - and do presentations in hotels for interested people from the area. If you are near a major metropolitan area - this may be an option.</p>
<p>So - no - I don’t think it is horrible not to visit colleges that are far from home at this stage of the process. Do what you can to show demonstrated interest - as outlined above and by being on their mailing list. Beyond that - waiting until he is accepted is fine.</p>
<p>I think visiting schools AFTER acceptances & FA awards is a good way to cut down on travel costs. I know a couple of families that did just that.</p>
<p>But as always, make sure he has a safety he loves. In case he decides the far-away schools he got into aren’t for him after all.</p>
<p>When I decided where to go to law school, I chose a school on the opposite coast sight-unseen. There were lots of good reasons for me to choose that school over the other options that had nothing to do with what it looked like, and anyway everyone said that it was totally beautiful and I would love it.</p>
<p>A few months later, I showed up a couple days before classes were to begin. I hated it. I didn’t think it was beautiful at all; I thought it was tacky. The library didn’t even stay open as long as it should. The apartment I had gotten through proxies was awful. I felt like I didn’t belong there. I knew I never would have even considered going there if I had visited first.</p>
<p>That lasted . . . four or five weeks. The reasons why I had chosen that school turned out to be right on – the school couldn’t have been more perfect for me. I got a key to the library; I found a better place to live. I never thought the campus was as pretty as some people did, but I learned how to pay attention to the parts that WERE beautiful and not to notice the gross ones as much. And as I spent time there, the buildings and places acquired emotional resonance; I started to care. When I go back and visit now, I feel all warm and gooey inside.</p>
<p>Anyway, my point is this: Visiting can be as much of a mistake as not visiting. It’s all random. You can’t tell what life will be like for you somewhere by spending a weekend there. (If that were true, Paris and San Francisco would be the largest cities in the world.) You can tell how you will react emotionally for a few weeks, that’s all. For some people, that short-term emotional reaction, if negative, could color everything that comes afterwards, but I think most people tend to adapt and to make the best of things. What’s more, because visiting – like any other form of eyewitness testimony – seems really vivid and reliable, there’s a natural tendency to over-value your reactions as a visitor compared to other things you learn by research.</p>
<p>So . . . you should be reassured that a college visit isn’t necessary.</p>
<p>Most schools will not care, but there are some schools that want “demonstarted interest.” ie- school visit, interview, etc. I believe you can find that data on the common data set for each school. I know on the common data set for Washington and Lee it lists “level of applicants interst” as being very important. I think many schools do understand that not all kids have the time or money to visit. But, otoh do make sure to take advantage of visits by the college rep to your area, any college fairs, and make contact with schools of interest early. Can’t hurt to contact the regional rep to ask a question or two. </p>
<p>My S did cross off several schools after visiting so in our case we thought the visits were important. </p>
<p>Many years ago most students who went to school far away didn’t get the chance to visit. That seems to be a recent change. If budget is at all a concern, just wait for the acceptances.</p>
<p>We visited about 10 schools my daughter either got rejected at or ended up not applying to, and she got accepted/waitlisted at 4 schools she had never seen before. So yes, we had to scramble to do visits April break. But at least then the visits made sense (instead of shooting in the dark). </p>
<p>Don’t worry about not visiting. A friend’s son applied to UCSD site unseen. First time he visited the campus was when he moved in for school. He loves it.</p>
<p>I’m for visiting the schools that make the cut. It’s very expensive if he goes and doesn’t like it. We visited about 10 schools with S and 11 with D. They both found 1 school that they “saw themselves attending”. Both applied ED and were accepted. S has since graduated and is at grad school now but enjoyed his 4 years in undergrad. D will be starting her 3 year and LOVES the school that she is attending. Compared to friends who have children who transferred I had it easy but part of that was allowing them to go and see for themselves where they fit. Friends kids have had to add on at a minimum of 1 semester because of the transfer. That is costly.</p>
<p>Large schools are usually not concerned about whether you have visited or not.
Smaller schools are more likely to be care a bit about whether you have visited or not.
If his top choice is a small school that cares about “demonstrated interest” and he is not applying early decision, it’s probably worth a visit to that school. My two cents. :)</p>
<p>It really depends on a lot of things. Of course it is not a true necessity. It used to be that few people visited the school they visited. But in those days you did not tend to apply to school to which you had no connection. There was a true reason for each school to be on the list that made it have a personal connection to you or a good reason for applying there. </p>
<p>Now we are open to all sorts of schools that we’ve never even considered. My college son ended up with two schools on his list that none of us in the family knew much about. We had absolutely no connection to anything about the schools. So I felt that not only did we have to visit, but we needed to spend some time in the area and get some info. So we did. But for some schools, we already had some info, connections and it was not at all as important.</p>
<p>Also, for some of the smaller schools, a visit is considered important in terms of getting accepted. If your son has such schools on his list, he is going to have to make a good case for applying to them sight unseen and meet with reps if they come to town. Demonstrated interest has become very important as kids are applying to many schools, and sometimes just throwing schools onto the list.</p>
<p>I know that my son getting his acceptances to the two far away schools were in part due to the long visit there. Admissions saw that we and he were seriously invested in the idea of going to their school and they told us so.</p>
<p>The point about proving your interest is a good one, and that’s often important at LACs especially. But I think there are other ways besides visiting to show that your interest is legit, such as bugging them to set up a local interview, e-mailing with a bunch of well-thought-through questions, asking to be put in touch with current students who share your interests, etc. That won’t help if the college is using “demonstrated interest” as a proxy for “rich enough to fly across the country to visit, so probably doesn’t need much aid”. But if that’s what the college is doing, and you AREN’T rich enough, etc., then you probably want to avoid that college anyway, whatever its other virtues.</p>
<p>I agree with prior posters … whether a pre-acceptance visit helps depends on the kid and the collge, but that in most cases kids will adapt to their surroundings. Each of my D’s was looking for something specific in a college, so we visited. We had the resources to do that. If you don’t have resources to visit, then don’t worry about it. Many schools have videos posted on y-o.u,t*u_b~e which can provide some flavor of the college. And there are videos of actual college tours available for purchase. With a bit of imaginative research a student should be able to determine that the following engineering schools are really not “all the same:” Rice, UMissouri-Rolla, Rose-Hulman, Carneige-Mellon, and Drexel.</p>
<p>I am not sure of the value of a single, standard-of-the-pack visit (i.e., group info session and campus tour).If you can’t afford, you can wait until acceptance. But, if money is not a problem, overnight visits would be great. If nothing else, it matures your kids.</p>
<p>We did just this on purpose. We only visited far away schools after acceptances and FA offers were in. That way we did not end up with her having a school that she was in love with that she did not get accepted to or that we could not afford. Worked out perfectly for us.</p>
<p>I agree that there are ways of demonstrating interest without visiting. If I recall correctly, Emory University’s Admissions Office has some suggestions on its page. (My family stopped trying to show interest in Emory after my daughter decided she wasn’t applying, so my recollection may not be perfect.)</p>
<p>I would urge you to consider, though, that if he goes to one of these far-away schools, there will be a lot of travel costs. He’ll have to get there. He might not come back from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic for Thanksgiving (I didn’t go home from college for Thanksgiving), but he probably will at winter break. Will he travel for spring break? Summers? And any time you go there, you’ll have plane tickets, plus hotel, plus rental car, plus meals. There are a lot of hidden costs in sending your kids a long way away (as my wife and I discovered when we sent our kids from the Mid-Atlantic to go to overnight camp in the upper Midwest).</p>
<p>The one school my son hadn’t seen before applying to… is the one he ultimately ended up attending! But, he had seen most of the other schools in the summer, so he had to make return trips anyway to see them with students.</p>
<p>Some kids can make their decisions by using a spreadsheet; mine tried, but it just didn’t work! From his point of view, the fit with the student body was paramount, and these visits in April were what determined where he would go. </p>
<p>I agree that you need to be very careful, though, if money is an issue, to think twice before going to a school so far away.</p>
<p>My best friends daughter was WLed from a number of schools some years ago and the reason Emory gave when her counselor called was that she did not visit. She had done a number of things that Emory suggests one should do when one cannot visit. In her case, the parents were undergoing a divorce and funds were very short and the planned visit did not happen due to some issues that occurred during their trip to schools in the south.</p>
<p>I think that most schools care about demonstrated interest by visiting if the student is in driving distance. I do think Emory is one of those schools that expects all students to visit or make their interest clear in some ways: they asked the students to check off all the ways they had contact with the school on the application.</p>