<p>I'd have to cast a vote here for allowing her to visit alone if it's possible. While I respect your family dynamic of including everyone's observations and thoughts prior to making important decisions, I think that allowing her to visit and bring her thoughts to the family table, would be markedly better than no one having visited at all! :) </p>
<p>I've always been a proponent of visiting as many schools as is humanly possible prior to applying but I realize that not every kid is able to do this. My reasons are based on our experience with our Ds and also with that of many friends over the years with their kids. That April window for visiting after acceptances is VERY small, in addition to the myriad of reasons why kids' opinions of a school may change in either direction after visiting.</p>
<p>In terms of location for transporting kids and their paraphernalia back and forth twice a year, yes, some schools have storage facilities, and yes, others are located in cities where the student may arrange this. However, there is still the issue of travel back and forth at holiday breaks, family visits, and unavoidable emergencies. Ease of travel is one thing that usually isn't considered until it's too late! :) Just another thing to add to the long list of issues when making up a college application wishlist.</p>
<p>I think JHS's comments are very important. My son visited only 3 colleges -- his first visit was to the college he felt was his top choice, an overnight which he took in spring of his junior year. Because one of his safeties was in the same city, we arranged back-to-back overnights, #1 school first, safety the following night. He absolutely loved his #1 college, basically raving about everything -- even for things that others might think of as negatives, he found a positive cast. </p>
<p>When he arrived at the next afternoon at the safety, it was raining, and he called me on his cellphone while walking around campus: he didn't want to be there. He hated it. He wished he hadn't planned on the overnight. I basically encouraged him to buck up and reminded him he would be home the next day. When he got back home he reported a litany of problems with the safety campus, but also said that in the end he had found some things he liked, and if he ended up having to attend that school he knew he could adjust.</p>
<p>Well, my son got in to the #1 choice, but they didn't give him financial aid, so he turned it down. He was accepted with great financial aid at his previously unvisted #2 college on the opposite coast, requiring hurried arrangements to fly to check out the campus. He liked it, he bought a t-shirt, he attended. After 2 years he dropped out, to take a "sabbatical." He decided to transfer to another college -- and applied to that safety he hadn't liked. In hindsight, that safety probably would have been the best choice for what he now wants to study; that safety had also offered him a great financial aid package. Unfortunately, the safety wasn't able to accommodate transfers in his major and waitlisted him. </p>
<p>Those first impressions may have validity, but they are first impressions with the eyes and heart of a 17 year old thinking about leaving home for the first time. One of the advantages of NOT visiting is that the prospective student does tend to look at more objective criteria -- for example, studying the web site or course catalog to find detailed information about major requirements and course offerings. I'm not saying that students shouldn't visit -- I'm just saying that the value of visiting shouldn't be overrated. It is useful - it is not the most important part of the selection process.</p>
<p>Having heard some of the outlandish reasons that 17 year olds state as reasons they like or don't like a college, on their "Blinkish" first impression, we will definitely not be leaving those decisions in our kids' laps.</p>
<p>My niece shared that she didn't like one school because there were "too many trees" and it looked like "summer camp". While I suppose this is as valid reason as any to add or dismiss a school, it struck me as odd. What about the academics? The students? There are so many other factors than the trees!</p>
<p>Another said she didn't like a school because she saw a girl with a piercing. A single girl; now, there were possibly more than that, given the school, but dumping a school because of a kid with a piercing?</p>
<p>We plan to go on initial visits, and send DS back alone for auditions, because by that time his list will be sufficiently narrowed, and I will also be privvy to the nuance of his choices, having seen them myself.</p>
<p>I can understand why some parents send their kids alone, but I think snap judgements that one makes at 17 may not hold at 22. Just my opinion though....</p>
<p>
[quote]
My niece shared that she didn't like one school because there were "too many trees" and it looked like "summer camp".
[/quote]
Aha! I'm not the only parent of a tree-hater! </p>
<p>I'd note that this is not a universally held opinion in our family. My son is off to Humboldt State in a few weeks, the ultimate tree-hugger's paradise. Personally, I like trees.
[quote]
we will definitely not be leaving those decisions in our kids' laps....I can understand why some parents send their kids alone, but I think snap judgements that one makes at 17 may not hold at 22.
[/quote]
Despite the fact that we agree 100% on the frivolous nature of some "reasons" put forth for disliking a college, I still think that it is the kid who will be going to college, not the parents. If it were a situation where most colleges were bad, and it was up to the child to somehow select the few decent gems from the riffraff - I'd agree -- in fact then maybe I'd hire an expert to go pick the college for us. </p>
<p>But it's quite the opposite: just about every college we parents might choose to visit is accredited, respected, and will afford our child a quality education. We find the colleges from books with titles like "362 Best Colleges" or "Colleges That Change Lives", not from spam email offering quick degrees. It doesn't MATTER if the kid hates Dartmouth and loves Dickinson -- they are both perfectly acceptable colleges. Of course in my example one has far more prestige than the other -- but so what? If we were going to rely on rankings then we wouldn't need to visit in any case.</p>
<p>So my daughter ended up deciding that she couldn't go to a college with too many trees, or with preppy students, or with too much grass and open space -- and after all of that weeding out, she STILL ended up applying to TWELVE colleges, including at least 3 she had never visited, with enough safeties in the batch to ensure she would get in somewhere. She's happy: she's going to a college with a lot of brick and concrete. I can't fault her choice - everyone says it is a wonderful college and it is very prestigious, and they gave us decent financial aid. So what does it matter that my d. dropped some other college off her list for what seemed like a dumb reason -- she has to narrow her list down some way.</p>
<p>I agree that it is the student's ultimate choice, but it can also be frustrating when a very appropriate school gets dropped off the list due to the whims of the weather that day. S dropped UPenn from his list after arriving fresh from sunny CA on a day when it rained nonstop. Forget fine programs, like-minded students, everything positive, he wouldn't apply because it was "too gloomy." It's no skin off my nose, really, but you do wonder what if it had been a glorious sunny day, with students frolicking on the quad....maybe a different story. On another campus, an LAC in MA, he wasn't into the tour for 10 minutes before he turned to his dad and said, "too pretentious."</p>
<p>A friend's daughter refused to consider colleges with "funny names" which to her, included Wesleyan and Tufts. A 17-year-old's winnowing process is not always razor sharp. </p>
<p>Looking for a good "fit" is important, but IMO it's not the most crucial thing. It's possible for students to find their "fit" on many different campuses once they have gotten there and are looking for ways to make it work rather than reasons to cross it off a list.</p>
I'm with Calmom. As a family, we based the decision on which schools S1 should apply to on a set of objective criteria. It was just not feasible to visit all of those schools, so we waited for the acceptances. He was accepted to 10 or so schools, so once again we used objective measurements to decide where he should visit. I think it was an advantage to visit the top three choices in a 2 week period. Though stressful, it provided the most realistic appraisal at that point in time. He had matured quite a bit over the course of senior year, so I don't think that the earlier visits were as useful. </p>
<p>It does seem that some daughters seem to rely more on impressions made during visits. Is that the case? My son is just extremely logical, which made the decisions more quantitative in nature.</p>
<p>I just wanted to add that my son liked every college that we were able to visit, so this was clearly not a good method for eliminating choices!</p>
<p>Seems that one can wittle away based on the "fit' pieces without ever stepping foot on the campus. My son doesn't want to go to school in the south, or to university that relies on Greek social life. He's not much of a rah-rah type, so big sporty, football schools don't much interest him. He needs a top notch music program.</p>
<p>Even without the music piece, his criterion leaves a finite number of choices, and we haven't stepped on a campus yet (well, one, but it doesn't count, since we weren't looking yet!). Seems like if kids do the big/small, urban/rural, concrete/trees, rah-rah/earthy, academic interest kind of wittling, they will find the list substantially shortened from the get go.</p>
<p>I am always surprised when I hear of kids/families driving or flying all over East Oskgosh, with no clear or definitive purpose. It seems that more pre-screening, not less, should provide a better working list.</p>
<p>This seems a bit like a big "duh", but I have heard too many stories of the 30 college list....all requiring visits.....so nothing much surprises me.</p>
<p>sjmom, that sounds similar to our approach. I, too, have a very logical son, so maybe that is the way to go with such types. :)
My son was able to eliminate one school through the visits. Once he was there, he realized how small and relatively isolated it was, and that helped him knock it off the list. The visit also boosted one that had been low on the list up to the top two (and eventually, the one he picked). Although it was bigger than he thought he wanted, he found he felt comfortable there, and was able to see how many opportunities and activities it offered. </p>
<p>I have a feeling, however, that he would have made the same final choice, regardless of visits. (As a music major, he needed lessons to make sure of the proper fit with instructors. However, he found he felt good about all three of the teachers he had lessons with.)</p>
<p>Well, it can be hard to quantify "How do you feel about strawberry?" when your previous experience has been "chocolate or vanilla?"</p>
<p>The process of visiting can give a student something to react against, give the feel of something that had seemed abstract or irrelevant on paper, etc., changing criteria in the process.</p>
<p>We visited about 15 schools over four years. D applied to seven.</p>
<p>Our son didn't visit half of the schools to which he was accepted. They were located around the country, so we decided to visit the schools he got in to. We didn't see the point in spending time and money to see schools unless he might actually attend.</p>
<br>
<p>This was our take on it as well. We wove some visits into some trips, but I'm not about to spend money to visit Northfield MN when I have college expenses looming in just a few months. DD is applying to several schools and if she needs to visit in order to make her decision she can go in the spring of senior year, when she has both midwinter and spring break to work with and she'll be 18--old enough to get a hotel room on her own if she gets stranded anywhere.</p>
<p>I don't know if anybody else has noticed this yet, but airfares have jumped wildly.</p>
. I think that sometimes what our kid's say isn't really a full reflection of what they feel, and that if they are ready to drop a school on a whim they probably weren't feeling that comfortable about the school anyway. The factor they cite just happens to be a convenient reason to hang their hat on.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that cognitive dissonence will tend to mean that students will tend to interpret 'data' based on their preconceived expectations. That is one reason that it might be more effective to defer visiting until more research has been done and the list already winnowed down some. I think too often parents have a tendency to encourage college visits before the kid isn't yet emotionally prepared or sufficiently well-informed about the college. Of course, some of us are the parents of procrastinators, so very often the most convenient time to visit comes well before the time that the kid has reached that stage of readiness.
<p>There is some logic to it all - she doesn't want to have to walk a long way to class when it is cold and snowing. She has reasoned that an urban campus where buildings are close together is going to be warmer than a large park-like campus. Since she came up with this observation soon after experiencing a Russian winter, I assumed that she probably knows what she is talking about. At Barnard, the classrooms are connected to the dorms by an underground tunnel, which I am sure makes my d. very happy.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The school in question is 13 hours away by car and my husband and I won't get vacation at the same time until early 2007, so there's no way daughter can do an overnight trip at this time.
[/quote]
I'm late to this thread, but I think there's a very troubling message here. </p>
<p>"no way"/impossible mean something actually cannot be done except at dire cost. A poor family <em>could</em> steal the money for a visit they can't afford but most would agree that if you can't afford it then it's not possible. If the school would fail a kid for missing the class days the visits would take, that too is in the category.</p>
<p>However when I see personal preference cast as creating inviolable rules (eg. as the OP later writes, our family makes important decisions together so she can't go alone) that indicates a degree of inflexibility and rigidness that doesn't bode well for reaching good decisions. And what kind of message does this send to the kid? We don't trust your impressions/thoughts, we still need there to make sure you're doing the right thing?</p>
<p>I could decide that it's just "impossible" for me to ride in anything under than a Porsche 911; if I did, I'd be doing a lot of walking! Parents that make decisions by refusing to even admit that their preferences are just that -- preferences -- are going to bypass a lot of opportunities that are open to their kids and set a poor example of how to approach life to boot. Life is all about tradeoffs, flexibility and compromises; simply announcing "this is the way it is" as if there are no viable alternatives doesn't strike me as a very promising approach.</p>
<p>In sum there does seem to be some valid disagreement over the importance of visits, and the consensus is that schools won't penalize the kid for not visiting if alternative methods of showing interest are followed. But to plain-out-say there is "no way" the kid can visit rules out the benefits those visits MAY bring, and I have to wonder just how many other things are "impossible" as well.</p>
<p>I am late to this thread as well. My DD applied to a number of highly selective institutions this past year. Prior to applying she visited three of the schools. One was a local safety school, one was a highly selective university that happens to be within an hour of our home. The other school is not far from where the in-laws lived. We had visited several times while seeing her grandparents. She attended the info sessions for the schools in question for two years, contacted the admissions office via email, asked questions, contacted departments relevant to her major, and reviewed the websites. She weeded out a lot of schools in this fashion. She applied to seven institutions. </p>
<p>Result: She was accepted to all of the schools to which she applied with the exception of one. After she was accepted, she visited a couple of the schools that were still high on her list. We had every intention to visit some of the schools before decisions came out. However, my mother in law came to visit and less than 24 hours later, she was in the hospital for emergency surgery. This resulted in a recuperation period with us of seven weeks. Hence, we were unable to travel to the schools as regular school was about to start. She mentioned this fact to every admissions official during the interviewing process. They took it as a sign of maturity on her part that she was more concerned with helping in the healing of her grandmother than visiting a school. They told me as much when she stepped out of the interview. Contrary to what I thought, it did not make a difference with regard to accepting her.Her Dad and I had reviewed everything with her ahead of time. When he picked her up from the final overnight at one school, he took her out to lunch and had a heart to heart talk about the school options. When they walked in the door later that evening, the decision had been made. God willing, she will be spending the next four years at MIT.</p>
<p>Son visited some of the colleges he was accepted at, but ultimately would ONLY consider attending those he HAD actually visited. Out of sight-out of mind I guess. First person impressions are pretty important to some people.</p>
<p>CalMom, upon further reflection, knowing how much my other predispositions would lead me to living most of my life happily in big cities, the idea of getting to spend four years of college around trees--or ocean...or both---sounds appealing to me.</p>
<p>I think if it is even remotely possible to visit- then do so- because much information- can't be gained any other way.
I realize that cost is a factor, which is one reason why D limited her choices to schools that were within a days drive-
If it is too expensive now to visit, it won't get any cheaper when you also have room/board/tuition/ & books to cover.
My H also did not vist Ds school, until we moved her in.
Many kids go by themselves to visit, since they were within a days drive- I took her or we carpooled.
She did apply and was accepted to schools that she didn't visit, but they were not in the running at all, at decision time, and I think , I at least would have liked to have had the information gained by a visit</p>
<p>Needless to say, he has chosen a campus with trees. The three colleges he applied to this year (as a transfer) were Humboldt, Evergreen, & Lewis & Clark. Many, many trees.</p>
<p>It sounds like there is a lot going on in the OP's family--it's perfectly OK not to visit, especially if you are overwhelmed, out of vacation time, stretched financially, possibly grieving. Sometimes, as hsmom's story illustrates, family considerations have to take precedence over the ideal college shopping experiences. </p>
<p>Every kid is different; we did some visiting and my D. seems to find it easier to rule things out than in based on those visits. It got very frustrating to me until I realized it was her way of saying "I'm not ready for this yet." Now that she IS ready to go look, we have had some unanticipated major expenses and a couple of deaths in the family that required travel and time off, so we are basically in the same boat as the OP--no time or money. I am just going to have to relax and accept that she'll find a school in spite of the fact she hasn't been there, and she can always visit if she has trouble deciding on where to go.</p>
<p>My H. went off, sight unseen, to a school thousands of miles from home that he hadn't even heard of before his mom found it and suggested he apply there. It turned out to be the single best experience of his life--it is funny, because for him it was truly a life changing experience. Had he gone and said "ugh, too flat" he would have missed the whole experience.</p>
<p>But to plain-out-say there is "no way" the kid can visit rules out the benefits those visits MAY bring, and I have to wonder just how many other things are "impossible" as well.</p>
<p>What a snarky post. Geez. I didn't say impossible. I said not possible this year. I.e., any time after December 31 would become possible.</p>
