Vent - college decision timelines and campus visits

Parents Forum
1

Just gotta vent. I mean, it’s a serious disservice to our kids and these are really big, consequential decisions for them… Spring break is in March; he’s gotten some acceptances, but; many acceptances/rejections come out in mid-April; decisions need to be made in May, some as early as May 1st, possibly only two weeks after getting some final acceptances/rejections! (Note: my kid is a transfer student)

How is this supposed to work!?!?!? My kid could make some valuable visits over Spring Break. But should he (potentially) waste his time visiting top choices that he may not even get into, or should he (potentially) waste his time visiting ones that he’s gotten into, and then when he gets into better choices he hasn’t visited them?

I know plenty of people choose colleges without ever visiting, and it turns out ok…but I’d bet some of the time it doesn’t, and a visit could’ve helped. It’s what most of us parents did “back in the day.” But if timelines could just be adjusted it could do a lot of good.

What do others of you do?

(Note: he has visited a couple, but there are far more that he hasn’t. )

2

Colleges do not make it easy esp if a transfer or waitlisted, I know some folks visit their top 3 choices to get a feel of the school. He / You can dig around to see how many transfers each school have accepted in past years. Where is he looking?

3

He’s a Chemical Engineering/Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering major. He’s applying to most of the top schools in that field, so Michigan (accepted), Minnesota Twin cities (accepted), UIUC, UT Austin, U Del, Georgia Tech, UW Madison, Johns Hopkins, and many of the UC’s (UC Davis (accepted)UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, and UCI). May still apply to three more ('cause we’re made of money hahaha).

We/he have/has visited all of the UC’s except the one nearest us, UCI, but one of his top choices, UCB, and UCD were when school was not in session, so not an exact picture.

4

OMG! I just mapped out a 3,000 mile, 48 hour road trip that hits all eight of those non-UC schools! Spring Break Road Trip! I’m down! :slight_smile:

Edit: Leaving out Atlanta, and Austin, and maybe Delaware too, makes it a totally doable trip!

5

This is soooo hard too because some of the schools my DD has been accepted to do dorm selection based on when you apply for housing and their housing applications opened up months ago. One of her top schools starts dorm selection in less than 2 weeks. But she hasn’t decided yet, because she just got 2 acceptances this week and she’d really like to visit one of the 2 during the school year as she has only visited during summer, well guess what…their spring break is the same time as hers, so that doesn’t help. The school is a good 4 hour drive, 5 with traffic if we don’t plan correctly. Only way we could go is if she misses 2 days of school next week.

6

OMG, yeah, I didn’t even think about housing!

7

We visited starting last summer. School wasn’t always in session, but we still got a feel for the town. For some, we just go by brochures and find older classmates and friend’s cousins etc that are there and they have messaged my daughter. It’s not the best, but we are down to not visiting one school only. Good luck - we would have covered more but our plans were cancelled the fall before last due to the fires in California.

8

The virtual tours are usually really good as a start.

For more info go to YouTube, there are many students posting “day in the life” of college x videos.

These are student made and generally very good.

I’ve seen a lot of these.

There’s a whole website devoted to these. I forget the name. The students post several for each school covering different aspects. Not official and made by a marketing department, very realistic.

9

Apologies for the tangent, and maybe he’s already looked at this, but I would want to know how his courses transfer for each school. I’d be concerned that any engineering courses might not directly transfer.

10

Thanks @DCCAWAMIIAIL , we know to cover that. What will be accepted will be part of the decision. He has followed to a T the requirements for transferring to UC Davis, UCLA and UC Berkeley, so we know he’ll be good for those, and should be pretty good at most of the others. Everything he’s taken has been lower division. We shall see.

11

It seems many colleges have cancelled the accepted students weekend. MIT is trying to think of virtual ways to do this , but it sure won’t be the same. Harvard and others have also cancelled these events.

Years ago, we visited 3 schools after acceptances. Had that been our strategy this year, my son would be in trouble.

By the way, there is even talk of cancelling graduation ceremonies. ?

12

I think you’d better ensure the college you want to visit is going to stay open for tours.

I’m not sure what disservice you are talking about. What is a disservice? Anyway, your child needs to decide on 2-3 top choices. Forget the others, because there is no time. Especially this year, it’s possible he might have to decide without visiting.

13

This has been my number 1 pet peeve for years. With the amt of money schools receive from state/fed govt, there should be a universal timeline that all 4yr non-profits abide by. I’m not for more federal oversight, but this process is so slanted towards the school, it’s borderline illegal. I’ve often proposed a universal application deadline date of 12/1 and an 2/15 universal notification date for both acceptance AND all aid declarations. Schools can get info out earlier than 2/15 if they want to entice earlier acceptances. Before everyone jumps on why this can’t or won’t work, please look in the mirror and realize you probably have the resources to make the current system work to your advantage, where most of America does not. Families need time to digest/understand the financial ramifications of this massive decision and receiving admission/FA info in late march or early april and then having to make a decision in a month is patently unfair and needs to be changed.

14

@Lindagaf , see comment below yours for another’s view on how this is a disservice. Kids/families need more time to decide on schools.

15

Consider this: Visiting in person is completely overrated.

You are flooded with a bunch of essentially random information that is really vivid and seems critically important. But really all that’s happening is that you are reacting emotionally to information that is incomplete and misleading, and you are constructing what are essentially fantasies about what it would be like to attend that institution that say more about your psyche than about the university in question. You completely miss a sense of the range of possible experiences there, and how you and people like you adapt to the institution to maximize what’s good about it and cope with what’s annoying. (Every institution has plenty of both.)

You may not like your tour guide. Or you may love your tour guide. Is she typical of students there? What does “typical” even mean in the context of a university? You may not like how the dorm rooms you see are set up, or the bathroom arrangements? Are all the dorms like that? Are the students in the “bad” dorm really unhappy, or did they find that after a few weeks they didn’t mind the dorm as much as they thought they would?

You can probably learn most of what you really need to know to make an intelligent decision by reading the catalog carefully, comparing COAs, talking to students and recent alumni online, and doing some internet research on the reputation and quality of the departments in which you are most interested.

Of course, once you have visited a few places, unless you completely hated all of them, it may be hard to choose an unseen campus over one you have visited, precisely because you have so much more seemingly relevant information about the place you have seen. That doesn’t mean you are making a high-quality decision.

(My experience with this: I chose my college notwithstanding that I probably liked its campus least of all the places I visited. There were too many good reasons to go there that had nothing to do with what it looked like. That proved to be true. In addition, surprise!, decades later, I go all gooey with nostalgia about the same spots I thought were awful when I first visited.

I also chose my graduate school sight unseen. It had a reputation for being really beautiful. I got there, and I couldn’t believe how much I disliked the whole physical plant! Plus, lots of things I took for granted in my college were different there, and not for the better. All of that lasted a month or two, but ultimately the reasons why I chose to go there proved absolutely right. I couldn’t have made a better decision. And I still hate how it looks.)

16

If your kid is a transfer student, for the most part, the May 1 deadline is not going to pertain to him/her. S/he is probably going to get some acceptances later (usually after RD for first time undergrads) as the number of available seats is going to be a consideration. In addition, transfer students are really not part of the rankings.

17

See if you can eliminate schools and don’t apply to any more.

Why is he transferring? Maybe same reason(s) exist at some of the new schools. Maybe some of the schools won’t transfer as many credits. Has he gone through all the schools and what classes are required? My son eliminated one school on his short list pretty quickly by seeing how many more core classes he would’ve had to taken vs what he wanted to take.

Maybe join the accepted students Facebook pages so he can get a feel for the type of students he’ll be joining. Is he a big foodie? Look at dining options and see if any look more appealing.

18

It’s always been my personal approach to visit schools before applying. After all why bother applying to a school you wouldn’t want to attend? That way once offers are received if there is still some uncertainty a follow up visit can be made. For this reason I’ve always started doing campus visits with the kids in their jr. year.

19

I agree with @gwnorth, you need to visit the campus before you apply, to get some inkling of what it may be like if you were to go there.
Also, why would you need to apply to so many schools? That would have cut your battle of trying to visit each and every school.

I think my eldest applied to five schools, my middle daughter applied to three schools, and my son applied to 10 schools only because his GC suspected that he would be a NMF finalist. (He was a winner).

All three kids were in high school or near high school when we ended up visiting the schools in their summers off.

We focused on where they would apply to save some money.

D1 hated Yale and did not like Marist.
D2 and S3 did not like NEast schools, nor UCI.
All three did not like UCSD.

S3 didn’t like USC.
They all had time to apply for housing.
It wasn’t a surprise to us that they would continue their educations after high school, so we just planned to visit schools. They didn’t have their majors then, but we asked them if they could see themselves living at these sites for 4 years. It eliminated a lot of guesswork. Our kids, however weren’t transfers.

20

You might not have a choice this year. There are schools that are canceling accepted student days, tours and info sessions…for everyone…not just you.

My guess is more schools will be doing so if the coronavirus continues to increase in numbers.