I am questioning the wisdom of our strategy. Although we saw some schools before applying, for the most part my son wanted to save the visits until he knew where he was accepted. Now we are just a few weeks away from finding out which schools are viable for him, and have almost no idea where we will be visiting! The logistics could possibly be daunting, or not bad at all. Just wondering if this was wise, or if I should have insisted we do visits beforehand!
Most students applying to highly selective colleges will visit both before and after. We visited 20 colleges over the course of 18 months before and now when D gets into schools in late March she will take part in admitted student weekends probably at a few schools. You are at where you are at now so perhaps you will have to travel a lot in April or prioritize top schools he wants to vidit
This is what happens when you live on one coast but the student is intent on college on the other coast! The logistics of planning such a whirlwind trip are boggling my mind, especially since we will essentially get news one day and need to be on a plane the next, but we will persevere!
My daughter did a combination. She wasn’t accepted at all schools to which she had applied; had seen some before applying; saw one after applying but before acceptance (on the waiting list); went to approximately five after being accepted. It was very stressful but she survived.
We did some before and after. My son has been accepted to 5 schools so far and we are still waiting to hear from his top choice, which should be Monday (finally, thank god). If the travel is daunting, may I suggest you wait until you receive financial aid package as well. If a college isn’t a viable option due to money, is there really a point in visiting and getting your child’s hopes up? I don’t think the top choice for my son will be giving him the money he needs to attend, however he received almost a full ride tuition for the competing private catholic school, so I guess it’s not a bad position to be in
We have done a combination. Family vacations the last few years have included a few college stops. H travels on business often, and if he had a trip in place where a son had an app, son would tag along. Yet, there were and probably still will be surprises and so we will have a few post acceptance trips. Most parents I know have waited until after acceptance, however. I think that choice has been due to $ and to the popularity of the state flagship. Often if kid was admitted to flagship, that was the end of the story.
My son, right before winter vacation junior year, decided to apply to colleges. Fortunately, he had spent a few weeks at several places, none of which he applied to. It was a long shot he’d get in to anything but the flagship.
When acceptances came in, it took some planning to stop in midwest, then onto two California schools. It turned out it was less expensive to fly to CMU, then Ca. He could only make the accepted students day at CMU. We rented a car in Ca.
Had we had an extra year, we would have definitely visited more colleges prior to acceptances. I mentioned several schools that are strong in his major, but they were unfamiliar to him.
If it makes you feel any better, trying to see schools beforehand was NOT a positive experience for us! Since all the advice I’d heard was to see the schools over Spring Break Jr yr, I planned a big circular trip hitting a whole bunch of Unis across the week. Ds wasn’t that interested in seeing schools until he was accepted, so he ended up getting grumpy and timing out early. We ended up cutting the trip short. After he received acceptances, he finished the visits and in a much better frame of mind!
What WAS helpful was making one early “practice” trip, going on a campus visit to the closest Uni. I wrote down all the questions the other parents asked (obviously, they knew what they were doing!), made notes of the opportunities for that Uni, added my own questions. That was my foundation, then, for all the future campus tours.
Good luck!
I think a better plan is to visit schools of various types to start – large public U’s, private U, a LAC, colleges in cities, colleges in rural areas, etc. Getting a first hand sense of what its like to be a student at those places is helpful in deciding where to apply. A lot of kids get a much better understanding of their options if they sit in a class of 200 kids, or sit in a seminar where they see everyone is expected to contribute every class.
After that, for schools that are matches a visit if not too difficult makes sense, but for reaches it probably isn’t that important until you find out whether they’re going to take you.
It’s actually a hard call. If you can do both it’s great but that is expensive. It definitely feels a lot better to visit when you know you’re in. You don’t have to have anxiety when they tell you that it’s the most competitive year ever. You don’t have to worry about asking stupid questions. Even little things were less stressful. Like when my daughter needed to run to the ladies room before check in I could just pick up the materials for her. Something that would have been a " no no" before she was in lest they think she wasn’t " independent enough"
We visted many through the years while on vacations. D1 went to three after acceptance (the one she went to, twice), D2 went to top three after acceptance (we limited it) and it worked out fine. Three was just about the right amount.
Thanks everyone. Luckily my son did visit several schools in the past few years, as we vacationed here and there. He ended up applying to so many that there was no way we could have visited them all beforehand. We will just have to bite the bullet and wait until we’ve gotten all the acceptances and plan a whirlwind trip! BTW, as someone pointed out to me earlier, back in the day we didn’t go visit every college possibility, we basically chose by looking at a brochure–my have things changed!
You might find that once the acceptances come in, your son will be able to decide to take some schools off the list sight unseen. This was true for my daughter.
mikemac makes good points. I do believe visiting is key if you can swing the time and expense and do think going beforehand makes great sense. We are on Child #2 and I can’t imagine how she could meaningfully narrow her options re where to apply or devise a strategy re Early Decision, etc. without visiting and discovering which ones are true fits. There are just too many potential fits out there so a personal perspective and ranking of sorts is needed! Visiting early was very helpful for Child #1. Certain schools we’d all romanticized and thought she’d love fell flat upon visiting, others perhaps more off the radar felt surprisingly right. Who knew?! We were glad she didn’t have to waste the time, effort, and money on applications to schools that proved wrong for her after a visit, schools she never would have attended if admitted.
This round, we are focusing on schools that require/prefer interviews (so she can knock them out on campus as we go), and those that really value demonstrated interest, etc. Oh, and those not on spring break! It just doesn’t feel the same when school is out of session. I also agree re perhaps backburnering the super reach, ultra elite schools unless they are on your path and you have the time. Those schools all have very different personalities, too, of course but since they are reaches for everyone if you need to cut back that is an obvious place to start. Attend the visit days for admitted students if and when that day comes? Just my two cents.
Too late to change your strategy now, no matter what anyone says. I usually recommend day visits before applying if you can afford it for a few reasons. One is that schools often look better on paper than in person. So application time and energy can be wasted on schools that the student wouldn’t even want to attend once they visit. Students can end up with few or no schools they like once they visit, and it is too late to change the application list.
Another reason is that it is almost impossible to visit all accepted schools after admissions (not as hard if some are rolling admissions, though). Students end up jettisoning schools that may be a great fit for them due to logistics.
A third reason is what you are discovering now. It is expensive, exhausting, and pressure packed to try to do lots of visits in April and make a decision. Not to mention the logistics of missing school/EC events and work for parents. We did 3 accepted student visits with D2 after acceptances, all requiring flights to different parts of the country. And this was after visiting all schools prior to applying. We were wiped out after just 3 in April.
I think first being accepted and then visiting will make whichever student more happy and relaxed. It really seems more logical
Well, what’s done is done. You will just have to wait and see where he gets accepted, what is affordable, and visit his top choices then. This can make sense, particularly for schools that are far away from where you live and don’t use demonstrated interest as a factor.
We visited schools before applications and were able to eliminate some schools from the list based on the visit – other schools turned out to be pleasant surprises when we visited (ex. my S ended up at a school not on our first list but we visited on a lark because it was pretty close and he loved it right away). My S went to a few accepted student days and then was certain his choice was the best fit for him. My D applied ED so we visited schools before she applied and made a couple of visits to her two top choices until her top pick became very clear in her mind.
I have no idea how one would apply wihout visiting. D. had several visits before and several after. The most important factor in decision making.
We’re going through this right now. Luckily D applied early admissions for all but one school and that one school has already notified her on her acceptance. We are having D go to the admitted students day for her top three choices. I debated making her attend a fourth school’s admitted students day but I’ve decided not to push it. She still has time to change her mind.
D visited some schools before applying but we just didn’t have the funds to visit all schools before and after applying. I tried to take her to see different types of colleges and universities, but not necessarily specific schools.
@tellm2more, Nothing wrong with your strategy, though I can see it might be stressful anticipating a possible whirlwind of visits. DS generally wasn’t interested in visiting many schools. I do think visits can become expensive. For most of the 9 schools my son applied to, the cost of applying and time spent on the application paled in comparison to the cost of visiting and time commitment this entails. So our approach was, “If you get a good scholarship and are still interested in this school in February, then we’ll visit.”
We visited only 3 schools prior to applying: the nearby state flagship, a school that happened to be very near our spring break destination, and a school in a city less than a 4-hour drive away that we turned into a 4-day summer vacation. These trips did help inform my son’s sense of what he wanted. Once acceptances and scholarships arrived, we eliminated quite a few schools from consideration–a couple based on the scholarship amount, but most because over time he had refined his idea of what he wanted in a school, based mostly on info available without a visit, (e…g, desire to be near a a city with many cultural attractions, internship opportunities, not too many very large classes, not a LAC, etc.) So it was kind of an iterative process for DS.
BTW. all but one of his applications was EA, so that helps a lot in that we have the results sooner and have more time to visit before making a decision. For schools that consider demonstrated interest, though, visiting may be a priority.Tough call.