My DS could pretty much be happy anywhere as he is pretty laid back, so he didn’t want to visit many schools. We went to a few because I wanted to see them. He will choose his college based on looking at a website most likely. He has been on a lot of college campuses in general in the past, but not for any tours or because he was evaluating them; it’s just because certain events might be a college campus (book fair, summer program, etc). His only criteria is an urban environment. Maybe we will do a few post admission visits, but again, it may be chosen based just on a website.
My DD is very picky and had high stats, so she visited over 30 colleges before applying. She basically found things wrong with most colleges except for 4 of them. Given that info, she applied to very few colleges.
My older son hated visiting. I dragged him to four CA colleges during spring break senior year (we live in the NYC area), but we didn’t visit any of the East Coast colleges. As it happened he got into four east coast colleges and none of the west coast ones so he had a busy April. He was actually much more focused spring senior year so that was right for him.
Younger son was very interested in college visits. We saw most of the colleges he applied to before he got accepted. He then revisited or in the case of (U of Chicago) made the first visit during the accepted student events. The accepted students events can be both more useful in terms of info, but less typical than regular college visits. I can’t really say in retrospect which was better. My younger son who was a big believer in visits during the process says he now thinks they are overrated. The things that really ended up mattering were not things that came out in visits and visits often misrepresented the college. (i.e the U of Chicago host may have been more serious than the college as a whole, the American University host was probably smarter and more engaging than the average student on campus.)
Our experience was that son didn’t want to apply to several schools he visited and ended up choosing one that he didn’t visit prior to admission. It seemed that he was more attentive and better able to focus on how he fit into each school when attending was a real possibility. If you have many schools to check out after acceptance it isn’t a bad problem. I expect that once you have a list of schools that are real possibilities you and your son can weigh these based on personal criteria and can whittle the list to a manageable size if it turns out to be a long list. Either way it seemed that visits after admission gave us more information than those before. Don’t second guess what you can’t change. It will be workable…and if it turns out to be a short list no worries there either. All that is really needed is one comfortable match.
Wouldn’t the before/after acceptance decision for each school depend on such factors as:
Chance of admission. An early visit to a safety won't really be wasted, while an early visit to a reach could be if the result is denial.
School considers "level of applicant's interest". If so, having a visit recorded can help.
Convenience of visiting and making travel arrangements, or being able to bundle a visit with another trip in the area.
Of course, the actual value of a visit depends on the student and his/her criteria for choosing a school, and whether the student has done “homework” beforehand to know what to look for during a visit.
I agree that visiting safeties, and to some extent matches, is a better use of time and resources. It is often harder to find a safety that you really want to attend, so takes more looking. It can also really pay off; your kid might fall in love with their safety and decide to attend at a lower cost than other options (my D1 did this).
IMO, if at all possible, visiting before is great.It avoids that crunch rush to see lots of schools all over the place, with possibly many last minute airline tickets ($$) and missing school towards the end of ones senior year. Each of my s’s had a school or 2 they thought they’d love but hated, and didn’t apply.
Don’t beat yourself up. It’s entirely possible to have a satisfactory college experience without having seen the campus before Acceptance April. I even think in some cases, visiting a lot of schools before applying can confuse a student.
We live in California. My D applied to 5 schools, in PA, IN, CO, WA, and a state school in California (but far to the south of us). Visiting all of those schools beforehand was out of the question. She was accepted at her #1, the Indiana school, and we visited that one in April. She loved it and enrolled. So that worked out fine for us.
Much earlier, the summer before her junior year IIRC, we visited my two alma maters in Seattle, one a gigantic state flagship, and the other a small LAC. She wasn’t interested in either one of them specifically, but I wanted her to get a feel for what these two types of schools are like. Those visits were very helpful (probably more helpful than running all over the country would have been), as they helped her decide she wanted an LAC. So if your son has both types on his list, and if there are samples of both types somewhat near you, you could visit them sometime in the next month. That might at least enable him to scratch a few off his April visit list.
I didn’t go to college, but from threads here on CC, it seems that our generation applied blindly, never saw the campus till the day they moved in. Why was our generation so resilient yet we seem to coddle our kids for the right “fit”? I know there are some kids that have different challenges that need to be met, but couldn’t that be done through phone calls/emails? I am not being sarcastic, I am truly wondering why kids need to visit a dozen schools?
I agree that our generation did not see as many schools prior to admission. I only saw 5 schools and only 1 on any semblance of a tour. The others were through attendance at leadership events, camps or competitions. My DS and I have seen 5 schools on formal tours mostly at “open house” events. I think they have been very useful because they revealed that my son had this idea in his mind of what a college would be and had not realized that some would be VERY different from that idea. Before the visits he would not have thought to say I want a true campus because he thought all schools were like that. Seeing a school simply being part if a city changed that perception. Also seeing the differences in quality of lab facilities was a surprise to him. Basically, he did not know how much he did not know. None of our trips were more expensive than a hotel room and a vacation day. We were able to see a lot just by adding stops on to other already scheduled trips. I think that helped him be interested early on since it was just part of a trip not the entire point of the trip. He would never want to see 7 schools in 7 days. It just is not the way he gathers information or makes decisions. He will go to at least 2 admitted student days, hopefully 3, before making a final choice–unless his first choice makes him a full ride offer ;-).
I took my DS on a tour of his targeted OOS schools the spring of his junior year. There was only one school that he really connected with. We visited that school again over the summer for an engineering day program. He applied ED and was accepted. Before the tour all he wanted to consider was the in-state public university. The tour allowed him the opportunity to see what else was out there in the real sense.
@GA2012MOM, I think there are a lot of parents who got through college, but believe they could have had a different and better experience at a different school. I sure am one of those. My kids have been far happier with their college experiences than I was, and I think that is due to a better fit.
Making sure we visited safeties well in advance worked well for my kids. They were each able to pick out a school or two that they really liked and to which they were very, very likely to be admitted. That allowed them to knock a bunch of schools off the list and took a lot of stress out of the application process because they knew that even if they were only admitted to one school it would be somewhere where they could be happy.
I really thought we would be all done with visits at this point, but we didn’t visit three of the schools my daughter had applied to. She is still waiting to hear back from three . She was accepted to two that we never visited. I think we are close to ruling out one of them since it seems to have a few strikes against it.
If she gets accepted into one in particular that we DID visit, we want to go back and get a different perspective. We know that one of them is a reach for her although we can’t seem to find any stats of others applying to her intended major. Is she was to be accepted , they would need to give her a rather substantial scholarship, and I seriously doubt that will happen.
I am probably feeling just as anxious as she is at this point because I will have to arrange the travel with a few obstacles in the way
She applied to 7 places and got into 6 but dropped 3 quickly, including her safety, one which was financially out of reach and another that she didn’t like as much. Then she visited the other three and make her decision.
It depends on the cost, distance, and purpose. We did visit a handful of universities before my D submitting application. We went back to visit one school on top of the list after admission notice to find out more specific information about financial aid, housing, clubs, etc. I don’t see much need to visit the school after submitting application but before admission notice though unless it is really nearby or the visit may help the chance for admission.
Simply put (and I am not being cute), times have changed, right? The world of higher ed has changed. College is an incredibly expensive investment, admissions are more competitive, the brochures/websites are so very glossy, parents are more involved in the process for better and worse, and kids are perhaps more often going farther from home such that making the decision about where to spend four important years of one’s life off a website or word of mouth seems pretty wild. I’ve actually been hearing several stories of kids coming home after first semester or year wanting to transfer due to their failing to get a better sense of the place going in, i.e., poor “fit.” It’s a process I went through for grad school (and almost undergrad) in the 80s and don’t generally recommend. It might have made me more resilient but I wish to heck I had visited more schools before I blindly went off to the single undergrad institution on my radar because it sounded fun, boasted sunny skies, and offered my major of interest. I hung in there but was fairly miserable. My kids aren’t at all coddled and our resources are limited but schools really do differ a lot and you can often feel things straight away once on campus. I’m one who believes fit is a meaningful concept and that visiting is a wise investment of time and resources. It’s my kids’ show but I am happy to help improve their odds of having a truly excellent college experience by helping them feel more fully informed about their choices. Beyond that, college tours proved quite fun for us. I genuinely cherish that time in the car – happy memories indeed.
You’re right Valdog, it’s like doing due diligence on an expensive investment! Although a cautionary tale is my nephew, who visited his first choice school Georgetown 3-4 times before deciding to attend, and still ended up leaving there after the first semester! But you can only do what you can in terms of finding the right fit, the rest will just happen!
I feel like colleges may be more savvy marketers than they were back when we went to college, too. It can be hard to get beyond the marketing “gloss”. Getting on campus can help. So can reading the school newspaper.
We had it somewhat easy in that my daughter wants to stay on the west coast. We had seen a couple of schools on spring breaks in her freshman year. Then for spring break of junior year we did a double loop - first to Oregon and then down to greater LA. We were able to see 8 schools in that time frame, and of those, she ended up applying to 5. She also applied to the 2 she’d seen as a freshman (although right now she really doesn’t remember much detail about those so will revisit if she gets in) and 3 that are close enough to us to go see on a Saturday.
She has plans to go visit a couple of her EA schools in April, and is keeping her spring break open to do a return visit at a couple of others if she gets in.
Overall I think this was a good strategy, but like I said, it worked out because her schools are all relatively close to each other.
