<p>Does visiting a college help when applying to that school?</p>
<p>For some schools it helps. Visiting is demonstrating interest. Regardless, I encourage you, if it isn’t a financial or time burden, to visit to make sure you want to apply.</p>
<p>Check the CDS of the school. Many school would consider your demonstration of interest. You may express your interest by visiting or other means.</p>
<p>Visiting can often be very enlightening. I crossed a number of schools (and even entire categories of schools) off of my list after visits because I discovered the schools were not what I was looking for.</p>
<p>I don’t know how much it helps, but not showing interest can disqualify you in the minds of some schools. We live not too far from a top ranked USNWR National University and one day the GC got a call from admissions that went something like this, “We think Mark is a great candidate for our school, but he’s never shown any interest. We’re 10 minutes away and he hasn’t even gone on a campus tour.”</p>
<p>Needless to say, Mark hotfooted it down to campus, took a tour, met with and profoundly apologized to the AO, and was admitted. Some schools are just jealous that way - you need to show them some attention before they give up the goods.</p>
<p>Some schools are also concerned about their yield - the percentage of accepted students who end up choosing that school. If a student doesn’t show interest and they don’t think they are going to actually attend if accepted, why admit them, increase their acceptance rate, and decrease their yield?</p>
<p>I don’t know what difference it makes to the school, but to you it will probably make a huge difference. Most campus tours are run by students so you get a chance to talk to them about the university. Also: actually being there tells you SO MUCH MORE than just looking at pictures ever could…</p>
<p>I know people who had a few “dream schools” that were completely discarded after a visit and others who weren’t even considering certain schools and ended up picking them because they loved the visit so much. If you have the time/money to do it, I highly recommend visiting your selected universities.</p>
<p>Visiting campus before attending is a really great idea, you can experience the atmosphere of the school, the campus, and facilities before making a decision that will affect the next few years of your life. It’s best to make an informed decision than an uninformed one.</p>
<p>I visited my first choice college (fun day out- excused by my high school- with a couple of friends) and it was awesome. Unlimited free food, waited on hand and foot (tiny college helped), sitting in on amazing classes, getting our names remembered by the time we hit the honors interviews a month or so later (one of my friends was interviewed by her favorite professor from her visit, with whom she’d made an effort to cultivate a relationship- as interviewing professors are assigned randomly, they just told her she was very very lucky 
). For us, there was no downside.
Then again, the college was a subway ride from my high school, so if you live in San Jose and want to visit UF or Yale or Reed or something, then it’ll be slightly more complicated, but I can say that I think that visiting and showing interest only helped me in the admissions process. </p>
<p>It helps with getting into the schools in more ways than showing interest. I found I had a much easier time writing my “Why X College” essays for schools I visited than for schools I had not. Plus, admissions officers want to hear about your personal experiences with the school and why they were so valuable, and a visit offers an opportunity to have one of those experiences. If you can’t visit all the colleges on your list, then try to strategically pick which ones you do visit. Obviously, try to visit your top choice, but try to visit a decent assortment of the schools on your list. If you have a few large universities and a few small universities on your list and you can only visit two, visit a large U and a small U. This works with other categories, as well: rural/urban schools, geographic regions of schools, LACs/non-LACs, etc. You may be able to cross schools off the list without even visiting them based on what you learned from other schools in that group (for example, I visited Swarthmore and realized I hated the small school atmosphere, so I crossed off all the schools on my list that had under 6,000 graduates. I also realized that I didn’t like being farther away from the city, so I took off all the schools that weren’t in large cities.) This gives you a way to adjust your list without visiting every campus.</p>