I know that college visits are good for that, but that’s not really a realistic option for me. My parents told me that we could maybe go on one if I found a college that I knew for sure I wanted to go to.
How can you really know what you want in a school, what’s right for you, and if a school you’re looking at is a good fit without a visit?
My daughter didn’t visit any either. It was not feasible for our family to do this. She needed merit. We wanted her in a certain geographic area to be close to some family because we live overseas. She wanted a certain major. She studied the websites. She felt she could be happy at any of the schools she applied to. It worked out. She will be a senior in the fall, has been happy at her school, doing well there.
Once you figure out what your priorities are, you can generate a great list of potential schools, even without visiting.
To start you think of preferred variables such as size, region, culture, academic strengths, level of Greek life, Urban/Suburban/Rural, LAC vs. Research U, student life, etc. You can narrow down your list for fit quite a bit.
One issue is the size of the school. If you have any universities near where you live, if you visit a very large one and a very small one that might give you something to think about.
Another issue is city versus suburb versus small town versus rural. Do you have a sense regarding whether you would like to be in the middle of a large city or in a small town?
Cost is a major issue for the large majority of students. I recall from another thread that you are in-state in Illinois. This has the downside that I have trouble spelling it correctly, but the upside that it has great in-state public schools.
Most students in the US seem to want to attend the highest ranked university that they can get into. To me this is probably a mistake. There really isn’t much difference between a school that is ranked say #40 versus one that is ranked something like #80 or #90. There are hundreds of very good universities. Once you graduate in most cases no one will care, and very few will even remember which school is ranked higher or lower (and the rankings may have switched to be the other way around anyway).
Another issue: Many students want to go out of state. IMHO this can in some cases be an expensive mistake. If you live on campus, you can be 10 miles from home or 1,000 miles from home and it will seem like a completely different world compared to living at home and attending high school. You don’t have to go far to get a very different experience and to be “on your own”. However, if you are say 100 miles from home and have a bad breakup (this does sometimes happen to university students), someone you know can be there same day. Yes, I have made the trip to university for this reason and many other parents have also. Also, of course in-state tuition is often much lower – for the obvious reason that it is in-state taxpayers (your parents) who have been paying taxes for years to support your in-state public schools.
You should run the NPCs and try to get some rough guess on the annual cost of various schools.
Some students care about things such as football and fraternities. Some schools (U.Chicago comes to mind) are noted as being academically very challenging. Schools such as U.Chicago and MIT are probably only appropriate for students who are both very strong academically, and who really want to take on a lot of work for four years. No one needs to do this and no one should do it unless they know that they want to. Of course, most students couldn’t get into either of these schools anyway.
Get a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. See if you can visit some nearby schools — they have tours on Saturdays, for example. You can get a feeling for types of schools — LACs, state flagships, other in state public universities. Sign up on the websites for mailings and take virtual tours. Look at the Common Data Set to see a lot of data about them. Review the websites for departments you are interested in. Watch the admissions website for dates when schools might visit your area. Go to a college fair and chat with reps.
Most important - run net price calculators on the college website before spending too much time looking at them. A college that is unaffordable is not a fit.
Reading college review sites and seeing what other students are saying about the school has been helpful – of course take everything on there with a grain of salt. College Confidential, virtual tours, and even just visiting their websites and seeing the things that are offered are good alternatives.
I think on your other post you said your parents probably wouldn’t pay the high prices for out of state publics. Your parents might not know that colleges have these net price calculators on their websites now. They can put in some info on your family finances, and you can see how much they might cost. There is no point in doing a lot of research or paying for an application/sending scores to schools they can’t or won’t pay for. Those calculators are kind of new (last 10 years or so). Weren’t around when we parents were college age. They really help see if a school is affordable or not. It is an old fashioned idea to just apply and see about the cost later. You can waste a lot of time and money applying, and end up with no good choices.
I will say that you should look at Illinois publics for sure.
A great option is to visit schools in your area of different types if possible. Traveling across the country might not be possible, but there has to be some sort of options within driving distance, yes? That’s a great way to get some generalities down - do you like big vs small, urban vs rural, etc. You can then take those first-hand experiences and then see how the colleges you are looking at compare to the ones you visited. It won’t capture it all but is a start.
A lot of schools have youtube tours… official (put out by the admissions department) and unofficial (just by students on campus). Check out some of those, and look for a site called Niche that has reviews by current students.
Read the descriptions in the Ultimate Guide to America’s Best Colleges, Fiske Guide, and Princeton Review. What do you find appealing in descriptions? What do you find unappealing? When one sounds good, check out the colleges listed as similar or overlap colleges. Start getting a sense of what you want in a college.
For many students, very many colleges might be a good fit! You can be happy and get a good education just about anywhere— it is more about the person than the place. So pick colleges that appeal to you more than other colleges do, but do not get hung up on finding “the perfect college.”
You won’t know for sure until you start attending.
@simba9, isn’t being snarky either. Every school, I mean EVERY school, will have things you don’t like that you’d never know about until you’ve been there. That said, year after year, roughly 80% of people surveyed say they were happy with their undergraduate institution. It’s largely what you make of it as opposed to where you go. Good luck.