Me and most of my friends did most tours last summer and then all this year, but we’re seniors, so our transcript and applications couldn’t really be improved. Shouldn’t the tours happen earlier to inspire students to work harder 9th-11th?
No. It is already too long a process. And there is little to be gained by going that early, and parents would have to visit loads more then!
Personally I found it silly when someone raised a hand for 9th or 10th grade (tho I’m sure some were dragged along with their sibs).
I never viewed the purpose of a college visit to be inspiring a student to work harder. When my daughter did her college visits (all junior year), it was to see the campus and surrounding area, gather information about the school, talk to people there and determine if it was a place she liked and could see herself attending for four years. As such, visiting closer to the time one would attend makes a lot more sense, as a 7th or 8th grader probably has little idea of what they’ll be looking for in a school 5 or 6 years hence.
You are not the same person you were in 7th or 8th grade (at least I hope not). Do you want the same things now as you did then? Then how would you know what to tour or what to look for? You’d have to redo it anyway as your needs and desires change.
There is nothing to be gained, and a lot of childhood to lose, by beginning this process earlier.
My first tours were in the fall of my junior year. By then I already had an idea of what I wanted to study, so I knew which schools it would make sense to look at. I definitely recommend starting out in junior year, instead of saving them all till senior year. Senior year can be very crowded, what with applications, SATs/ACTs if you’re not done yet, and regular school.
My youngest (graduating HS senior this Spring) could tell you why younger kids shouldn’t go on college tours, since she had to go on a few and she complained the whole time. As @HRSMom says, many siblings are forced to go on tours along with the older sibs. And a great majority of them hate that and find it all deadly dull. 7th - 9th graders rarely are thinking seriously about what they want to do with their life. That’s too early to expect in fact. Most will grow and mature significantly from those younger years. I thought both my kids grew significantly their senior year. I think Junior year is a perfect time for visits, as students are starting to think of life beyond High School.
I dragged my 9th graders on a tour of a college when we were vacationing in the area (Tulane / NOLA). Their aunt / uncle went there so I pitched it as “look where they went!” In hindsight it was a bad move. They were simply too young. They got very little out of it.
Just no.
I agree that junior year is an ideal time to start visiting colleges. Maybe the spring/summer of your sophomore year. We took our daughter on her first two college visits during spring break of sophomore year, and it was interesting to see the balance between 10th, 11th, and 12th graders visiting. But, if the two schools had not been in a location we were already visiting that week, we would have waited. Most of the 10th graders (and, there were 9th graders, too!) were more interested in screwing around than taking the visits seriously.
Ironically, we took her brother (who was a 5th grader at the time) along to one of those schools, and he’s already declared it his top choice. He has several years to change his mind again. Now, he understood the rules going in and stayed quiet the whole visit, but there were plenty of siblings making a general nuisance of themselves that day!
That being said, starting the conversation about college planning and careers should start early. Little brother’s class has done a couple of short visits to local colleges to learn a bit about college education and career planning, but that’s it. A 6th grader will never remember the dog and pony shows some of these schools put on for potential students.
My children’s school does start college tours in 9th grade. The students are taken to view universities that are close enough for a day trip. In the 10th grade they tour in-state universities on an overnight. In the 11th and 12th grade the students are each year taken on roughly a 5 day tour of universities that are located in a different area of the country than where we live. The students look forward to it every year and by the time they are Juniors they have a solid idea of what type of university they want to attend and what will be required of them to achieve their goals.
That is ridiculous saffsmum. Overnights in tenth grade? I am sure they only look forward to it as a field trip with friends. They change their mind too much. They are too immature. Glad my kids aren’t at that school.
Official college trips started for us the Summer before Junior year. However, as a family, we would “swing through” a college when out of town. Much more of a look what this type of school looks like. Once 9th grade started, we told our kids that it all counts from here on out.
One concrete reason it is bad: some Saturday tours fill up and can’t take on more kids, so they have to find another date. 10th and earlier are wasting spots in these tours.
@HRSMom in the case of our school the students in 9th and 10 grade tour exclusively during the week and the tours are booked privately with the universities being visited. Since the trips in 11th and 12th grade are several days in length week-end touring is part of it but again the tours are prearranged with the schools being toured. Our students are not taking spots away from others wishing to tour. Without knowing an individual student I’m uncertain how it can be claimed that spots are being wasted upon them.
Because middle school is tortuous enough without dragging your surly, eye-rolling, hormonal 12-year-old on a tour…
@saffysmum I was not referring to those separately arranged tours…just the Saturday and Spring break tours fill up on popular weekends.
Never take a middle schooler any place - even on a family vacation. @scout59 summed it up very nicely.
I took D1 on one tour in spring of sophomore year to get her thinking about the process. D1 did a full visit, interview (she was precocious, even a sophomore interview went great for her), ate in the cafeteria, went to class at a local LAC. I thought it probably was NOT a target school for her (and it didn’t turn out to be), so it seemed like a good starting point. She told me much later that she liked the school and enjoyed her day, but also thought privately, “I can do better”. She did buckle down junior year and get better grades – they hadn’t been bad before, but she found another gear for junior & senior year. She studied hard for her standardized tests, too. And did indeed have some stronger choices and good merit aid. But I think if we had done it any younger, it probably would not have had the same effect.
D2 went on a couple of visits spring of sophomore year as well. We started then partly because I KNEW she would have a hard time deciding, and finding fit for her was going to be a challenge. Super bright, quirky, not really a “bloom where planted” kid like D1. We did more over the summer before junior year, too. But all of them before spring break of junior year were sort of woven into other trips we were already taking or pickup/dropoff from summer programs. She is picky and takes a lot of warming up to things, so it was a good strategy for her. She said later that it helped her see what she was working toward – it had been pretty nebulous in her mind before that, she didn’t know what college was really like.
One problem with a lot of visiting early is that you don’t have any real idea what your test scores are, so you don’t know what your options really are.
My D1 worked for an academic summer program for inner city kids with the potential to attend college. One thing they do is take them on a tour of the state flagship, and the teachers (all college students) talk about their colleges and what they are like. But these are kids who very likely would not get to college without some intervention – all are low income, many have single parents, public school student in the city. They do a Saturday academic program during the year, this summer school program, have to take at least two honors classes in middle school & HS, and get free college counseling services from the program. So for them, an early visit and talking about college in middle school is key to get them used to the idea that THEY can go to college.
But for the average kid of college graduates who already knows they will probably go to college, I don’t think middle school college incentives are necessary. I think one visit sophomore year isn’t a bad idea, just to help them have a picture of what college is like. Neither of my kids applied to the first couple of schools they visited (but D2 is at a school she first visited summer before junior year).
For us even fall of junior year was too early, spring of junior year would have been the better time to start. Kids like to do what their peers are doing and apparently the college buzz is just starting in spring of junior year and picks up speed throughout senior year.
No.
While on vacation, I took my kids to visit colleges. They have no memory of the schools they visited in 5th-9th grade.