I have spent a lot of time around universities both on the east and west coast. They all look pretty similar to me. Nice buildings, lots of students, social areas, classrooms etc. I really did not see any major differences between the schools regardless of if they were ivies, liberal arts or state schools. In fact, I recently strolled around UCLA and it actually reminded me of several ivies on the east coast. So what’s the big fuss about visiting schools and going on school tours? Also, does it really matter if the school is big or small? If you’re at a big school you can always find some small classes and vice versa. You can get a “small school” experience while attending a big school if you really want. I know that many high schools offer tours where they take the students around to various colleges. I’m skeptical about this approach but am open to ideas.
It’s not just a “tour”; it’s a visit to see if you could see yourself living, working, playing, and studying there. If the schools don’t feel different to you, then maybe you’re not looking and asking the right questions.
I tend to agree with you, that visits may be next to useless, especially if you are focused on larger pubic universities like UCLA, or Ivy League schools that do not care if you visit.
However—
A visit may inspire you to write a better answer to the question – WHY XYZ University?
. Some midsize and smaller private schools keep track of interest, and one way to show interest is to visit a campus. Another way to show interest in a smaller private college is to sign up early, write a note to your admissions counselor, attend a presentation in your state about a college, or finish your application very early.
One thing we gained from visiting smaller LACs
was to notice that some very small LACs only have one cafeteria, so socially
they can be pretty stifling, and students may need a break by a study abroad or semester doing something off campus. I would not have gleaned that from reading a website, but the tour helped see that limit for our students, that small LACs may feel more “high school like” than bigger universities, because there is only one on campus cafeteria, in some cases, and also you can see living arrangements.
It can start to be a blur, though if you do more than four or five college visits in one week.
The tours are next to useless, but presentations with student speakers are more useful, as is hanging out and talking to random students you run into.
To me the big thing is that it makes it all feel more real. Sitting at home and reading information on-line is very abstract. When the student and parents walk the campus, it just feels much more real.
Some schools will also let you sit in on a class and talk to professors. At some of the smaller schools that we visited we also had a personal tour by a current student at the school.
Regarding finding small classes at big schools — not in all subjects, especially not your first two years. And many of the smaller sections you do have are taught by TAs, some of whom may not speak English very well. Also, you don’t always get high quality of teaching at a research university. Honestly, it is not what profs are rewarded for. They are rewarded for publishing.
If you didn’t sit in on classes, you may not have noticed these differences.
I’d not only suggest a visit to your initial schools of interest, but also overnight visits to those few you found to be most appealing.
This. Speaking as a UCLA alum, UCLA has a very different vibe from any of the Ivies, so I’m surprised OP found them similar.
That said, the ability of students to bloom where they’re planted is often underestimated. Many students would do well whether they enrolled at Dartmouth or UCLA.
I don’t agree that it doesn’t matter if you visit large universities. S17 only had large state schools with ag departments and animal science programs on his list. Visiting to him was very important. He saw where he didn’t feel “at home”, where he felt the atmosphere for learning was best, where he felt he could enjoy what will be the next 7 years of his life. (Early admit to vet school so 7 years at his choice). The visits were HUGE for him. Sitting in a class proved the teachers really did care and were fun to be around. Yes he has had some TAs who are excellent graduate students but he always has had access to his professors too. Only the few entry classes were huge. The rest very reasonable in size. He saw this meeting and talking to students. He made an excellent choice and the visits and meeting with heads of departments helped with the decision.
I like your “bloom where you are planted attitude.”
However, a school can appear perfect on paper (or website and word of mouth) but once you visit, not so much. This is what happened to my son. We were so sure our first college visit would be THE school because it appeared to have everything he wanted and needed. It ended up to be at the bottom of his list as the search continued. There is something about stepping on a campus and getting the feel for the environment that makes the decision more clear.
It depends on how picky the student is on aspects that can only be determined on a visit. Students who are not very picky, or who are operating under tight cost constraints that override everything else besides cost and academic offerings, may not get too much value from a visit. Indeed, visits may add randomness to a student who is easily swayed by superficial things that are not necessarily representative of the college (e.g. the weather that day).
I still remember every college visit (mine or my kids’) that turned me off and took a college straight off a list. If you dont care where you go, fine. But don’t let that attitude show on any apps to competitives.
If you “strolled around UCLA” and thought looked Ivy, muet have been a quick walk. You may want to think about what you really know about colleges.
Or not, if you’d be happy to settle for any affordable college down the street, where knowing them isn’t one of their criteria for an admit.
I’m with @Empireapple With DS18 he knew immediately that American University was the one after visiting. I had it as the best fit and it worked out that he agreed. However with DD19 we had a school that I thought was perfect on paper, but after visiting we all agreed that it was coming off the list. Oddly enough a school that was added on because it was nearby rose to the top of the list. I thought on paper it wasn’t a good fit, but after visiting we all agreed it moved to the top of the list. I thought the school would be too “preppy” and “conservative” ( our tour guide even looked like he stepped out of a Vineyard Vines catalogue) but he and all the other students we met were so very genuinely friendly. We were able to attend a student panel (I highly recommend this!) and the students were down to Earth, funny and seemed to all be friends despite vast differences in backgrounds. They all talked about how the school was a community and that they all volunteered in the greater community through the school.
I have lived on the campuses of Harvard and Columbia, and off campus at UCLA. I have spent lots of time inside the buildings and libraries at Harvard and Columbia but only knew UCLA peripherally. Honestly, Cambridge and Westwood village are very similar. Likewise, the buildings of Columbia and Harvard are also similar. Inside, the libraries and lecture rooms of many of the halls, are identical. Of course there were some major differences but also many similarities indeed. Even some of the faux old buildings on the UCLA campus look like the actual old buildings at Columbia and Harvard. Some of the newer buildings at UCLA resembled other structures I remembered at Columbia. While I was at Columbia and Harvard I took courses that were taught by Nobel Laureates who couldn’t teach to save their lives. On the other hand, their TA’s were outstanding and often taught sections of the courses or even the entire second semester (after the students complained about the laureate). There were small and huge classes that were taught by transformative professors and also those that were taught by duds. As a student I used to line up overnight to get the courses that I really wanted and I basically crafted for myself the big school/small school experience that I wanted. I don’t think that anyone strolling through a campus, or even spending the night there would really realize any of this. Furthermore, even speaking to the students is of questionable value because each one of them has created a different experience there. At Columbia and Harvard there were students who went out of their way to take the most challenging courses taught by the brightest minds in the country. However, there were also those who signed up for “Rocks for Jocks”, Moons for Goons" and “Physics for Poets” (Geology, Astronomy and Physics respectively). Who would you happen to meet on a “tour”? I agree that there are differences in the student bodies at these places and I personally felt much more comfortable at the east coast schools than at UCLA; but to be honest, it took me weeks to months to appreciate these things.
So you’re not a prospective undergrad?
It is very helpful, but not essential. Plenty of students do not visit their campus until they are flown in by the college for free at Admitted Students’ Day or even until they show up for freshman orientation. People without a car or enough money to travel may find it hard to visit colleges unless they are lucky enough to have the colleges offer to pay for their visit. It is okay not to visit. You can learn a lot about a college from college websites, guide books like Fiske and Ultimate Guide and Princeton Review, and sites like College Confidential.
Visiting may help you get a feel for the college. It may confirm for a kid such preferences as that he likes small colleges more than large ones, rural more than urban or suburban, non-fraternity more than fraternity, intellectually oriented more than preprofessionally oriented, etc. But most of that you could figure out to some degree from other sources.
What the visits mostly do is help you get prepared to leave home and go to college. You start envisioning yourself in each college environment. It is psychological.
But plenty of kids make a smooth transition to college without ever having visited before their arrival as a freshman.
And I agree that what you see on a visit may be affected by the people you meet, the weather that day, etc.
Our family enjoyed our 21 college visits with our son, especially for the psychological reasons I mentioned above. But I would never tell anyone that a visit is essential. It is not. I disagree when people tell students they can’t decide upon a college without a visit. Visiting just is not realistic for a lot of people.
So if you can, visit. If you can’t, you can still learn about your college choices from other sources and pick a place you think you will be happy!
My son would agree with the OP to a point. He used to tell me that all the chemistry buildings look the same,lol… But I think at some point there is a “feel” of the campus when everything else seems the same. We took both our kids to small, medium and large campuses locally just to get an idea of size of the campus. “Fit” is hard to explain but at some point one school might just “feel” better then another one with everything else being equal.
For the most part, it’s not about the buildings. The purpose of a visit is to get a sense of the people, the environment, the culture, the institutional priorities, etc. if you’re in a position to choose where to apply based on something besides money and availability of your major, these are important facts.
During the info session and the tour, pay close attention to what gets emphasized. That’s the school telling you something about what they consider important.
Sit in on a class or two. How big are intro level classes? Who teaches them? Who teaches smaller sessions of those classes? Sit in back. How many students are on their laptops doing something not related to the class? Do they ask good questions? If the professor asks a question of the class, do people raise their hands and have good answers? Are the students engaged? Are these people you want to be in class with?
Talk to many students. Find people in the dining hall, the student center or other places people are hanging out. Ask them what you want to know about, what matters to you about the life of a school. Some possibilities: Why did they choose this school? What is the best thing about it? What’s the worst (more politely and positively framed as what would they most like to see improved?) How’s the social life? What do people do for fun? How important is Greek life? Do they think students are, on the whole, more competitive or collaborative? How’s the teaching? Do they have ever have trouble getting into the classes they want? How many of their professors know their names? What are research opportunities like? How’s the academic advising? What do they think of the administration? How’s the food? How’s the housing situation, both freshman year and after that? Can you just join any club you’re interested in or do you have to apply and be accepted? What do they think of the size of the school and why? What kind of person do they think will be happy and successful at this school and who would be better off at a different kind of school? What is the political atmosphere on campus?
Pick up a copy of the student newspaper (and check out more editions on line) and see what the concerns of the students are. Look at what’s on bulletin boards. What’s going on on campus? Just look around. Do people look overall happy or miserable? Do they all have their heads buried in their phones or laptops or are people engaging with each other?
But don’t ignore the buildings entirely. Are things in relatively decent shape? If the buildings and grounds aren’t being well maintained, what’s going on? How crowded are the dining halls at peak hours? Can you get a seat if you’re eating lunch when everyone else is? Is the university putting a gazillion dollars into fancy amenities and/or athletic facilities for popular teams? How do you feel about those priorities? Are other things, such as academics, suffering so the football team can have a fabulous locker room or the students can have a climbing wall or a lazy river?
Maybe as a preliminary exercise, get Fiske’s Guide to Colleges and read about the schools you might be interested in, so you can start to get a sense of how schools of similar size and academic level might still be very different. Read Fiske carefully. It doesn’t come right out and say negative things (I can think of a few reasons why not), but if you read closely and between the lines, you’ll get a sense of what might be the less desirable things about some schools.
Visits changed the course of the search and ultimately the selection for my DD. The #1 school on paper for her, a highly rated and regarded school on every list, dropped completely off of her list after being on campus. The students, the tour, the professors, the facilities, the location all told the same story. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Never even applied. The feel at Brown is so different than Dartmouth and difficult to determine how you feel about them until you are there.
I will also say that large state U are not the same or even similar. PSU had a completely different level of organization, personal attention, and friendliness than WVU. As PA residents we were so disappointed in our state flagship and pleasantly surprised by WVU. The Ohio State and U of Maryland couldn’t not be more different. Touring the campus of these large universities gives you a great feel for the value of the perks for top performers such as honors colleges, special programs, mentors. Meeting actual students and taking the pulse of the campus casually also told her so much. There is so much information online that families that can not make the visits can still have a feel for fit. If it is an option at all, I would recommend the tours.
I personally never found school visits to be that important. Myself, my wife, and our son were all very happy at colleges we had never been to until the day we moved into the dorms.
I disagree. If you go to a big state school, you’ll almost inevitably be sitting in huge lecture halls with hundreds of other students for introductory freshman classes.
Both of my kids found their schools at a visitation. Neither of them had it earmarked as a favorite before arriving on the campus; something about that visit spoke to each of them. On paper, both schools were just another school that was likely to accept them (in my daughter’s case, it already had) but didn’t appear to be anything more special than the rest of the schools. Something about the people we spoke to and the things they had to say set those two schools apart from the other schools they were considering.