<p>Not saying that it wasn't necessary due to financial pressures, but visiting after acceptances turns the process upside down. Thoughtful visits before applying can completely re-order an application list, saving a lot of time and $$$. And ensures that all your acceptances come within some reasonable radius of "fit."</p>
<p>3togo
I'm trying to make sense of your list. I can see how MIT, Caltech, & Columbia are all near/in a city, but UM and Cornell are large schools off by themselves. Have you visited Cornell? Would u consider Georgia Tech, which is near Atlanta?</p>
<p>I just looked at a handout we are given that lists, by GPA quintiles (top 20%, second 20%, etc) where class of 2006 students applied and where they enrolled. You can't tell whose information it is or where they got in- just which schools they applied to/matriculated. The most # of applications I count, from a quick perusal, is 9, by a person in the second quintile. There's also a person who applied to 8 in this group. But there are a lot of students who must have applied early decision, as there are a lot with only one school listed. Also a lot with only 2 schools listed. Interestingly, of the top 20% (about 50 students), there is one person who applied to 7 schools. That was the most. And only 1. Only 3 people applied to 6 schools. It isn't about getting ONLY into the top 20 schools , though there were 12 going to ivy leagues and some to Duke, UVA, Stanford, Wellesley, Williams, Berkeley, NYU WUSTL, UCLA, Vandy, UNC-CH.Hill, Emory and 3 of the military academies, etc. Again, the students weren't limited to 4. The max was 6 before the workaround rule kicked in. I strongly suspect there were a lot of incomplete applications, and I do not know if this list shows withdrawn applications if a student was accepted to an ED school. When my older s graduated, it listed the 2 schools he applied to, even though he turned down the EA school when he got into his ED school. I do believe if you do your HW right, you don't need to apply to 10+ schools.</p>
<p>BTW, I agree with TheDad. If you can, visiting BEFORE you are accepted is a better plan. Helps you make the decision before you apply.</p>
<p>OOPS- I put int he wrong #s in post # 257. The first 6 (not 4) apps. get done pronto (w/in 30 days of completion). The next 2 get done when all others have their first batch done. Any requests over 8 (not 6, sorry) are charged $50 per application (so they claim). But my #s in post #263 are correct. Only one person last year applied to over 8. And by the way, the $50 they collect goes into a pot to buy gifts for the teachers. That's a nice touch.</p>
<p>I also agree that only 6 guaranteed schools, plus 2 more maybe seems a little stiff...it would have been for me, anyway. Like the poster upthread, if you have high aspirations (using the every popular USNWR rankings as a cutoff point), you can't just apply to one reach school and realistically expect to be admitted. I applied to 4 reach, top 20, etc. schools, which really doesn't seem too excessive being that the overall acceptance rate for those schools last year was just over 10%. Add in 2 higher match schools (within top 10 on LAC list) and two low/safe match schools (in the 30's on Nat'l Uni List), plus one true safety, and my total was a perfectly reasonable 9. I will say this, however: most of my friends were well within 4 or at most 6 colleges. But not the ones who wanted to shoot for the "top" colleges. Plus, people who are very dependent on merit aid might also have good incentive to spend a little extra money up front on numerous apps and get it back later. I would be more comfortable with a limit if it was in the low teens, because that encompasses people who might reasonably want to apply to more while still stemming the app-happy kids who are blitzing the top 25 with applications.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm trying to make sense of your list. I can see how MIT, Caltech, & Columbia are all near/in a city, but UM and Cornell are large schools off by themselves. Have you visited Cornell? Would u consider Georgia Tech, which is near Atlanta?
[/quote]
I'm an old guy ... I already went through this 30 years ago ... but the scenario is legit. Middle class kid from a family without a family history or bucks to be knowledgable about the dimensions of selecting a college ... so choices such as small/big or city/college town had never been considered until it was time to apply. My kids will have a big leg up on their exposure to the options for college ... but Ms3togo and I will not advocate cutting off options earlier than necessary. (FYI - I actully attended Cornell.)</p>
<p>BTW, bookworm, Ga Tech isn't near Atlanta, is is smack in the middle of downtown Atlanta, right across the street from The Coca Cola Company Headquarters.</p>
<p>
Yeah, the kid misses out entirely on the opportunity to visit the schools that reject her. I am so glad that my daughter took that week off from school senior year to visit Boston -- if she hadn't visited Brown and Boston U. that week, she never would have had a chance to see those schools! ;)</p>
<p>Seriously, it depends on the kid. My son did fine with the after-acceptance visits. He's adaptable and would have made do wherever he ended up, and was far more concerned with the sort of questions that have hard, factual answers than emotional "feel" issues. (He couldn't care less what the tour guide was wearing!)</p>
<p>My daughter did find it valuable to visit colleges ... except that the net result of her visits was that she fell in love with her reaches and discarded her safeties. It all worked out in the end ... but what if it hadn't? Maybe if she had visited those safeties she rejected out of hand at a time when she knew those to be among a limited array of choices, she would have been less judgmental. Maybe "too many trees" is not such a good reason to reject a college. As it was, when the list was shaped and the apps all submitted, she had never visited 3 of 4 of the true safeties that were on her list -- if it had come down to those 4, the visits would have had to take place in the spring.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yeah, the kid misses out entirely on the opportunity to visit the schools that reject her.
[/quote]
Pfui. Beats getting accepted to a lot of schools that one later determines one wouldn't have wanted to attend and finding out that one has inadvertantly minimized the number of schools applied to with characteristics one hadn't considered, understood, or internalized. </p>
<p>Adaptability has nothing to do with anything. Sure, most students can adapt and do reasonably well and be reasonably happy at a large number of institutions. From my perspective, that's insufficient. With the amount of money being paid by parent and student and with the range of potentially life-shaping experiences to choose among, I'd want something better than "reasonably happy, reasonably well" adaptability.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.</p>
<p>The Dad</p>
<p>I'm with you. These are 4 really important, highly formative and truly expensive years of my kid's life. He could "make do" at lots of schools, just as he's done at his HS. In fact he's excelled. But I want for him the joy of a college where he feels intellectually and socially at home.</p>
<p>Cal mom's son may not have benefited from visits. Mine did.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Maybe if she had visited those safeties she rejected out of hand at a time when she knew those to be among a limited array of choices, she would have been less judgmental.
[/quote]
Correct. ( And an offspring of yours... judgemental... who'd have thought?? What a surprise ;) )</p>
<p>My kids both visited colleges after acceptance. For us, it was a matter of logistics and finding out about the colleges a little late in the process. My daughter was in marching band and the HS drama. In their HS, these two things overlap by a couple of weeks and consume about every weekend and many weekdays. If you want to do a visit at a college a few states away it takes a little time. I see nothing wrong with applying to a couple of colleges without visiting. As it turned out, one of these colleges is the one my son is attending.</p>
<p>If the parents are putting up the money then it and everything else is 100% up to them. If the student is paying for everything themselves, Like I am then it is 100% up to the student.</p>
<p>Logistically, it would have been impossible to visit all the schools I was planning to apply to (being that they were spread throughout the United States, and I just didn't have the time or money to travel 3000 miles on my own in a foreing country).</p>
<p>What I did was visit the 2 schools which I liked the most due to other factors (which for me was NYU and Emory), and then make a decision what my #1 school was. Luckily, I got in ED so I never had to make any harder decisions.</p>
<p>TheDad,
Like bethievt, I'm with you. If you can manage to visit schools before applying (logistically and financially) it is a great thing to do. I heard a story (don't know if it is true, and if it is it makes me wonder about how much HW this kid did)-- anyway, he wanted to visit a specific school, and when he got there, realized he was visiting Colby when what he wanted to see was Colgate (this is a kid not from the NE). Can you imagine??
By the way, is that how you spell "phooey"? I love your spelling of it!</p>
<p>Before sr yr, youngest D & I drove the 1.5 hrs from small town NH to Worcester & then Boston just to walk around and see where cetain schools were located. She fell hard for the vibe/racial diversity & energy of one particular Boston school and we signed up for the tour and it just cemented her feelings for that school and the big city. But, the price tag and the curriculum did not match up with her/our needs and she had to concede that while the school/campus/student body was great, maybe we should look for something similarly "big city/diverse/energetic" in a less expensive school with better curriculum for her and we found it...1000 miles from home. </p>
<p>Going on that road trip months before her apps were due (when she wasn't pressured) was the best thing we did. It brought clarity to her as to what she was really looking for in a school and racial diversity turned out to be a HUGE "must have". The college she attends offered her a scholarship that entails weekly volunteer work and she has chosen to work in a racially diverse high school near her campus. She's not only happy where she is, she's filling a void in her own life and she's helping other high schoolers to reach their potentials too. She can't imagine herself in a better situation and neither can we. As a parent, I am all for visiting campuses before applying because something may just surprise your child or reveal itself to him/her in ways you'd never thought possible just as it did for our daughter.</p>
<p>But Monty, your daughter got that vibe visiting a <em>different</em> school. Let's assume for a minute that you didn't have the time/money to visit the 1000-mile-from-home college --- should the application have been withheld because she couldn't visit?</p>
<p>Visiting "types" of colleges is a different matter than visiting the specific college, and often much more affordable. I think that east coasters often don't appreciate the amount of traveling that would need to be done by a west coaster interested in exploring colleges along the eastern seaboard and in the midwest -- though a college application list that included Univ. of Chicago, Carleton, & Grinnell as well as Columbia and Swarthmore would be quite logical.</p>
<p>I think my son's thinking was kind of along the lines of Karan's -- he figured the most logically efficient approach was to wait until spring and then visit the top two colleges on his list. He actually visited three, simply because one of the colleges was located in the same city as his top choice. </p>
<p>My daughter was fortunate to be so insistent on attending college in a large city -- it eliminated the transportation issues that would have arisen if she had wanted to visit colleges that are more far afield. There is no way that we could have handled a big, loopy college tour that involved a lot of driving.</p>
<p>calmom- if we couldn't afford the 1000 mi visit, D would have applied RD and then visited after acceptance. But, by visiting early and applying EA, she got picked as a finalist for a scholarship that we DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED. (we had to fly out again for the face-to-face interview at a later date too). So saving $$$ by NOT flying out there early would have led to no scholarship $$$. And it's not just that it's great to have the scholarship, but the experiences she's having doing mandatory volunteer work in a big city? well, as the ads say...That's PRICELESS.</p>
<p>And you are totally correct about eastcoast/westcoast. a 4 hr drive gets us pretty much all over New England, NYC and some upstate NY. I bet 4 hours doesn't get you very far in CA?</p>
<p>C'mon I'm not a west coaster but the colleges my kids wanted to see were in Southwestern VA(Roanoke), northwestern PA (Allegheny) and North Carolina (Elon). My kids did get merit offers at all the colleges they visited after their applications. They did their best to express interest by going to local events (Roanoke and Elon) or seeing a rep at the HS (Allegheny) before applying but there truely wasn't a weekend or two day period where a visit would have fit. My son ended up flying out to Allegheny for an accepted students event because I couldn't take off work to drive with him and he didn't want to drive himself. I would not have felt comfortable having them decide to go there without visiting but I really don't think it's a big deal breaking your neck trying to fit in a visit before applying.</p>
<p>I agree kathiep</p>
<p>It's a luxury to be able to visit all schools before applying, not a necessity. But as monty_mum said, there can be unexpected benefits that arise when you visit. And expressing interest in other ways might be important if you can't visit.</p>