College Selection / Touring Timeline?

adlgel
Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:33:16 +0000

We didn’t start touring for my DS (oldest) until his spring break week Junior Year when we did a tour of 5 schools. We hit up 2 other schools on one-off visits before the end of his junior year. He is not picky and he applied to all but one of the schools we visited along with a few other safety schools I made him apply to that we did not visit. He ended up going to the only school that he actually expressed a strong preference about.

DD is two years younger than DS and accompanied us on DS’s spring break college tour so we did not revisit those schools for her although she applied to a few of them. We did a day trip in the fall of her junior year on Election Day when school was closed and then did another week long tour during her Spring Break week when we hit another 5 schools.

I honestly don’t think touring earlier than junior year would have been beneficial for my kids. However, I would have tried to take better advantage of the individual days they had off in their their junior year (Election Day, Columbus Day, President’s Day, etc.) to schedule day trips to schools that are within driving distance.