We are starting to look at dates for college visits during the next school year. Where available, we want to be able to do more beyond the regular tour and info session such as get on an honors college tour or presentation if there is one, try to connect with a professor or student in D28’s planned areas of study, hang out in the student union or similar to get a vibe of the school. Basically we plan to dig in to any school that D wants to visit.
Would experienced parents recommend a normal weekday visit or an Open House day? Does your answer vary if it’s a larger state school vs midsize vs small. In case it matters schools we might visit include Pitt, UDel, UVA, UMass Amherst, W&M, Emory, WashU, Brandeis, Davidson and Denison. Big range of sizes.
If you have a real interest, then the open house days are great! My D26 actually got to hear from folks in the department at one of the open houses. It convinced her it was a good fit. An open house at another school convinced her it was NOT worth applying. But, it’s time consuming - it was basically a full day including travel. So a regular tour is better than nothing, but the open house was pretty helpful.
I’ll also note that at Pitt, the open house gets you the code for the fee waiver, so they at least make it a bit worth your while.
I agree that the Open Houses can be very helpful. There are normally many more staff and resources available than on a standard tour..
For what you described as your daughter’s interests, I recommend that you set up appointments in advance for anyone you want to meet with. You can go through Admissions for this or contact the department or faculty member directly. See what works best.
Open houses are definitely helpful…and if you can go to those definitely do that. That said, every kid is different and at some point, both my kids started to get open house fatigue (as well as tour fatigue) when we tried do too many schools in a concentrated period. Also, it was almost impossible to logistically coordinate a college tour trip that also included multiple open houses or extended tours. So…we had to pick our spots. At the end what worked best was to always do a guided tour plus add a current student connection where we can meet up with a student or two for 15-30 minutes and get a more unfiltered view of the school and the student life. What worked worst (at least for us) was us just doing a fly-by the school or our own self-guided tour. Also…we tried to never do a tour on a weekend - it just made every campus seem quiet and uninteresting for our kids.
We always choose to attend an Open House when available at large U or small lac. It’s so helpful to have staff from many different areas- housing, advising, career center, study abroad available in one place and ready to answer questions. Ditto for faculty and department reps. We have had excellent experiences at Open Houses that helped cement the feeling that a college was or was not a good fit.
IME, regular tours have been very hit and miss on quality. Also because you interact many fewer people, one or two duds can really throw off the impression of a school. At an OH, if one person isn’t clicking we just move on and talk to someone else. There’s a lot more freedom to customize what you see and do.
At the large U, it also helped my kid get a sense of the bureaucracy of the place and how well they did or didn’t prepare for the mass of families.
If you want to dig deeper…things like meet a student currently studying in the major, going to a specific department like engineering or music or whatever, finding out more about anything specific…
Contact the admissions office and ask if these things can be arranged. At some colleges this will be possible on the admitted student days. When my kid was working in undergrad admissions, and also ran admitted student days, the admissions office staff did the best they could to honor some of these requests.
As an adjunct to visits it can be helpful to speak with current students, as you mentioned an interest in doing. She could try contacting the admissions office at schools she is considering and ask if their are any students in the honors college or her intended areas of study living in your area they could put in contact. Many kids are home for the summer and she could arrange to meet for coffee and chat about their college experience.
I think it depends on the school. Some schools have very good open house days. Some schools have very good normal visit days that are almost like an open house.
On your list, the only one I have actual experience with is Pitt, and my kids attended admitted student event days, so I am not sure about the Blue and Gold days… but if they are anything like the admitted students days, those were very good and highly personalized!
I highly recommend connecting with student clubs and teams! Clubs often have designated members who are focused on outreach, and are happy to talk to prospective students. I always give the example of my S23 who was interested in Formula SAE teams. He contacted the team at each school before his visit, and in almost every case, they were happy to meet with him, show him their project spaces, talk to him at LENGTH about their experience at the school, and many times showed him around and gave him a private tour.
You can usually look on the school or department web site and find listings of clubs and teams. From my kids’ experience, I suggest contacting 2 or 3 clubs/teams per school, about a week before the visit (although my D26 had great results even when she forgot to contact them until the night before ).
I would recommend visiting during an open house. My oldest son had no interest in Pitt because it was too close to home. My only requirement was he had to apply to one of our state flagship schools as a plan B.
Reluctantly he attended a Blue/Gold day. He actually spent the entire day and walked out with a lot of info. It was very useful. He applied but ended up elsewhere. He would’ve been comfortable there as a plan B. The nice thing about Pitt is that it’s rolling admission and you could be accepted as early as September.
My only other advice is visit when school is in session and don’t try to cram too many visits into a trip. One a day is more than enough.
I’m glad I asked this question, since the preference for open house days was not what I had expected! We will only visit while school is in session, and max 2 per day but only one where possible. I had anticipated most of you would have said tour plus add-ons. Very glad to know open houses are good and not just a cattle call of prospective students.
As an FYI about visits…if you plan to do more than one college visit on a trip…drive TO the next college place the evening before. Way better than getting up in the morning and scurrying around to get to a new college town.
And really, call undergrad admissions if you go on either an open house or regular tour…and ask about the things you specifically want to see.
Another option…which we did on accepted student visits. We went the day before so DD could have the chance to meet with the specific folks she wanted to meet with, and that worked well. We spent the night and it also gave us a chance to see more of the college and town, eat out, etc than if we had just gone the day of the admitted student day. That day before was much more personalized.
We too really liked the open house days. For one daughter, she also had meetings the day before with two departments she was interested in (theater and creative writing, but in the end majored in history) but unfortunately there was a big flood that day so it took us forever to get there and she missed the appointments. But both were great and talked to her later in the day. The theater dept was great and even invited us to a play rehearsal. Daughter was more than impressed.
The next day at the open house, they had the normal group meeting with parent talking about finances while the students were taken to tour the campus. Each student got a goodie bag with all kinds of swag and a ticket the football game that day. We then went on a more general tour, saw fraternity row, the dining hall, the library.
Other daughter is a STEM major. She’d been to the school for a recruiting trip but that was very general information. In February, after already committing to the school, we went to an open house day (a lot of hs juniors there too) and she loved it. It showed all the cool projects the students were working on, a lot of things the clubs did like jet cars, sports, computer stuff that I knew nothing about. She was very happy with her decision to go to that school. We did meet with a professor and felt trapped in his office. I should have told him we wanted to go to another presentation.
).
to both of these bits of advice!