We are planning our winter and spring break college tour itineraries for my junior son and our Germany exchange student (who thinks the US college system is fascinating).
Goal #1: to see as many of the SLACs on our list, especially those that are potential ED candidates and/or matches that want to see a lot of love from students (+ some safeties that I hope my son will love).
Goal #2: to get my kid used to talking about himself in the company of other people. He’s so shy…
Goal #3: to show our Germany exchange student both “flyover” America and (because I’m not a sadist and we’re flying in and out of these fascinating places) a little bit of the Big Apple and Boston.
Here’s what I’m thinking for February:
- Sunday before Juniors Day @ Macalester: drive to St. Paul from Iowa, stopping in Northfield on the way to get a quick look at St. Olaf. Spend the night in St. Paul.
- Monday: Juniors Day at Macalester. Monday evening: fly to Columbus, OH; pick up rental car. Drive to Granville; sleep there.
- Tuesday AM: Tour Denison. Eat lunch there. Drive to Kenyon for PM tour. Sleep in Gambier B&B.
- Wednesday AM: Drive to Oberlin, stopping in Wooster on the way. Wednesday PM: tour Oberlin. Sleep in Oberlin.
- Thursday AM: Drive from Oberlin, OH to Carlisle PA to see Dickinson. Thursday PM: Dickinson. Stay in Carlisle.
- Friday AM: drive to Easton to see Lafayette. Tour Lafayette. Drive to Newark; return car. Leave stuff in Newark hotel; take NJTransit to city.
- Saturday: take German exchange student to do his chosen touristy thing in NYC; fly back to CA that evening or following morning (still looking at flights).
Notes: yeah, we could stop in Pittsburgh or check out additional schools in PA but these two were the ones that felt like the most likely fits. I left Carleton off my list b/c the most recent #s suggest it would be a super reach (more than any other on our list, including Bates/Vassar/Wesleyan, I think). But I guess we should probably at least look at it while we’re there?
Question: Am I nuts for thinking that I can do a roadtrip between Cleveland and New York during peak winter? I should at least rent an AWD car, right?
For Spring Break we’re able to spread out the visits a little more. Basic plan is:
- Bates (in the company of family who went there and live nearby). (bracketed by 2 nights in Maine)
- Worcester schools (Holy Cross + Clark) (sleep in Worcester night before)
- Skidmore + Union. (stay in Saratoga Springs one night)
- Vassar.
- Wesleyan (followed by dinner with my niece at Trinity and overnight with close friends near UConn).
- Drive back to Boston for 2 nights. The German exchange student wants to see Harvard so I guess we’ll do that but otherwise it’s Duck Boat rides and North End pastries.
From reading other threads, I’m thinking that we will always at least check in with the admissions office but maybe not always do the official tour/info session (unless that is considered a total diss by admissions staff). We will do some homework on campus events/faculty that the kids may want to chat with. If offered and it works out, he’ll try to sit in on a course (this was possible at Rhodes but I’ve read for other schools they reserve those opportunities for seniors).
Any other suggestions based on previous tours you’ve taken? places/experiences en route that we shouldn’t miss? Hit me with your ideas (except maybe be sparing with the ideas about which additional schools we could/should see – this list is already painfully pared down from what it once was!)
(And yes, I’ll be requiring the boys to listen to all of the “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast series en route.)
3 Likes
Very ambitious but sounds super fun! For us I always felt we got more out of official tours than just looking around ourselves.
Think of all the stories your exchange student will be able to tell 
6 Likes
Been there, done that. I won’t even start with our daughters east coast college visits starting from Chicago and visiting like every lac in between… Lol. My wife made it sorts fun seeing Broadway shows in NY but some days were just to much. For the schools my daughter was really interested in she made live visits with the head of the departments. You can then use that in your essays. (pro tip). But she also learned a lot that way about each school.
My suggestion is to read the room per se. After a few visits many schools will seem the same. Taking notes is great but at one point they tend to blend. Seeing too many can and will make it confusing. We made a very detailed Excell spreadsheet on each school but again at some point even that blends. Have fun.
11 Likes
Ambitious, but doable if the weather cooperates. The longer driving days could be absolutely fine, or they could be a nightmare if you happen to run into a storm (same with the flights between minor airports/connecting cities/etc.). Worse comes to worse, you have to cancel a tour, but hopefully it will all work out. If you’ve got a couple of buffer days in Maine, is there any interest in Colby or Bowdoin?
2 Likes
I can really only speak to the Ohio part of the itinerary, but it sounds do-able. For Denison, I recommend you try to reserve one of the hotels right in downtown Granville if you can - Granville Inn or Buxton Inn - as the village is an important part of the school environment. In any event, try to have lunch or dinner there. And I hope you will have time to give Wooster a little attention, as it is a school that really appeals to some people. Denison, Kenyon, Wooster and Oberlin are an interesting collection, as they might look similar at first glance but they all have very distinctive characters. We did two ambitious/aggressive coast-to-coast school tours when our S19 was a junior and senior - he was in high school in Japan, so we couldn’t break the US school visits up. I agree with the advice that you read the room. My son didn’t want to take notes, he didn’t want to attend classes, and he didn’t want to eat in the dining hall, so we just did it his way and he still knew immediately when he found the one (Denison in his case). We did do the info session and formal tour at all the schools we visited, and we found it helpful. The info sessions tell you something about how the school perceives itself and how it wants to present itself. Some are terrible, of course, but that tells you something as well. The tours were all over the place, but they do give you the chance to ask questions of a student and see the campus in a somewhat organized way.
11 Likes
Definitely ambitious yet doable barring crazy weather. The roads between Ohio and Central PA are major highways with lots of services, so it’s simple driving. Pittsburgh is a delightful city, but it’s easy to bypass it and its traffic as you don’t have any of those schools on your list, so that makes sense. Seconding @shelbybaik, Colby and/or Bowdoin are interesting and not so different from Bates, and easy to add them to your Maine portion and tie into your Maine adventures.
Some people do Franklin and Marshall with Dickinson, Kenyon with Denison, and Lehigh with Lafayette. Just mentioning in case those have hit your radar or might be more appealing than something you already have. (You have one set already.)
Signing up for a tour and info session at each will help you get as much out of your trip as possible. While it can feel like you’re giving up flexibility, you’re generally ensuring that you’re not missing anything for all that driving. Also, if your schedule allows, grab lunch in a dining hall before pushing off. This can be an excellent way to sample the vibe of each school.
Definitely take notes or make little video recordings of your thoughts about each – easy to do with drives. Have fun!
5 Likes
Looks doable - as someone else said, so long as weather and airlines cooperate. Seems like you’re a planner and there’s a lot of logistics in there.
If those schools are really considerations for applications I would strongly suggest making sure you or your son is taking copious notes. After day 3 they’re all going to run together in memory “wait, which school did we hear that piece from?? School X doesn’t look at LOR’s and school Y that’s all they look at - or was that school Z?”. 
Have fun - a great way to see some different parts of the country!
8 Likes
We toured a lot of LACs (many on your lists) and sometimes did 6 or 7 in a week because we had had to travel to the area from a good distance. With well planned logistics, it was fine (and we did drive through a little snow but nothing too bad).
One thing that happened for us (and I’m not sure if this is still as much of an issue because perhaps some of ours was Covid-reduced-schedule-related), but the afternoon info sessions and tours didn’t always match up with the driving schedule. I noticed that you have a lot of afternoon tours on your list. By the time you do a morning visit in one place have lunch and drive to the next place, you might be getting there later than their afternoon info session. For us, some schools only offered morning info sessions and others only had an afternoon info session that started at maybe 1 PM and we couldn’t get there on time. So some rearranging happened in the planning as a result. Sometimes we were still able to get a tour even if we couldn’t do the info session in the afternoon.
I agree with others who said that the official tours generally gave us more information than walking around on our own did. We certainly enjoyed walking around on our own and would often do it before or after a tour, but even though you can get good or bad tour guides, we did feel that we got a lot more information and a better feel for things by going on an official tour.
When we squeezed two into a single day, I tended to feel it was fine as long as neither school was a top favorite. For schools that were favorites, it was nice to have closer to a full day at the one school… So when we knew in advance that a place might be a particularly good fit, we tried not to rush that visit too much.
Sounds fun! Enjoy.
12 Likes
Most of our 7-10 day college tour trips included round 6-8 schools per trip. I think we took 7 trips like that total across 3 kids? It even blurs in my mind…and I was the one planning, paying and executing those trips, lol.
If tour schedules have opened up, be sure to quickly register for tours. They do fill up, and with your plan - you need to get the tours you want to take to make the schedule work at all. We had to re-jigger our initial plans on each trip to make all the school tours work. Be flexible with how you see the tours fitting together.
Often times, if there was a significant drive between two schools in one day, we chose to eat in the car on the way as opposed to planning to eat at either campus. Again, successful planning will be all about figuring out the logistics as well as planning for possible delays.
At the same time, if you can eat at each college that helps immensely in understanding how good or not good the food is. Take those free lunch vouchers. And ask if Admissions has coupons for book store (if either kid wants to get swag). Some tours gave 20% off coupons, some schools put together a swag bag for students registered for tours. Some did nothing, but did have coupons if you asked about them.
Unless the kid touring wanted to discuss something super positive or super negative - we didn’t really talk about the schools we’d just seen during the drives from place to place. We planned some fun pit stops, picked out audio books we wanted to listen to and each kid also created car trip playlists we listened to/sang along to while driving. Plan some breathing time/space during these kinds of trips to decompress.
7 Likes
One last thing - I told each of my kids that if we ever drove up to a school and the kid didn’t want to get out, didn’t want to tour, just had an immediate “nope” reaction - we would just turn around and leave.
All of my kids had that reaction to one school each. We bailed on those planned tours/visits, re-grouped on what we wanted to do with the surprise open time available and kept it moving. No drama.
11 Likes
If your child is considering Wesleyan and Bates, then there is no reason not to see Carleton. It’s lovely and it’s right there in Northfield. (There are quite a few overlapping applicants who will apply to many of the schools you have listed.)
6 Likes
Your itinerary is ambitious but doable. My only suggestion is that you get to the first tour of any day the evening before, not the morning of.
8 Likes
My older kids mostly toured colleges here in the northeast, and I remember the struggle to time tours in CT and MA, and making them line up. As a parent of 2 2021 HS graduates, do official tours, missed that with them. I assume your staying at the doubletree at Penn station in Newark, if possible try of the amazing Spanish/Portuguese restaurants nearby, best in the country.
4 Likes
I agree that it’s preferable to be there the night before.
I’m usually a lone voice for three colleges a day if needed. This worked well for us though and we wanted more free time to do other fun stuff. Visiting colleges is fun mostly for us adults I think. So we arrived the night before, did the first tour of the morning (always including a stop in a campus cafe or similar to people watch), went to another college for lunch time tour, then another college for the afternoon tour, again stopping in a campus cafe. This can work well for visiting colleges near each other, especially if maybe one college is more just a curiosity visit than a serious look-see.
3 Likes
My comments added in bold.
If the admissions office isn’t open at St. Olaf on Sunday, then I’d see if there’s an electronic guided tour, or if there’s a student (former classmate, friend of a friend, whatever) that would be willing to do an informal tour.
On Wednesday, I’d try pretty hard to have an AM tour at Wooster, or meet with a prof, etc.
Depending on what flight availability is like from the Twin Cities, if there’s not a good time for a flight to Columbus, you could also consider doing the Ohio portion in reverse by flying in to Cleveland. Oberlin is 28m from the Cleveland airport and Granville is 5h18m from Carlisle and on a bit more southern of a route, so perhaps less likely to have any lake effect snow/ice.
Your spring break trip looks reasonable to me. You’ve got some great schools on this list and I look forward to reading any trip reports!
4 Likes
Ambitious! I think that last evening in NYC I would definitely look at flying out the next morning. Or maybe you could add NYC on at the last of your Boston area tour if you have more time then.
I mostly enjoyed the official tours and thought my kids got more out of them than unofficial walk arounds with me. This is true of other things in our lives too. If we go to a National Park or a historic castle and the ranger or tour guide points out interesting features and imparts knowledge my kids seem to be more ready to hear that from the official source than if I tell them that I read the same facts. So I’m a big fan of the whole official shebang. As others have said. How the college approaches the presentation and tour gives you a little insight into what the college considers important, too, and the face they are trying to present to prospective families.
I’m trying to count up the visits we went on. My daughter was class of 2022 so some of the schools when we were visiting in 2021 and 2020 had COVID restrictions and you weren’t allowed inside buildings. I can remember 12 that we went to see. Of those 3 were walk around with mom and one was walk around with a friend that goes there. She applied to one of those 4. Of the remaining 8 she applied to 5 (and got in all). For one that we missed the tour on it was pretty quickly taken off her list. I feel like if she had gotten the tour it might’ve had a chance but it probably wasn’t the school for her anyway.
4 Likes
It depends on how much you like driving. Driving from MN to Ohio sounds awful to me but others might like it.
2 Likes
Couple of points I want to make:
-For Denison - Stay at Granville Inn (much better than alternative). Weekday prices are much better than weekend. Denison has a very nice info session before the tour. They also offer interviews to knock out while you are there.
-Absolutely see Carleton if visiting St. Olaf since the schools are truly down the street from each other. St. Olaf offers a tour with a free lunch, so that is a nice way to see the school (and a lunch!)
-Avoid at all costs arriving into a town at 10 pm and then having an early info session/tour. We did that a few times (mostly due to flight schedules and not wanting to miss school) and it made for a tough turnaround.
-Some info sessions and/or tours are jam packed. When we did Villanova and GW there were hundreds in the info sessions and maybe 30 in groups - to add to the fun, 5 groups would be in lobby of some building with 5 tour guides talking at the same time. Truly my pet peeve - can they not send tour guides in a different order of buildings so everyone isn’t stacked up in the same places.
-I agree with the above poster, if student dislikes school immediately just leave. We did that with Miami of Ohio, did the info session with several hundred people and then skipped the 90 minute walking tour.
8 Likes
As a heads up, and this isn’t specific to Denison… Many schools do not allow juniors to interview until a given date. For the schools we looked at, it was May 1. So worth investigating but often premature for that junior spring break trip. The upside is that most schools also have great zoom alternatives now.
4 Likes
They are flying to Columbus
@groundhog74
2 Likes