As an observation, many of us experienced college visit fatigue and that this thread, based on some responses, is causing those folks PTSD.
There are 2 schools of thought here. One is to visit a couple of schools at a time and mix it in with fun. The other is to go all in and just try to get it done. For a kid who’s not loving the process, both may involve some hell. For a family for whom the distance is great or there are sports or parent PTO creating limitations, there may be only one choice - the cramming approach.
I suspect that if trip 1 is truly awful for OP, some tinkering can be done to Trip 2. This is about making that basic plan work.
Had another kid at Davidson… Yes, it’s D1 sports, but FWIW, none of my kids were remotely sporty and perhaps trivially preppy (does wearing mostly Target clothes count?) and had no sense of being outsiders. I think my kid attended one basketball game in four years at Davidson, just to see what it was like. Davidson has a lots of types, including a theater kid group, etc. Similarly, my kid had nothing to do with the greek system at Davidson and its the most low key greek system anyway, with no rushing, etc. It’s more like an opt-in eating house.
That said, I appreciate your smart, practical approach to culling from a collection of schools and trying to be realistic with some reaches but not too reachy and not too many.
We made 3 trips to see Holy Cross with our S22. One big takeaway, besides the giant hillside, I felt a definite northeast athletic vibe to the student body. I got the same feeling at Villanova.
We really liked it for other reasons, but ultimately did not choose it.
When it came to S24 who could be fine at any school, we didn’t put HC on the list, and S24 didn’t like Villanova at all.
We have a ton of family connections to Davidson and it just doesn’t feel like a fit for some reason. I’m also feeling residual trauma from having two parents age and die within a 10-mike radius of that campus in the last decade. There’s only so much joy you can derive from lunch at Kindred when you’re there for those sorts of reasons. I think I’ll be fine skipping the CLT airport for the foreseeable future.
Absolutely this! Shush, don’t tell the kids but these college visits can turn out to be fun family trips. I’ve got such fond memories w/my kids on their college visits. For instance, while visiting Amherst, my daughter dropped her phone on the campus tour and a polite young man picked it up and returned it to her. Later, we ran into the same young man with his parents at the local pizza joint and were gobsmacked to find that dad and mom were none other than Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart (btw both so very down to earth and friendly)! On the same trip, we took a last minute detour to visit another college and I ran into a childhood friend I had completely lost touch with and got to meet her daughter for the very first time. We’ve stayed in touch since. So please take time to enjoy these trips with your kids!
We have many of the same schools on D25’s list. Now I’m wondering if we need to go to the junior day at Macalester. lol We’re doing Maine LACs and Clark over our spring break.
I have to say…I feel sort of badly for that exchange student. It’s like being sibling getting dragged along to a lot of college visits. This itinerary doesn’t allow for any tourist types of activities or sight seeing.
In that regard I think this is too many colleges for this one trip.
This is another tricky subject because I do think, if you can manage it practically, it makes sense to do a sampler of lots of different types of colleges before you start narrowing by type. But then you can aggressively narrow. Like, if your kid is skeptical about a big public, try out one anyway. If they are like, “Uh, no, like I told you,” OK, off the list for good. But now at least they know.
But this is sort of assuming you can comfortably do things in phases, and that is not always realistic.
So I guess this is basically a modified version of the above suggestion. If your kid starts figuring out during a long planned trip what they don’t like, maybe scratch some such colleges even before you get there. Probably just another break will be welcome, but maybe you can swap in an alternative on the fly.
But either way, I do think you have to respect a kid getting a small taste, spitting it out, and not wanting to go back for more of THAT.
I worried about that and have been checking this out with him but he seems okay. Likes road trips. We’ll do a lot of local color stops where we can (e.g. hitting the local diner instead of McDonald’s).
My S24 learned to dread the claim, “And the hotel has a restaurant.” A few too many hotel restaurant cheeseburgers, and I was commanded to start finding better options.
Of course what he didn’t know is by “restaurant” I actually meant something like “nice-looking cocktail list, and probably a cheeseburger or whatever for him.”
@goldbug I am a big food person, so my D24 knew that everywhere we went, the quality of food would be optimized - it was super fun. Feel free to DM me and I can tell you where we went… I did wish that there was some kind of food/hotel blog for college trips, particularly for Northeast SLACs…
Part of my hesitation about big publics is a) watching him navigate a big public high school (he hides) and b) a gut instinct based on friends’ experiences vs. my own (as a kid with some similar tendencies). e.g. my best friend from high school (our valedictorian) went to UNC-CH. She roomed with the same person (from our high school) all four years, majored in the thing her parents wanted her to major in, dutifully went home from time to time for family dinners, etc. The others in our triumvirate went to Amherst and Princeton. The guy she had a crush on went to Harvard. She was bored, isolated, frustrated. But also (as a shy introvert) intimidated by the scale of the place. Halfway through sophomore year she dipped a toe in transfer water and fell in love with Wellesley. I often think about how transformative that experience could have been for her but her parents talked her out of it. My son is likely to be BFFs with whomever he rooms with freshman year either way – that’s his style – but I’m hoping we can find a place where he feels comfortable branching out a little. High school didn’t do it for him. College (+ maturity and finding more of his people) might. (That said – sure, we’ll go over the hill and check out UC Santa Cruz, and we’ll look at Santa Clara, which is larger than most of the SLACs.)
Not to muddy the waters for you, but I am curious if some of the west coast SLACS are on his list? He sounds pretty similar to my son whose top choices included Wesleyan, Vassar, Hamilton and Reed (with Macalester and Oberlin coming in the next tier of preference). We are in New England and spent a week over the summer out in Washington and Oregon visiting Reed, Lewis and Clark and Whitman. A second visit had been planned to swing through Occidental and Pitzer, but as the date got closer he realized he was pretty confident in his list.
I personally love that you are taking your exchange student with you! That sounds like an awesome way to give insight into a process that mystifies much of the rest of the world–US college admissions are their own beast for sure!
I visited Harvard on my first ever trip to Boston last fall, as a curiosity. It was nice, but in many ways a normal looking college campus with a few oversized buildings. The students walking around seemed like regular looking kids. I don’t know what I was expecting (white button downs and ties ala 1950?), but I’m glad I went.
Your itinerary does look kinda nuts (and I love it). If everyone stays flexible I think you will come out of it with some good memories, and a better sense for what appeals to your son.
Yes, we’re going to hit up Occidental later in February and will try to manage a swing through the PacNW liberal arts colleges in the summer (suboptimal b/c students won’t be there, but if he gets accepted and is seriously considering them – e.g. Whitman, which seems very promising – we’ll make a point of going when students are in session.)
That’s probably going to be enough. But can you do that before this trip? I’m asking just because on the off chance he actually sees something intriguing, you could then think about tossing in a Iowa, Minnesota, or whatever.
those were her choices. At a school as large as UNC, she never had to see or be around hs classmates. My guess is the major and going home would have happened anywhere
