Just want to add my sympathies from one west coaster to another. It is so hard to get anywhere that we too have always piled visits into a few trips.
I’m planning our spring break trip with S25 right now and it’s looking like 8 schools in 6 days. We’re doing 4 in February in the midwest as well, squeezing in a trip to Busch Gardens and some family visits too.
Keep NYC – you will have earned it, and everyone is excited about it! Lafayette can go. It’s less likely to be a top choice and it’s complicating things.
Don’t schedule interviews at this point. Do them by zoom with the schools that stay on the list. It’s hard to rally for an interview after an uninspiring tour.
Two tours a day requires that you keep your momentum, but one a day leaves a lot of extra time in the day, so I would plow on with 2 a day plan where the logistics work (like Denison and Kenyon). I suspect your son would like Wooster better if you choose to cut one (Oberlin). The other alternative is to do both Ohios and save Dickinson for your summer trip (and just fly to NY, skipping PA.)
Sometimes, what’s possible at the schools in terms of programming will just decide for you. Don’t sweat it if that happens.
I agree with what others have said about not worrying if you have to cancel a few tours that are already scheduled and not worrying about putting off interviews until later - we cancelled an already scheduled tour at Oberlin (D23 was still accepted) and only did a self-guided tour for her at Dickinson but did sign in at the admission office (D23 was still accepted). She requested interviews at every school that offered them but only did one in person…the rest were all Zoom. Not a problem.
And my S21 didn’t tour Dickinson until after acceptance and it didn’t hurt him (but he did demonstrate interest there in other ways).
I want to put him in charge but he’s been sick for most of his break, first COVID and now the flu – so a) I’m holding him at arm’s length and b) he’s really really cranky.
I’m also gunning on all cylinders b/c we have to submit all travel plans w/ exchange student several weeks ahead of time for parental/organizational approval. I do tend to do things in one big burst. We’re homing in on a plan though, and it’s starting to feel doable. (she says nervously, having just booked a non-refundable B&B in Carlisle…)
Okay, plans are coming together.
a) Denison/Kenyon still happening on one day BUT we’re not going to try to make the noon panel discussion at Kenyon b/c that way lies madness. (I’ll ask admissions office about virtual panels and we’ll linger on campus for breakfast the next day to get more of a feel for the students.)
b) Wooster and Oberlin will happen on sequential days, with an overnight in Oberlin in the middle.
c) Driving to Carlisle the day before our Dickinson tour, which gives us time to have a nice dinner in town and stress a little less about getting there on time.
d) Lafayette is out (unless we stop to stretch our legs there en route to Newark) but New York is ON. Both Broadway and exchange student reunions will happen. And we’ll fly out on Sunday.
Unless I’ve somehow added an extra weekday in there somewhere, I think this is going to work fine. (ignoring the possibility of big winter storms, in which case all bets are off.) Thanks for the encouragement/feedback/help, everyone!
ETA: looking forward to contributing my trip report to the long thread about places that moved up/down on list.
I feel your pain. Looking forward to comparing notes on trips!
I really enjoyed asking S24 the up/down/same question–it always started an interesting conversation where I learned more about what he was prioritizing.
Kids also think they can fit a lot more into a day than they (you) can. 100 mile trip? Just a little over an hour, right? School tour from 9-11? Okay, we’ll get there at 8:45 and be back in the car by 11:20. Of course you are doing all the driving.
Which schools is he really interested in? Do those. It is a long way from Ohio to Philly.
Are you spending the night in Granville? My S24 is going there so I feel like I’ve done some investigating on restaurants and the very charming Granville Inn.
We drove through Dickinson after our quick fly-in to see Bucknell (5 days before the ED deadline). I thought Dickinson was a lovely town and the college was super cute. Of course, it was also a perfect fall day.
And both my kids flew to Minnesota for college visits. S22 ended up applying and taking a gap year from Macalester and S24 went to see St. Olaf and Carleton. I’m also a big fan of only seeing 2-3 colleges on any visit.
2-3 colleges would be ideal but the OP is from the west coast and it’s very hard to travel across the country multiple times with a travel day on each end.
You should try coming from KY with few direct flights anywhere! It took us 8 hours to get to Bucknell and we flew. After that 24-hour adventure, I was sort of done with hard to get to schools.
But we take advantage of all long weekends, and if means flying to see one school, so be it. I have a zillion airline miles and hotel points, so I don’t mind flying for a quick 24 visit somewhere.
We had to fly to see all the schools my D23 applied to. Long weekends sadly don’t work because you fly out Sunday, see the school Monday and miss school flying home Tuesday. No 24hr trips for us. Not to beat the point to death but every single school east of Boise is at least your Bucknell day.
So as much as I hate slamming all of our college visits into two separate week long trips, it is the way we’ve had to do it.
I’m excited for your roadtrip, and hope it all goes swimmingly. Just wanted to note that — if your son hasn’t looked at Fiske yet — that could be a good way to pre-screen the schools to make sure that a visit is worth the added time / cost / hassle. (Maybe that already happened and I just missed it; if so, cool cool. Also, not a bad thing to do when laid up in bed!)
We’re also from the Bay Area, and when we were visiting New England last summer, I marked a bunch of potential schools in Fiske with Post-Its and had D25 and S25 read through each and jot down a 0 (“please, no”) to 3 (“definitely want to visit this one”), and it allowed us to cut out several that I had previously been thinking of visiting.
If each school’s entry takes 10 minutes to read, but would add 3 to 4 hours to the trip to visit the campus, it’s a pretty cheap investment with a pretty good ROI, and lets you focus on the ones where there’s a genuine interest.
Exactly. We are from the east coast and DD wanted to look at CA colleges. Luckily we have lots of CA relatives so we combined a family vacation with a college trip…and we saw six colleges. We were there for 9 days. We drive to most places from San Diego, but DD and DH flew to San Jose for the Santa Clara day trip.
But we weren’t making two trips…so we had the kid choose 6 schools she wanted to see.
We did the same thing with a southeastern trip. 6 colleges max. We were not making a second trip there.
We went to Texas with the other kid but that was only 3 colleges. And a family vacation to San Antonio.
We never just took a college trip. We always combined it with visiting family and/or friends, and doing some fun sightseeing. Definitely took the edge off of college tours…which do become sort of meh after a while.
I think the week-long trip is very common - especially for people in our area where it is hard to get places. There is no perfect way to do it at all, especially with kids who hit a grumpy wall after a few days!
We did something similar, went to Nashville for a family trip with D23 and tried to do a touristy thing in each town. For S25 we’re going to stay with my sister in Ohio and see friends down the SE coast in April.
It can fun at times, but man the information sessions are torture after a while 
I’m sitting here looking at an elaborately sticky-noted Fiske Guide and laughing. I think he found it all kind of overwhelming. But he’s also someone who has trouble conceptualizing how things might be before he gets to experience them. (the trip to France was a great example. He ended up having an amazing time – but when I first pitched it, he couldn’t really imagine what staying with a host family and going to language academy w/ a bunch of unknown kids his age would be like. And then he had fun! So much fun that we’re going to try to see some of the kids from his CIEE program on this trip!)
I think once we’ve seen a handful of schools it will be much, much easier for him to home in on what he is and isn’t interested in. We know small is fine (the size of Rhodes, which felt kinda small to me, didn’t bother him.) Beyond that…who knows?
He doesn’t really know yet. All over the map. Seriously – the other day he was excited about Harvey Mudd, of all places.
We aren’t going to do any dine-and-dash tours, fortunately. The tightest connection is getting between our morning at Denison and a mid-afternoon tour at Kenyon, which seems totally doable, especially since we’re spending the night in Gambier and can do another mini-tour or session in the AM before leaving for Wooster. Cutting out Lafayette and adding a day at the end in New York gave us the leeway we needed.
I hope visiting the campuses brings both clarity and excitement!
One “hack” you might think about would be to photocopy the pages for the schools on the trip (or, at the least, to take photos of those schools’ pages) and just bring those pages with you. En route to the school, you can pass the single school’s sheets over and have him read them out loud to the car, to give you all a refresher on things to look out for on campus or to plant the seed of questions to ask on the tour.
Regardless, I hope it’s a great time!
I think adding something fun to look forward to makes a ton of sense. We’re planning touristy things at the end of each trip (and some break-like periods spaced in – e.g. a day in the Twin Cities when we could go check out U Minn but could also just do other stuff, e.g. Mall of America.) The boys are both insanely excited about the New York part of the trip – one because it’s NEW YORK CITY! and the other because he’s going to meet up with his summer friends. I do think this really helps.