When you have all of the completed financial aid offers, and determine which of these places are truly affordable for you and your family, if Utah is one of the finalists that would be the time to worry about visiting or not.
Look up the Estimated Cost of Attendance at each of the places that have accepted you. Make adjustments that include your family’s own best estimate for travel to & from campus as many times each year as you are likely to travel. Adjust your estimates for new seasonal clothing/hiking gear/etc. Adjust for other factors that you decide to take into consideration. We made a spreadsheet so we could get better sense of the probable real differences in cost.
Congratulations on having so many great options on the table!
I feel as if the time has come for you to consider the impact of cost on your future experience. The fact that you’re expecting loans to be necessary means that you are not in the lucky minority who get to treat cost as a secondary concern.
It’s absolutely fine at your age to not know what you want to do, major-wise and career-wise. But the fact that you’re in “exploratory mode” means that you need to be all the more attentive to setting yourself up to have as many options as possible in the future. Graduating with debt will limit your options. This may be an abstract thing now, but you will be surprised how quickly it will become a real thing, and you will find yourself in the position of “I wish I could do this cool thing after graduation, but… loans.” I really feel that in your position, it would be smart to dial up the weight that you are assigning to affordability, in your decision process.
I agree with @momofsenior1 about the ranking strategy. This is the stage at which Google Sheets (or Excel) is your friend. Create a spreadsheet with multiple tabs. First tab is cost. One column for what the NPC shows… another for actual FA/merit offers… with the highlighted column being your current best guess as to total cost to graduate. Update this as info comes in, and sort the whole list, low-to-high, based on this number. The higher the cost, the more ruthlessly you should consider eliminating the option. If you have half a dozen schools that you like so well that it’s difficult to rank them, why keep the most expensive three in the running?
(Make sure, with U of Utah, that you are taking the option to establish residency into account as you calculate total projected cost. You could be paying in-state rates for years 2-4, which could push the school considerably higher in your affordability ranking.)
Another tab in your spreadsheet should be your major pathway. You have a start on this (communications at Ithaca, international studies at American) but identifying one acceptable major per school is way too rudimentary. As an undecided student, it’s not desirable to be locked into one path by virtue of which school you chose, and for no other clear reason. Do a deeper dive into the offerings of each school you’re seriously considering. Identify at least three possible majors of interest at each. (The beauty of a spreadsheet is that you can devote cells to direct links, so that you then have an easy reference “tree” of all the relevant information.)
Once you have saved links to 3-5 possible majors of interest at each school, then look more closely at your roadmap for making a decision once there. How many of these options would you be able to keep open, and for how long, as you take introductory courses and gain clarity on which direction you’d like to go in. If there are multiple paths of interest with sufficient overlap in the first year or two, that you’ll be able to keep several options open until you’ve taken some classes and gotten “proof of concept,” that’s the desirable scenario (particularly if you’re confident that you’ll be able to access classes and experiences, in the first year, that will help you gain clarity). A school where there’s one major that sounds cool, but no appealing Plan B, is less desirable. Also, from an administrative standpoint, how much flexibility do you have? Are you admitted to a particular major or do you declare later, and if you are admitted to a particular major, how easy or hard is it to change?
Another thing to look at is travel. The “as the crow flies” distance isn’t an accurate indicator. If you can take a single direct flight to, for example, Salt Lake City, you may find that this isn’t really any more difficult than getting to Ithaca or Burlington. Or maybe it is - you have to look at it from your particular starting point. Look specifically at both the elapsed time to get to each school, and also the relative complexity. Opportunities for delays and complications rise exponentially with multiple connections, and some locations are more vulnerable to weather delays than others. Getting to Eugene, OR from PA sounds like a hassle to me - there aren’t a ton of direct flights to Portland from the east coast, and then Eugene is nearly two hours from Portland.
What else is important to you? Recreational opportunities and EC’s? Honors College opportunities? Whatever your priorities are, make a tab for the ones you care about and note the important attributes of the schools you’re considering.
This is a good problem to have, and you do have time. But if you can narrow down to 2-3 front-runners, then visiting those last few before making a final decision may become realistic and wise.
@adenvh36 Love this thread, thanks for posting it. A student who likes everything and would be happy everywhere - priceless and rare. You may be the first student in history to have American University and the University of Utah in your top 5! Ok probably not, but still… If you start a gofundme to raise funds for a visit to Utah and Oregon, I’ll donate the first $100! (not that I have any dog in the hunt here, I just want to read the trip report:)
Aww. Just discovered this website and I am so thankful that I have come across a community this warm and eager to help. Taking time out of your day to type paragraphs helping a random kid you don’t know is extremely admirable so I deeply thank everyone who has responded.
As far as starting a gofundme hahah. We can see about that, but I would be hesitant to accept money when you guys have already done so much. If I do go to Utah or Oregon I will be sure to keep you all updated.
@aquapt’s post is excellent. Since you are undecided, you need to go somewhere that has a wide range of majors in your interests. My D was pretty set on major by senior year, but went to a place that had all of the majors she ever considered. Another college she looked at, had only one major she would even consider doing. If you have some majors in mind, go further and compare what courses each college offers in those majors and see which look best. My D found that different colleges took different approaches to her major.
And travel. The far away school D looked at had a three hour layover and figuring out a ride to and from the airport on the college side. Both ends smaller airports so not a lot of flights in a day if one would be cancelled. She decided not to deal with that hassle.
Above all, though, look at costs and don’t get in over your head with debt.
BTW, this may not be relevant to the OP’s question, but I’d like to point out that there are a lot of students who enroll in American colleges and universities who never set foot on campus until they arrive: they’re called international students. They’re often so happy to be in the U.S., ready to experience a new environment (even if that means being in Nowhere, Iowa or Nowhere, Nebraska) that issues of perfect fit never cross their minds.