Thank you all for your advice. We are in Alaska — and not on the road system — which is why visiting is so logistically tricky as well as expensive. There’s a couple steps of travel needed to get to where a jet can depart from. My kid said she was for sure the most rural at the rural kid MIT fly in. I do understand that we’ll need to pull off that trip 4x/year for each kid when they do go to school, but that’s a very different calculation than jetting across the country for a few days.
But I do want to do the best I can for them, trying to make sure they end up somewhere they are happy.
My oldest is torn on the large vs. small school question at the moment, but I’m not sure how well a visit could answer that, or what the best way is to answer that, since it doesn’t have to do with the size of campus. Basically wonders about the tradeoff between having lots of class choices in areas of interest vs. having small classes with more professor interaction.