I have heard that if the college is relatively close (say 100 miles or so or less) then there is somewhat of an expectation that you’ll visit them in person if they look at demonstrated interest. So after doing the online legwork, it might be worth visiting to demonstrate interest if they’re close by.
OP appears to be in Alaska.
In some ways, for the geographic diversity, schools will have more interest in OP (assuming a stud) than OP will ever need for the school.
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During Covid, a lot of kids chose their college sight-unseen. My younger kid did, although we live in an urban area with a lot of colleges so he had been on campuses before for high school programs, concerts, summer programs for high schoolers, etc. So he had a general idea of what a campus culture sort-of was, but no visits at all as part of his actual application process..
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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.
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Just because a school is large doesn’t mean it will have large classes, at least once you get to the major.
On the other hand, some small schools have large classes, depending on how you determine that.
You can go to the common data set section set section I3 to see class size and distribution. It doesn’t tell you by subject, of course, but gives you an idea.
This is U of Louisville - 17K undergrads - a lot more smaller classes than you’d think. I put MIT below that (in the black boxes). Plenty of large classes. 16.1% of their classes are 40+ vs. 15.4% at MIT - so not a true difference even though MIT’s enrollment is less than 1/4 the size.
Ultimately, budget will drive your decision - right? Who will pay?? Sometimes those kids don’t have a say in the matter - as the offers will direct you where you go.
If the student is fortunate enough to get another fly in, you might see if they might allow them to expand the trip a day - you might have to sign a waiver and ask them for housing. When I went for my MBA, UIUC flew me in - and let me know if I was unhappy, I could bail early. I was 27-28 so it was different - but I was miserable on campus, so left and drove to Indiana U (which I loved).
Point being - if they can extend somehow a day, maybe they could get to another campus as well - perhaps they could arrange transport or housing with the other campus - so like when they were at MIT, would it have been possible to get to Northeastern or BU.
Perhaps it’s not plausible - just thinking out loud.
My D went to a large flagship and had plenty of interaction with her professors. It’s not necessarily a trade off your child will need to make.
Many large schools have honors programs and living learning communities that also make a large school feel smaller.
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If a school of interest is one where demonstrated interest of a potential applicant is important to the school, then that is an argument for an in-person visit before applying; but you can figure out those schools ahead of time, and plan accordingly.
One thing that was useful for both of my kids in having in-person visits was that they got to see what the actual student body was like, and got an idea whether it was a student body that they wanted to be a part of. Certainly going to a school on an “admitted student day,” after application and acceptance, can help answer that question as well; so if you have logistical issues in visiting campuses in person, then I would consider only a campus visit after admission (your Option 4).
I vote for visits only if financially feasible. If not, I wouldn’t stretch to make it happen prior to applications unless there is a potential ED on the horizon. For the time being, I’d suggest many virtual visits, despite their shortcomings. I’d consider saving for one or two visits in April of senior year. (I say all this having been on >20 visits with my kids; big family.)
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