I read about and fully agree with the importance of finding safeties you love, or at least like a lot. I totally “get” that college search time should be spent on identifying these safeties.
How much time should be spent on actual visits/tours of long-distance safeties when you have limited resources?
We are not visiting any high reach or out of reach schools. We are putting effort into visiting target schools. There will be times when we’ll need to choose a “low reach” tour vs a safety tour.
Unfortunately, I don’t think D24 is going to fall in love with any of her safeties - they are a little small and a little isolated, compared to what she’d really prefer. If we make time to travel to these schools (hotel stay required), we will not have the bandwidth to see as many target/low reach schools. I initially thought we could just visit all the schools, do all the things, but real life is hitting us in the face a bit. Our family needs a vacation, our other child needs our attention, etc.
Can she just do virtual info sessions for these schools and call it good? Do we actually need to keep visiting safeties in person until she finds one she loves? (I have read this… feels like a waste of money honestly…)
**I’m counting safeties as schools that admit well over 50% of applicants and D24 will likely have stats above (or well above) 75th percentile. Safety schools I’ve identified that meet many of her wish list items are just not schools she loves.
There are most likely more seasoned parents who will reply to this thread. However, I did receive some advice from an older parent at my DS’s school. Her son targeted safeties that did not track DI. So if they didn’t make the effort or have the time/means to visit in person before applying, they knew it wouldn’t matter. He did receive some rejections, mostly his reaches but a few targets, and they ended up touring one or two safeties after he was accepted. In the end, he ended up attending one of his targets but she felt it was more than fine to tour the safeties after he was accepted.
We focused the bulk of our energy on the top and deciding if/where to ED (ultimately the decision was nowhere) but the process gave us a good understanding of what was important. That, combined with virtual info sessions/tours and advice for GC, allowed us to come up with a decent list of “ok, I could do this if I had to” schools that we would visit in person if we had to cross that bridge.
I have a couple of thoughts. We considered schools safeties if they had over a 75% acceptance rate for our high stats D, and that she could actually see herself attending. 50% acceptance rate would have made me nervous (I’m very risk adverse).
Was your D unable to find safeties that met her size and location requirement? (If you need ideas, the CC community is great with coming up with schools to consider).
IMO, I would pick at least one of the true safeties and visit. It’s easy to fall in love with reach schools but takes more digging to find the safeties and matches.
We toured 2 of 8 schools that my DS applied. Frankly, the information that you get about the specific school is limited. We did tour about 10 schools in total. What it did help with was big/medium/small and rural/suburban/urban. We also did tour the school he is at after acceptance just to make sure. That I think is a better use of time and money.
I’ve combed through many sources, including CC, and I’ve come up with two top safeties for her. One accepts 62% and the other, 77%. The other safeties I thought I had identified came off the list after her last round of tours, where she clarified some of her wants/needs in a college.
I’m 100% willing to visit safeties after acceptances if needed. I do want her to apply to more than one safety, so that she has choices. She’s currently in love with a target (which accepts over 50%), and I’m hopeful that one will work out. She knows she can’t put all her eggs in one basket, though.
Isn’t that the solution, then? Find out a) if you need to, and b) if you have a choice of safeties. For less money and less effort than visiting one you can apply to one more school in each category.
It’s OK to love a school, so long as you don’t expect it to love you back.
Yes, I think I’d rather make sure she applies to 2-3 safeties that meet her most basic needs, and then visit if needed. I do not want to spend $500+ each to confirm mediocre interest. I think I just wanted to hear that it was ok to take this approach. None of her friends are looking out of state, so I don’t have other parents to bounce these issues off of.
Fully agree that she can’t count on anything - which is why I’m still making sure she sees more targets. I have warned her not to have a “dream school” but she is who she is.
There are many ways to do the college process, but my 2 cents is to spend a bit more time on the safeties. You seem to be assuming she won’t be attending one. Your plan of not visiting any, and your daughter having mediocre interest, seems to me to almost guarantee her being unhappy should she only have “safety” options.
Are none of your in-state options safeties for her?
You say the schools you have identified? How about her? Has she done some research? I know that can be hard. I had a Google spreadsheet that I shared with my D22 and while she got bored and annoyed with me harping on about college she did actually look at the spreadsheet and find a few schools that she researched further on her own.
She has spent a good amount of time in the exploration phase, learning about colleges/college life in general and narrowing down what she’s looking for. She has also spent a lot of time digging into some schools I mentioned to her. After each tour (5 so far), she takes detailed notes. So she is involved in the process. Where she struggles is screening colleges from the 3000 out there - or even from the 388 or whatever it is in the Fiske/Princeton Review books.
None of our in-state options have both a film major and small class sizes.
Film majors are a tricky choice, and I would not assume a school otherwise a target to be one if film is the major, particularly if students submit short pieces of work.
No, she’s looking exclusively at liberal arts colleges, where she can choose to major in film at the end of sophomore year (or choose English or…). No portfolios.
Looking at Clark, Fordham, others with no portfolio requirements.
Is she applying EA to any of these Target schools? Then if she gets into one she visited and likes it no safety visit needed. Just make sure she applies to a few safeties that meets her basic requirements ( just in case). However, If you are chasing money as well you may want to visit more safety schools as likely that is where she will get more money.
My DD23 plan was to apply ED/EA and only go visit safety school if all else did not work out. (She got in rolling ED so we are done)
@Parent42 - I had this similar conversation with my D last year. Just make sure she has three solid well researched safety picks as she awaits her first EA decision. Others will advise to visit safeties first - that is generally good advice (especially if chasing merit) but we gambled on her getting into a solid target early.
Agree with Milo and we used the same strategy: unrestricted EA at multiple target schools and a safety, so that we’d have time to know whether a “safer safety” was needed. It worked out fine. I’d say you can save the money and time by not touring safeties while kid is a junior. We didn’t tour the safety, just did a lot of YouTube to compile a nice mental list of “pluses” in the event that we would be looking at just the safety admission by Christmas. But kid was 3 for 3 in December, luckily.
It does have to be December EA though. Not this new Michigan/Wisconsin late January EA thing.
Also, if top choice is an ED school (as opposed to restricted EA), then I believe unrestricted EA is still on the table, provided you withdraw apps if you get the ED admission.
We made all-day tours to the two safeties on our original list. My son really loved one of them (Oregon State). The other one was okay, but he didn’t love it as much and we eventually crossed it off.
To be honest, we probably would not have visited the safeties if I had not read so much advice here on CC about it, but it turned out to be a good move for our family. We were able to cross off quite a few targets and reaches that my son didn’t like as much as his safety. We ended up with a more manageable list and a feeling of confidence that he would be perfectly fine and happy at his safety, if he ends up there.
Your plan of not touring all the schools on your kid’s list is totally fine. Any reason is a good enough reason, in my opinion. My kid toured only one school (because we were in the area anyway) prior to acceptances. We saved a lot of time, money, and energy. Plenty of families do it this way. Only in a small slice of society are extensive college touring trips even a “thing.”
