My son HATES to shop. And for him, looking at colleges is shopping.
But I told him I was unwilling to invest $30,000+ per year into a school sight unseen. So he went.
We started in the fall of his Junior year, and saw a total of 7 schools. Three he didn’t apply to: one was too big, another too rural. The third turned out to just be too much of a reach once we got his SAT scores.
But the remaining 4 are on his list, and he’s been accepted to one of them. Right now it’s his top contender over the other 2 acceptances he has. We may or may not get to visit the other schools to which he’s been accepted.
All our visits-- hits or misses-- helped us learn something about what he wants. We learned at one school that it was bigger than what he wanted-- great, that cut a lot of schools from the list. Another taught us that he doesn’t like schools that are too wooded; he’s very much a suburban kid. On paper, both of those schools looked perfect… until we found out that they weren’t.
What did work well with my son was spacing out those visits. We saw no more than one school a month, aside from the overnight last summer when we hit 2 schools within 30 miles of each other.