My DD as a senior has not enjoyed any college visits. She finds ever tour the same. They are boring to her and feel very fake.
My son visited one school which was good for his major, in April of his sophomore year, and that is where he attended. He did not care about school size or location, just that it had his major, which he had decided upon when he was about 10 years old. I did insist he apply to a rolling admission safety also, sight unseen. He was not interested in visiting, and I was not up to the fight with a very stubborn kid.
You could visit once she has her acceptances and ideas which schools are the most budget-friendly. My daughter applied to schools on both coasts and 2 schools in the middle… I sure as heck wasn’t going to be paying for travel from Seattle /Eugene to Madison WI to Boston if she didn’t get in with decent FA. As it turned out, we didn’t need to make the Wisconsin/Washington State/Oregon trip. Boston won with the best price offer, and by then she’d sort of lost interest in the other 3.
Curious to know what was the major that he knew he wanted at age 10?
Don’t push it. She might need a gap year, or she might need the reality of college to sink in during senior year, or she might want to visit after she has been accepted. Lots of possibilities, but pushing is likely to backfire.
Does she have any particular desires in a college yet? If so, are there any which are best evaluated by visiting?
It is possible that a given student only really cares about characteristics that are easily evaluated by means other than a visit. (e.g. “does it have the academic courses and majors that I am interested in?”, “is it within budget so that I will not have huge amounts of debt?”)
To make the most out of visits, it is best if the student has formulated a list of things to look for while visiting each school (the things to look for may differ from one school to another).
I don’t really get the point of visiting a campus to decide whether to go there. To me, a visit is just an excuse for a tour guide to fill you up with all the information the university wants you to hear. University’s got to sell itself, after all. Wouldn’t trust a word you heard. I never did them in high school. Then again, in high school I had zero intention of moving on to college, and everyone knew it. Even if I had, my family didn’t have the time or money to visit anywhere other than San Jose State. When I did enter college, I visited campuses after having already chosen them. De Anza was an obvious choice of community colleges, given my Grandma’s proximity to the campus and the quality. Didn’t need a visit to know it was a great choice for me. Wouldn’t have been able to afford air fare from Missoula to San Jose anyway. For university, I couldn’t do visits outside of a day trip to San Francisco State if I’d wanted them, given that I didn’t want to apply to San Jose State or East Bay, or a UC. I couldn’t afford to visit to the SoCal schools I applied to. Everything turned out fine. I’d roll with what she wants. She either will change her mind later or not at all. Doesn’t really matter.
If all we had done was tour & info sessions, my kids might have also thought all colleges were the same. My kids usually sat in on a class, we ate in the cafeteria, and we had our own items of interest we visited on campus outside the tour – art classroom building for D2, study abroad office for D1. It does pretty much limit you to one campus per day, so we did our homework ahead of time to try to visit campuses that seemed like a good fit to start with.
I agree, @intparent. The preliminary campus visits that were the most helpful were the ones where our son met with faculty in his intended major, met with students in that major, and toured the specific facilities for his interests. But the key visit was the overnight one after being accepted. That’s the one that sealed it. The AO student-led tours alone were not particularly useful.
We went on about 8 tours per kid with my daughters. With each of them, 2-3 were eliminated because of tours.
Our Flagship State U has multiple campuses…you have to take the tour on a bus. You have to get from campus to campus on a bus. Both quickly were not interested.
Another day we visited Lafayette and Lehigh on a rainy day. Lehigh we were in a giant group going up and down those hills…the tour guide kept going on the normal tour route…I couldn’t even hear him over the rain on my umbrella. At Lafayette they only had two families per guide, and they altered the tour to be more indoors.
Lehigh fell off the list…if she had to pick between the two the one that appears to be more personalized wins.
Another state U felt run down/stuck in the 70’s…it is up and coming, but still needs a few years. Looked good on paper, though.
Cornell had no energy and felt cold (and not in a temperature sense)
But for most of the other tours, yes, they all seemed fine and I could see where you would not think you get more info from the tour. So we just used it to eliminate colleges, but not to find fine distinctions between them.
Both of my daughters did not end up going to admitted students day for logistical reasons but were happy with their choices.
I agree that there’s no need to push a junior into making on-campus visits. But I also agree that once the list is put together, your daughter would be wise to make some visits if for no other reason than to demonstrate sincere interest.
Having said that, my son made no pre-application visits. He’d seen enough colleges and universities when in high school b/c of the travel schedule of his debate team. He’d spent time living in college communities because of my profession. So we did not push him at all. He was really very busy, especially during debate season. He got into several very fine colleges, including my alma mater which he visited with me on a summer vacation. The college he ended up attending (UChicago) is one that he never visited until after he’d been admitted. He did an overnight there on admitted students’ day, declared the next morning “This will do,” and the college search was over.
My daughter’s case was entirely different because she was looking at specialized schools (art colleges or universities with strong art programs), and was also concerned about the location. She did one massive swing on which she visited 10 colleges in 11 days – during June between her junior and senior years. Not the best time, but she learned a lot from that. (Some of those colleges were of more interest to her classmate who accompanied us on that tour, and who was more interested in theater than in art.) She also educated herself by attending pre-college art programs during two summers (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). I doubt that the college visits by themselves mattered to her admission. What was really critical was the quality of her portfolio.
brantly, kid knew he wanted to make video games, and that is what he is doing.