We are entering prime campus visit season for the class of 2016. I would love to hear which colleges you wished you HAD NOT gone to see and why.
There was a long-running thread on this topic not too long ago, but I can’t seem to find it. I personally think it is a touchy subject. I hesitate to name the college I was disappointed in after seeing, because I am sure there are other people who are very happy they or their child is there or are hoping to get in and go there. And I don’t regret going there or anywhere for that matter as it all helps with decision-making.
I remember my son telling me that visiting a school that he absolutely did not want to attend (after visiting) really helped him decide where he DID want to go. We always started out visiting a group of diverse college types (large state university, small alternative school, private liberal arts college, etc.)
I thought all the colleges we visited were worth it. That said, I probably wouldn’t take my oldest to see one of his safety colleges when he probably was only going to consider the two most selective places that accepted him.
I think some people regret taking their kids to uber-reaches that they have little chance of being accepted by. The kids fall in love with them and end up disappointed.
I would agree with @mathmom. I think all schools are worth attending as it helps formulate your own opinion. It helps the student see what he/she is looking for and not looking for. My daughter was sure she wanted an “urban” school. She was totally against rural schools. I’m so glad we made a few trips… she’s really settling in on “suburban” schools. I would also agree that visiting schools that are uber-reaches is a bad idea! It’s like looking for a house to buy and seeing only houses you can’t afford. Of course, you are going to love it. Good luck.
I was thinking more along the lines of “Why did I take my DC to see only schools in snowy places? I want grandchildren to visit in warm places.”
Even the worst college visits were totally worth it. They helped to eliminate entire categories of schools for our daughter (large universities) and son (preppy, rah-rah sports schools). None of the schools we visited were globally awful. They just weren’t for us. I can’t say we enjoyed every tour, and wished some had been shorter (UC Berkeley in the pouring rain, for example), but they all gave us info our kids needed to make their choices.
@mathmom, before this horrendous NE winter, I would have agreed with you about not bothering to visit the safety schools. But my son’s safety just happens to be New College of Florida, and we’re using a visit there as an excuse to get out of Massachusetts for a few days over his March break!! 
For every school named that a parent laments seeing, another parent or student will pop up and declare that school was a great visit. D15 hated the large urban universities we visited, so okay, big urban universities were out but that didn’t mean her universe was limited to small rural schools. Like phoenixmomof2, I worked in small colleges in the suburbs (huh, it’s okay) and small colleges in small cities (hey, I really like this!). What I discovered was the student type and size as well as density of the physical campus mattered most to D15 than actual location. So, big crowded flagship was out. Little public LAC was in. I also made sure D15 visit little public LAC in between snowstorms to make sure she realized what “in the middle of nowhere” meant in nasty weather.
I agree to save the uber-reaches for last or not go at all. Finding a good safety that DC likes is the hardest task to do (unless it’s New College of Florida! - that’s an easy safety to like).
I think it’s a great idea to visit potential safety schools when you are formulating your list. Less so if once the acceptances are in unless the merit money is definitely on the table. For my older son, what he wanted (and what we wanted for him) was a school that he would find challenging. He needed to be surrounded by kids who would push him to be all he could be. His two safeties are great schools, but I’m not sure he’d be where he is now if he’d attended one of them.
I agree that visiting schools you don’t think a kid will like can still be a good idea. I dragged my kid to Bard and Vassar even though he didn’t want an LAC. He hated Bard (too rural, too small), but Vassar ended up staying on the list even though ultimately he wanted something bigger and in more of a metropolitan area.
I took my son to Macalester because we were in town visiting family and he refused to get out of the car! (We hadn’t booked a tour, were just driving by.) He wanted a bigger school with D1 sports so he completelydid not want to consider it. Fair enough.
We visited a very tiny school as our first official visit (name on the sign, packets waiting for us, tour arranged) and I knew as we drove through the ‘town’ (really, it was beyond tiny) and before we ever pulled into the driveway of the school that my daughter would never go there. I don’t really regret going but do regret not doing more research before we went. She’d talked to the coach, but we didn’t really look at the school. Same with a few other schools.
In the ‘Why did I bother’ category, I would say that visiting really small schools in rural places was a waste of time for us. Even when I was there at that first school I kept asking ‘How do people GET here? Is there an airport? Where do you BUY things?’ DD goes to a smallish school in a small town, but there is a mall and an airport; we have our standards.
I had a lot of reservations for taking my S to see his number 1 choice but low-reach/expensive school. Because he was so keen on it, I felt we should give our best shot by showing interest (though now I hear they don’t care about that!). Of course he loved everything about it and it cemented being number 1 in his mind. Currently he is deferred from this school - won’t know until April if he is in but even then not sure we want to pay the full price tag is there will surely be no merit scholarships forthcoming to reduce the cost.
Vanderbilt. My D wanted to study ChemE. One of her criteria was that she could co-op. She was interested in Vanderbilt early in her college search and for some reason we never did our due diligence. We visited in the summer and during the information session the presenter said Vanderbilt did not support co-ops and felt students should spend their 4 years at Vanderbilt. D said after the info session that no co-ops was a deal breaker and unless we wanted to see the campus she was reDy to head home. This was the last tour of 4 and in the opposite direction from our home of the other three. I don’t know why we didn’t get that info ahead of time, but. I really wished we hadn’t spent 10 hours driving and a day and a half to attend that tour.
For my kids, I first visited a few colleges informally by myself while I was already driving nearby as part of my work. That helped to narrow down the list of colleges for each of them to consider. There were a number of colleges that I visited on my own that I realized were not worth their time, particularly since they only had a few days available for college visits because of their activities and their summer work.
My daughter didn’t visit all of her safety schools - particularly after she was accepted to a match college that she really liked and which was within our budget…
For my son, it worked out that he didn’t visit his reach college until after he was accepted. As noted above, there is a fear that a student will fall in love with a reach school and then get very disappointed if they are not accepted.
That particular college doesn’t track whether or not a student visits. Some other colleges keep track, and are less likely to accept a student if they live nearby and have not done an official visit…
As suggested above, for my son, we started out visiting a large state university and a small liberal arts college. That was a nice way to explain choices. In the end, he applied to both types, which kept his options open…
I don’t really see much point, as the campuses I didn’t care for … Well, others might really like them. Everyone has different tastes.
I’ve seen a few comments on here where the visit helped you all decide which college types you did not like. My daughter hated all the bigger schools we visited early on in our search - Application State, Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia. So we only looked at small schools. In the end, we visited the biggest school on our list, the University of Alabama, and she loved it. I’ll just scratch my head at this one.
Check out this thread:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/790906-colleges-you-child-crossed-off-the-list-after-visiting.html
The colleges that dropped off the list after we visited I am still glad we visited so my DD knew they weren’t for her.
I remember the old thread and may have contributed to it. About a year out, I can say I am glad we visited all the places we did because, as others have noted, it helped son figure out what he liked.
He did not like NYU because the campus was too mixed in with the city. He did not like Hopkins because people seemed too somber and the place seemed gloomy to him. He did not like Columbia because of the core curriculum----sort of like the child who didn’t like Vanderbilt because no coop, this was something we could have known beforehand. I think that son hearing the admissions folks and tour guide go on about it hardened his opinion. He did like Brandeis, which sent him in a whole new direction, wanting to check out smaller places with access to a big city but that didn’t feel like they were so much in the middle of a big city.
I don’t put much stock in the idea of visiting schools to establish what “type” of school a kid is interested in, especially in terms of location. I think that there is unlikely to be a uniform reaction on the part of the kid. I’d only visit schools that seem to be actual possibilities. Like everyone else, I think it is a particularly bad idea to visit schools that the kid has no chance of getting in to. It is far to easy to fall in love with those schools!
My kid liked every “urban” school he visited but one: Columbia. Coming from a small, semi-rural town, that was just too much for him at that age. (Ironically, 5 years later he went to grad school there and loved it. But he was ready.) He visited Williams and Amherst, schools that many would consider a matched pair: liked one, disliked the other. And so forth. He liked mid-sized Us, but not all of them; he liked LACs, but not all of them. He liked the U of C, with its core curriculum; he liked Brown, with its absence of requirements.
I do think it is a good idea to start by visiting a true safety if you can, and encourage the kid to think it would be a nice place to go to college. We were unable to do that, and it was a challenge to get him to put a real safety on his list at all.