<p>Personally, i think that colleges should be visited before enrolling to get a sense of the campus and community that youre going to spend the next four years at</p>
<p>but my father, who would pay for me to visit schools that are halfway across the country, says its a waste of time, visiting for a weekend can give a gross misinterpretation of what the schools really like, and you can find most important things and characteristics about msot of ht estudents and most of hte environments through websites (i.e. college confidential, college prowle r.com, theu.com…) </p>
<p>Both of you are correct. Do both, but consider each with an awareness that your experience, as well as anyone else’s, is not definitive. Try to coordinate several visits on one cross country trip. It is not wise to enroll without visiting first,however.</p>
<p>Well, oddly, that was my daughter’s argument. She didn’t want to visit ANY school, her plan was to show up for the first time on freshman move-in day. She was very excited to go and couldn’t wait, but, just couldn’t see the logic in visiting. </p>
<p>I basically laid down the law and made visits mandatory before I would sign a deposit check, and, my argument (before it deteriorated into “because I said so”) was that if you’re going to spend four years in a place, you need to go to get a direct visual concept, a gut/check or feel, a sense of the surrounding community, a verification of the representation on websites, etc. </p>
<p>Consider telling your father that evaluating a school through electronic media exposes you to greater chance of misinterpretation, because the school controls exactly what you will see and read. Going in person however gives you the ability to check out all aspects, including what the school doesn’t show you.</p>
<p>Also, is there any way to reduce the expense of the travel?</p>
<p>In some ways it’s like test driving a used car. You could just buy it right off the lot but each one will have a different “feel” or instill a different degree of trust in you, even if it is the same make/model of another used car (New car analogy doesn’t work since you could expect all new cars of same make/model to be the same, but like colleges, no two used cars are the same).</p>
<p>You are about to make a four + year commitment to something at a significant price. Wouldn’t make sense to go see it? kick the tires so to speak? </p>
<p>We spent many spring breaks and summer days/weekends visiting "campi " throughout the NW and AZ. Without those visits when it came down to brass tacks, the campus and surrounding community were vital. </p>
<p>Websearch first, visit second. Try and combine schools in areas where your interested. </p>
<p>dad wouldn’t buy a house over the internet would he? what about the toxic landfill next door? </p>
<p>Visit! D was able to attend the Accepted Students’ Days and they made a world of difference in figuring out which college was the best “fit” for her. She is now very happy with the choice she made.</p>
<p>overnite visits can be terribly misleading if the college has you rooming with an incompatible student. Our son did no college sponsored overnited but did spend a weekend on campus at a few colleges with friends from hs he knew. These worked out great. He particularly enjoyed his three day visit with a friend in marching band at RPI. He got him into a hockey game for free by posing him as a pep band player.</p>
<p>Our daugher visited on a regular school day, not the weekend. Sat in a 2 classes and had a student guide the entire day. She could have stayed over but the thought of staying with a stranger scared her.
We toured and met with admission staff before she ever applied to a school. After acceptances came in, she had to do the visit day for each one she was seriously considering or I was not writing checks. Cost us some money for travel and hotels but I figure it was money well spent.</p>
<p>The web-derived info is great for background and narrowing your choices. Also good for knowing what questions to ask. But relying on others’ impressions IF (and I emphasize IF) you have the means to gather your own impressions is a poor second. What College Confidential calls Preppy may not be your version of Preppy. If a school is 30% Greek, what does that mean? It means different things at different schools.</p>
<p>If it’s doable, I advise visiting your top choices.</p>
<p>Whenever one of our kids wants to convince us that something means a lot to them, they express their willingness to work to help repay some of the cost, within the same calendar year – AND they follow through
If you think that finances are driving his reluctance to send you on these trips, and he’s masking that by saying there’s no need to take these visits, then perhaps you can offer a month of summer wages to help repay it. Then he’ll know it means enough to you to sacrifice for it.</p>
<p>If he has substantial resources and is really just arguing on principle and belief, then I think your task might be helped if there’s another parent he trusts in your community, or your GC who can support your side of the argument. To me, it seems very mechanical to understand a human environment through statistics alone.</p>
<p>Something I wonder about: did he ever make a big decision in his lifetime, to move to a new place sight-unseen? If so, did he take an exploratory visit to decide which city, job, or country to go to?
Even if he went “sight- unseen” couldn’t he agree that it would have been a smoother transition if he had known the environment before landing?
Suppose he had no option except one…then he felt, “what difference does it make what I “think” of it before I move, the deal is already decided for me.”
But your situation differs from that. You have several choices and must decide the best place. How noisy is it? Can you study well there? Is the atmosphere fun, sunny, scholarly? I don’t think you can write those things down; they are personally experienced and differently tolerated by each individual.
My D loved her college because she liked the rhythm of the architecture as she walked along. It invigorated her. There’s also a music conservatory on the same campus, and as she goes from place to place she hears it coming from peoples’ rooms. This inspires her. Stuff like that has meant a lot to her for 4 years (about to graduate) and made her a better student. (Parents care about that, being a better student…) How can those impressions possibly be written on a website? NOt everyone would even care about those variables, but for her it “sealed the deal.”</p>
<p>Visits may not convey a completely accurate picture of a college depending on the day and the host or hostess…but they sure beat everything else. Even two colleges that are very similar “on paper” can have totally different vibes.</p>
<p>It’s like picking a date from a photograph. (And, yeah, I know some people who do that.)</p>
<p>I believe it would be a mistake not to visit a school where you may be spending the next four years of your life. My DD is a good example of why someone should visit. Her number one school that she had dreamed of attending fell from her list completely after her over night visit. She said it was nothing like she expected and she couldn’t imagine spending the next four years there.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t (and didn’t) go so far as to ban my kids from visiting colleges, but I think visiting is grossly over-valued, especially on CC. It’s fine, if you take it with a grain of salt, but not necessary at all, and sometimes even counter-productive.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>All of my great-grandfathers packed their bags in their mid-to-late teens, kissed their parents good-bye, and travelled halfway around the world in steerage with no return ticket. They didn’t have an advance visit. They didn’t have viewbooks or the Web, much less Emmigration Confidential. They had a few letters from people who had preceded them, and some folklore. They chose their “school” based purely on reputation, and when they got here they worked to make certain THEY fit in, because finding a better “fit” wasn’t an option.</p></li>
<li><p>Neither of my parents saw their college before they matriculated. If my father had visited, he might have known that it was a terrible fit, that he would feel lonely and gauche and clueless for most of his freshman year. But if he had done that, he might never have known that he would eventually be a BMOC, fraternity president (at a time when the national organization’s charter still forbade him even to join), and completely in love with the college. We toss around the phrase “colleges that change lives”; that college changed his. As it turned out, what he really wanted wasn’t a school that fit who he was. He wanted a school that would show him something he wanted to become.</p></li>
<li><p>I did visit the college I ultimately attended. At the time, I thought it was the ugliest school I had looked at. (Actually, I still think that.) It took me a few months to love every inch of it. I never visited my grad school before I showed up to register, and it was a damn good thing, because I wouldn’t have chosen to go there if I had, and I would have missed some of the best experiences of my life.</p></li>
<li><p>My daughter visited all of her prospective schools, but had a pretty disasterous visit to the school she attends. She made her choice based in large part on reading the livejournal communities for the schools she was considering. There was a huge difference in the character and feel of what people were talking about at each school, and the types of kids who were attracted to each.</p></li>
<li><p>Visiting provides the most dangerous kind of anecdotal evidence: It’s really vivid, you are overwhelmed with data of one kind or another, but it tells you almost nothing reliable about what it’s really like to attend a school for four years (or at least nothing reliable you can’t get by talking to people on the phone, or reading blogs, etc.). “Yeah, that’s a nice building. It has windows.” “This food is bad.” “The tour guide is dumb.” It feels really important, and it isn’t.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The most valuable college visits that D had were the ones that made her know that a place would be wrong for her. All the programs are geared to show how great the school is, but actually walking the campus and seeing the environment in and around a school can tell you a lot…it helps weed out the wrong choices, at least…</p>
<p>I agree visiting is very important, but it can be tough to get a good sense of a school via a standard visit. Recently my younger kid started his college search. We visited two schools, and went on the tour and attended the info session at each one. At the end of second school visit, he remarked that he didn’t know how you would distinguish between the two schools, and I knew what he meant - based on the tour and info session, they sounded like the same place. Take my word for it, these two schools are very very different schools socially, academically, politically, etc. </p>
<p>For future college visits, he’s going to vary things a little to try to get a more accurate view. He’s going to attend a class at several schools; at any school where he has a friend attending the school, he’s going to go hang out with the friend for a while. He’ll still stop by the admissions office and sign in so he gets credit for visiting, but I think he’s going to do more exploring on his own.</p>
<p>Its really not that important. You cant get a feel of what freshman life at college X is by soending a couple days there with a tour guide. I made my decision based upon reputation and a quick visit, and I feel i made the right decision.</p>
<p>Visiting helps weed out schools that you may be considering. One really needs
to try to speak with non-tour guide students,attend a class or two and speak to the professors while there. If you just do a tour it can be a waste of time. That said you can do a visit and still not be sure that it’s good for you but it helps fill in the picture.</p>
<p>I think visiting is a material component of understanding the school environment and whether it would provide a good fit. But I wouldn’t just rely on scripted tours and info sessions. It is important to approach kids and talk to them while there about the aspects of the colleges that are meaningful to you. Visiting, along with all other research will help avoid unpleasant surprises once there. It also is a good idea to start to get the daily online version of the school’s newspaper. It can give a sense of the variety of things going on at the school, how the administration’s handles student concerns and other problems, and the varying viewpoints of the student body.</p>
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