why is it important to visit a college before enrolling?

Parent Cafe
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<p>crouton, I agree with the earlier poster who suggested you chip in some of the money to visit. With a part-time job you could earn a few hundred dollars “earnest money” to show you’re committed and its important to you.</p>

<p>As you’ve seen by this thread, opinions differ on the need to visit. Personally I think its important to start by visiting various <em>types</em> of colleges; an urban campus, a rural campus, large, small, and so on. These can be in your locale and not schools you’re particularly interested in, but they’ll give you a feel for what that type of college is like. </p>

<p>There are many things we know without being able to verbalize how/why we know them. Call it gut feel, intuition, what have you. As many parents here can attest, they have dragged kids on college visits and had the kid just refuse to get out of the car at some places; they knew it was wrong for them. </p>

<p>I’m not sure how to convince your dad of all this, but here’s one try. Ask him to imagine he got transferred at work to another town. Without ever setting foot in that town, would he buy a house there and promise to live in it for 4 years? He could use the web, a broker, newspapers, any resources he wants, but once he’s bought that house sight-unseen he’s stuck in it. Would he agree this is reasonable, or would he want to take a trip there before buying?</p>

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<p>I’m not the Dad, but yes many years ago, I told my not yet husband that I thought a few years in Germany sounded like fun. I’d never been to Munich, though I had at least spent a month in Germany seven years earlier. It was fun though more of an adjustment than I had really expected. I figured I was adaptable.</p>

<p>I took my son to visit three colleges during spring break his senior year. He told me ahead of time he could be happy anywhere. We looked at Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley. (And he’s seen some East Coast campuses in the summer thanks to CTY and reunions.) He liked them all just fine. I will make him visit his top choices when we know where he’s been accepted, but more for my peace of mind than his.</p>

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<p>STANDREWS–you asked:
“Did you take the younger kids to colleges visited by the older? If so, how much did they gain from the experience?”</p>

<p>If you mean, did I bring along the younger sibs while the older ones whose decisions were in-the-limelight, yes I did for the D who was just 2 years younger, but nobody younger than that. She tagged along for the first campus he visited, but didn’t want to go to the rest of them.
She definitely gained. At that moment (when she was a h.s. freshman, and he a junior) she said that until then, she figured “college” was just another boxey building like a high school. She had no idea that there were different buildings, with green spaces between them, plus enjoyable walks between classes instead of noisy hallways. It never occurred to me that she didn’t know what a “campus” was, until then. At the meeting where the AdCom presented to a mixed group of prospective parents and students, she fell promptly to sleep. We let the AdCom know she was merely a freshman, and her gaffe didn’t hurt his admission chances (he was accepted there, but declined).
It also was very important in the following 2 years until she became a h.s. junior herself, because she was in an unpleasant, difficult h.s. Whenever we said, “Please stay with the task; you know things will be better in college,” her memory of that trip kept her a-going. She still talks about that trip, that it inspired her to work harder in h.s. so she, too, could go to college someday. It was her beacon.
Eventually, after touring many others in her own jr. and early sr. year, SHE went to that same college herself! </p>

<pre><code>The much-younger siblings we did not bring along on those visits, because they’re just too babyish and it didn’t seem at all fair to the decision-making process of “big brother” who needed to focus on his impressions of the school and not do his usual good job of minding his younger sibs, while walking along.

One of the younger sibs really mourned not ever seeing the campus where his big brother took off to. So we made a special point to bring ONLY that sib to Family Weekend in the fall of freshman year. Once he saw his brother all moved into the dorm, he was much more at peace (but edgey until that moment). Since that weekend was to welcome families of attending students, there were all kinds of lovely activities, student concerts and so on, that made it a delightful weekend, instead of confusing as a walking-campus tour is for a child under around age 14.
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<p>The most important thing to remember is that the oldest one needs to imagine him/herself on the campus and separate from family. If the next-younger child (2 years younger) had been a habitual nuisance/pest to him at home, I wouldn’t have ever taken her. It really was HIS chance to be treated as “the future college person” instead of yet another day of “big brother with the eldest’s caretaking responsibilities.”<br>
Also, we told our D what our expectations were, and that any questions she had of the tourguide she should save and ask quietly later; that it wasn’t “her” tour but his. As usual, knowing the expectations in advance made for a good time for all.</p>

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<p>It’s very important to get a “feeling” of each place before you commit - I have a couple of friends who attended colleges they’d never visited before and some of them turned out to be a bit more miserable than others…</p>

<p>Prestige and all that is important, but there’s a strong personal impression of each school that’s important also. I visited Berkeley very, very briefly one day when I was up north - I was barely on the campus when I started to go :eek: :eek: :eek: and so I cut the day short.</p>

<p>Ended up not applying at all. Now I kinda wish a bit that I did, if only because I had a decent shot (in state, 1510 SAT) and I could say that I turned down Berkeley for my current school :)</p>

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<p>So . . . what do you students think of my father’s experience (described above) – went to college sight-unseen, discovered it was a terrible fit, desperately unhappy for a few months, and wound up loving it with many opportunities and lifelong friendships – or mine – I just hated my grad school’s campus when I first saw it, and would absolutely (and mistakenly) have chosen another school if I had seen it before my decision? Isn’t it possible to make mistakes with your gut reactions to superficial things?</p>

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<p>There are folks who can purchase a $200k car without test-driving and not blinking an eye, and so I suppose there are folks comfortable doing that with $200k educations and committing four years of their lives that way. I’m not among them. ;)</p>

<p>I think one learns most by going on a Thursday evening, and by being paired with an incompatible host. If one finds the incompatible host still within the frame of what is acceptable, the school works. </p>

<p>If it really doesn’t matter where one goes to school, since they all have students and teachers, I recommend University of Phoenix. It is by far the largest institution (larger than the top 30 LACs combined), has the largest diversity in student body, and the most choices.</p>

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<p>My husband’s parents put him on a train and off he went to a college he had never seen. He had a wonderful 4 years there.</p>

<p>He tells us the long version of this story every time we leave to look at another college for our daughter. Her answer is,“That was then and you, this is about me.” For her, it is important to see where she may live for the next 4 years.</p>

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<p>To make sure that the Cornell to which you were admitted is in New York and not in Iowa! Also regarding Penn- Philadelphia or State College. Be careful when flying to Portland as one may end up in Oregon when Maine was the desired destination, which actually happened about 10 years ago to some poor soul as reported on CNN.</p>

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<p>

If it logistically and monetary can be done without great sacrifice I have a hard time advocating deciding to collect less information about such an important decision rather than more … I’ll almost always vote for more … and for information from a variety of different sources. I’d rather my kids do site visits than review students comments on-line from yet another on-line student feedback source if they already have plent of on-line student feedback. </p>

<p>To me the most telling line in your quote is the last line …

Yes, I agree it is … but I would not assume that the information gathered on a campus visit will be superficial. For example for me, my visits were when I first saw and felt the difference between an in-city campus and being in a college town … I consider this far from a superficial attribute for a school and as it turns out one about which I have a strong preference. Another idea that is tougher to defend but I which I would defend is seeing the on-line descriptions in action … If I had to guess one of my kid’s will probably respond well to a written description of a small college town campus with strong Greek and athletic culture … and when he visits he actually will not be a big fan of campuses with a strong Greek precense. I can add my aneodotal story of how I switched my undrgrad college choice after visiting the schools not because I learned new things about the schools but that what I thought would be a bigger draw was in fact not when I actually experienced it. </p>

<p>Personally, I will give my kids as much info as possible and trust they will sift the important from the superficial and that more info will help their decision process. Could the visit somehow negatively effect their decision? Sure, but I have to believe the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the trips helping more than they hurt.</p>

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<p>“Isn’t it possible to make mistakes with your gut reactions to superficial things?”</p>

<p>My d. had heard there was a lot of drinking at her first-choice college (#1 LAC). But I don’t think she had any real sense of what that was like until her two overnights. The second one, on a Thursday night, the women in her dorm started drinking before dinner, and brought flasks to a 9 p.m. a capella concert. When she asked whether they had experienced any problems with all the drinking, they all complained about the guys in the next entry, who were loud drunks at least two or three times a week. When my d. asked what would happen if she didn’t want to live next door to folks who were loudly drunk 2-3 times a week, they looked at her like she was nuts. She ended up helping one student with his music homework. The school went from the top of the list to near the bottom.</p>

<p>Was it the right decision? I’m sure she would have managed quite well had she chosen to attend. But why should she just have to “manage” when there were plenty of schools out there, with academics just as strong or stronger in the areas in which she wanted to study, where she wouldn’t have to?</p>

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<p>JHS:</p>

<p>You asked the students, not me, but being the busybody that I am, I’ll answer anyway.</p>

<p>What you describe is predictable and is a well-known facet of cognitive dissonance. Most people, when faced with the inevitable, learn to at least like it, if not love it. There are famous studies where people who don’t do particular jobs rate those jobs on how desirable they may or may not be. People actually doing those jobs, even if stuck in those jobs by circumstance (that is, they didn’t actually choose the job) always rate the actual job higher than those not doing the job.</p>

<p>If I were going to make your point, I’d just say that one is likely to adapt to almost any environment, but there are exceptions, and the important thing is to know what you really can’t tolerate.</p>

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<p>visits? kinda like kicking the tires and the test drive. it gives you a limited amout of incomplete information. And if you are assigned the wrong tour guide and/or overnite host the info could be dead wrong. Like the tour guide at a very good university who told us that she went to the library to nap! uh ho.</p>

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<p>There is no such thing as a wrong tour guide and/or overnight host. They are part of the incomplete puzzle. If you have a “wrong tour guide”, “wrong overnight host”, and find “incompatible students”, you’ve increased your knowledge base immensely. </p>

<p>“Most people, when faced with the inevitable, learn to at least like it, if not love it.”</p>

<p>Ah, the lessons of second grade. ;)</p>

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<p>Personally, I think there is so much you can learn about a school during a visit and I insist that my D visit after being accepted. You also see schools in a very different light as an accepted student vs. college tour. And yes, I do agree that it is important to explore online and talk to others about a school to learn as much as you can before committing to a college.</p>

<p>One of my D’s friends went to a school far away sight unseen. Even though it was a highly rated school and on paper had everything he thought he wanted, going there was such a bad experience he dropped out and refuses to ever consider going back to college again (after only 1 semester). That situation is enough to strike fear into the heart of any parent to let you visit a school first!</p>

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<p>I am a firm believer in college visits, but you can’t believe the number of high school classmates (1971) that never saw their college/university (other than photos in the catalogue) until they showed up for fall semester. Very few transferred and most ended up loving their school and the town in which it is located.</p>

<p>Maybe we overdo things these days…</p>

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<p>As I said before, I am not opposed to visits, just suspicious of the information they produce. Certainly in mini’s daughter’s case, a home-schooled kid experiencing varsity-level drinking over a couple of days is relevant information. (Although I have to say I have a virtual niece at a famous college that is indistinguishable from the one I think mini is talking about, and she’s a complete abstainer with little tolerance for drinking behavior, and she’s happy as a clam. And one of my daughter’s friends is at the same college mini’s daughter ultimately chose and has at times felt pretty oppressed by the alchohol culture there, too.) </p>

<p>I’m also familiar with cognitive dissonance. Part of what I’m arguing is that it can be positive. If a college has a good reputation, a good faculty, attracts good students, has alumni loyalty, etc., chances are there’s a lot to love about it. If a kid winds up there and focuses on figuring out what’s worthwhile, rather than how it differs from his or her expectations/fantasies, that’s not a bad thing. </p>

<p>No institution is perfect; all of them are unique in some ways; the differences between them (at certain basic equivalence levels) are ususally a lot less important than the similarities. And to the extent the differences ARE important, it’s really, really hard to get a meaningful sense about them in a few days’ visit (but really, really easy to get distracted by trivial differences like the weather, the building materials, the food, the five random students you talk to). </p>

<p>In the end, I think kids are better served by making some big decisions (size, region, competitiveness, culture, reputation), getting as much information as possible but not over-valuing visits, and then going with the flow of whatever school they pick, as opposed to searching for the elusive perfect fit. It depresses me to read about kids who are shattered by a rejection from their “dream school”, or who can’t adapt to this or that perfectly fine institution. Something’s wrong with that.</p>

<p>Back to my father. He knew he was stepping out of his comfort zone by going to a New England LAC from the Newark Jewish ghetto, but he had no idea just how uncomfortable that would be, how big the cultural gap was. Had he visited for more than an hour or two first, he definitely would have figured that out, but that’s all he would have figured out. What he learned, ultimately, was that he could deal with far more different types of people than he ever had before, that he could recognize them and get them to recognize him, and that the values of his college were much closer to his real values than his parents’ values were. He could easily have missed out on all of that if he had trusted his gut after spending a weekend there.</p>

<p>Or me. When I showed up at my suburban grad school, I had never really spent time in a suburb before. I was disgusted, offended. It didn’t look like a great university, it looked like a golf course dotted by big-box stores. What I learned – it took me a few months, not more – was that it WAS a great university, and that it delivered on everything I had considered important in making my decision – student quality, faculty quality, collegial atmosphere, value of credential, cross-disciplinary opportunities, a change in context for me. That what it looked like wasn’t what it was, and anyway I could (grudgingly) learn to appreciate its beauty, too. I know I would have crossed it off my list if I had visited first, and I know equally well that I made absolutely the right decision in choosing to go there.</p>

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<p>“Back to my father. He knew he was stepping out of his comfort zone by going to a New England LAC from the Newark Jewish ghetto, but he had no idea just how uncomfortable that would be, how big the cultural gap was. Had he visited for more than an hour or two first, he definitely would have figured that out, but that’s all he would have figured out. What he learned, ultimately, was that he could deal with far more different types of people than he ever had before, that he could recognize them and get them to recognize him, and that the values of his college were much closer to his real values than his parents’ values were. He could easily have missed out on all of that if he had trusted his gut after spending a weekend there.”</p>

<p>Much of this mirrors my own experience. And I learned heaps and got a great education as a result, and the best of it because of the cognitive dissonance. But I could never say that I loved it, or that I was ever really comfortable, or that I couldn’t have learned more (or least different stuff) elsewhere. </p>

<p>But I HAD visited first (and was too star-struck to have any idea of what I was really seeing - and I had trouble even seeing it for the first couple of years while I was there.)</p>

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<p>

JHS, thanks for the long post, at least I understand where you’re coming from. Two responses: none of what you cited was among the top priorities when my D was visiting school, though weather, food, and dorms can certainly affect attitude over four years…as much of an academic hard-ass as I am, I don’t think college is a purely abstract, cerebral academic experience. Differences in campus culture, both academic and social, are well worth investigating, imo, e.g., to what extent are academic and intellectual pursuits rate outside the classroom? You can get very different answers from schools that look similar on paper. What is that attitude of the administration towards the student…are students recipient of a product that they received as the move along an assembly line (the conclusion we arrived at at one Ivy League school) or is the school eager to facilitate things like something you mentioned, cross-disciplinary exploration and study.</p>

<p>Someone else made what I regard as good economic point: if the aggregate cost is going to be approaching $200K, damn right I’m going to look under the hood, even if it’s to see how the carburetor is set up, and I’m going to have my D slide behind the wheel and see how the control panel feels to her and, by the way, how’s the thigh support and head cushion feel while you’re at it?</p>

<p>All this assumes that one has done due diligence in narrowing down the schools that one applies to in the first place, looking for the approximate fit on purely academic grounds.</p>

<p>I do agree with you on the dangers of getting fixated on “dream” schools. Oddly enough, it’s looming as more of a problem for D with grad school than it did for undergrad.</p>

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<p>“Certainly in mini’s daughter’s case, a home-schooled kid experiencing varsity-level drinking over a couple of days is relevant information.”</p>

<p>Actually, that is a little bit of mis-characterization. She’d already had a year at Evergreen, and had taken courses at St. Martin’s, so she was in a better position to distinguish differences than most. Certainly better than I was.</p>

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<p>umm, money is not an issue for my family… we make plenty… and even if we didnt, i have enough of my own money saved that i could pay for whatever</p>

<p>yes, my dad did have to make a decision blind. He came to America from India without knowing much of anything about the college he was going to, much less the country/culture in the country. He figures that because i can get a horribly wrong misinterpretation of the students at a college from a one day or even one weekend visit and becaue it works out for pletny of people who dont have this misinterpretation, it isnt a good idea</p>

<p>cmbmom- i sound very similar to your daughter… how has she convinced your husband? i used the “its me this time…” argument but it didnt really work</p>

<p>Thanks very much for all the comments. if any of you have any more advice on how to convince my dad to let me go, that would be much appreciated… i figure as long as i understand that what im seeing isnt all the college has to offer ill be okay… just gathering more info… marketplace of ideas kinda thing</p>