College Visits – The Fun Part of Applying to College!
Last Updated on March 18, 2024 by Jill Schwitzgebel
But I was reminded recently when talking to a friend whose oldest child is a high school junior that if you have not done a college visit before, it can seem intimidating. Many people have no idea where to start. Some don’t even realize there is a world of difference between just walking around the campus on a self-guided “tour” versus taking the one given by the college or university, almost always led by an undergraduate student, with an information session before or after it.
Maybe the thing I have enjoyed the most about college visits is the one-on-one time I have gotten to spend with my kids for these visits. I have gotten to travel with them to different parts of the state, and even to different parts of the country. You get to see that they are truly becoming young adults now and you see them in a different light. And, it’s not lost on me during these trips that our time together will soon become much more limited.
Getting Started
Presumably, if you are ready to visit schools, you have done some homework. You might be at the beginning phase where you’re determining if a school is a good fit or maybe you’re further along and trying to come up with a happy Safety. But once you have settled on some schools where your student wants to visit, the next step is to go to the school’s website again. Every college does it a bit differently of course, but generally there is a link right on the front page of the website that says “Visit”. For this school, the Visit option could not be missed at the top of the page. Occasionally, that Visit link will be behind a link for “Prospective Students”.
After clicking on Visit, various options may come up. I chose this example below, as there are several types of visit options explained. Chances are, you just want to sign up for the Campus Visit.
If you don’t live close to the school, and interviews are offered on campus, you may want to go ahead and have your student sign up for an interview that day. For some smaller schools, interviews are just one piece of the Admissions process and students’ chances of being admitted are lowered without an interview. At other schools, they are optional or not available at all. Again, this is information that is readily available on the school’s website. Many schools will also offer the chance for your student to do an alumnus interview if you live out of the area. In general, if interviews are offered in any way, and your student is serious about that school, they need to do an interview!
After you click on Campus Visit, you will generally be taken to a page with a calendar showing you when tours are available. After you have selected your date, you can then choose your other options, which are the Information Session and Campus Tour times that are available to you that day:
If you are traveling to the school from a distance, the college website will also have links to nearby hotels that they have partnered with which will give you reduced rates as a prospective student family. In my experience, those rates are not necessarily lower than what I could get using points, etc. No matter how you choose to book, you can still use their suggested hotels as a guide to know which hotels are convenient to the college.
Don’t procrastinate on booking your visits, especially to large schools. We recently did that, thinking we could book a tour in November about six weeks ahead of time. Nope. We ended up booking for a day off of school that was four months away! Had I been willing to pull Kid 3 out of school, we likely could have gotten in much earlier. But, it wasn’t worth the stress of having to make up a day’s worth of school work to do that. So especially if you are planning to do visits during popular school holidays, book early!
Visit Day
After all the logistics are worked out, it’s finally the day of your visit! In my experience, you will always meet in the Admissions Center on campus. But leave plenty of time to park, because parking on college campuses always seems to be a little bit of an ordeal. Schools generally seem to give good directions in their visit confirmation emails/letters though. Sometimes, they will also email a parking pass for you to print out for your dashboard.
Once inside, they’ll likely ask your student to fill out a little more information before the Information Session or Tour gets started. This is where you start to see your kids’ enthusiasm or lack thereof, or shyness or assertiveness really come out. Some kids want to hang in the back of the room and remain anonymous, and some want to sit up front, ready to interact. I would say the major thing to remember is that they’re about to be applying to college, maybe even this one, and so you need to let them lead the way and do the talking as much as possible.
My rule of thumb is that I try to never ask a question to which I could find the answer on the college website and I tell my kids the same thing. It means doing a little homework before the visit. This works better with some kids than others! I generally try not ask any questions at all and leave it up to the prospective students in the session or on the tour. But sometimes, I can’t help myself! 😉 My older two kids were not particularly inclined to ask questions or to walk up front near the tour guide when we were in a group, but Kid 3 loves to stick near the guide and seems to come up with plenty of questions!
I have toured with all types of tour guides, and truly, I think a tour guide can make or break the college for your student a lot of the time. Sometimes, in the debriefing with your kids afterward, you have to help them separate out the college from the guide if you have noticed a discrepancy between the two. I have never met a guide who was not an enthusiastic salesperson for the school (they got that tour guide job for a reason!), but I have met some that just didn’t hit the right note for my particular kid. I have met guides that were SO enthusiastic that my low-key kid was overwhelmed by it and determined that meant that the students at that school were phony. I have met guides that forgot not every student in the group planned to major in chemical engineering and guides that should not have been allowed to chew gum while giving tours. But if you talk to those guides, you can almost always get a good sense about the school.
My favorite question to ask them (always better to ask the student tour guide than the professional Admissions Representative) if no prospective student asks, is how easy is it for them to get the classes that they want or more importantly NEED, each semester. That’s a big thing! I have heard horror stories about kids not being able to get the classes they need in order to be able to take the next class in the sequence, and therefore, they end up falling a semester behind. Usually, the students will be pretty honest about that…or at least you can tell if they’re sugar-coating it for you. I have also begun asking about whether the dorm room they are showing us is actually representative of freshman dorm rooms or whether it’s a dorm likely not available until a student is an upperclassman – we learned the hard way that dorm room bait and switch can be real!
The last thing we do before leaving campus is usually to visit the bookstore. I can judge what my kids are thinking about the school by whether or not they want a t-shirt! While at the bookstore, we have begun a tradition of asking a student or two what the best pizza place in town is, and then we go there for lunch or dinner afterward. This way, while we are comparing campuses, we can also factor in the pizza quality. Priorities!
The Debriefing
At the end of the visit day, usually over our pizza, we do the debriefing. I try very hard to never offer my opinion. (Come to think of it, I’m not sure any of my kids have ever asked for my opinion either!) Now, I MAY ask leading questions if I have an area that concerned me that I think the kids need to consider. But I think it’s important to help them process and talk through their thoughts and opinions after a tour.
I always have encouraged them to put a few notes in their phone to remember their thoughts while they’re fresh in their minds, although I think they rarely (never?) have listened. However, I have been known to make a few notes of my own about what they said about the college right after being on campus to jog their memories later , like when they need to write an essay about “Why do you want to attend ___ University?”
