When should you start visiting colleges?
If someone has mentioned that they are already touring campuses and you are wondering whether you should be, you are in the right place. Here is when visits are actually worth making, what to look at once you go, and whether any of it helps with getting in.
Start in the spring of junior year. That is when most families begin, and the summer after junior year is the busiest stretch for tours. Visiting earlier is not wrong, but it teaches your student much less, because a place only means something once they have enough of a list to compare it against.
There is a reason it falls there. They need to know themselves well enough to have a reaction to a place, and you need enough of a list that one trip covers more than one school.
Grade by grade
| When | What a visit is worth |
|---|---|
| 9th and 10th grade | Skip the touring. If you happen to be near a campus anyway, walk the quad for twenty minutes. It costs nothing and turns college from an abstraction into a real place. |
| Fall of 11th grade | Optional. One or two local campuses, purely to learn what big or small and city or countryside actually feel like. |
| Spring of 11th grade | The real starting point. The list exists, your student can react to a place, and school is in session so the campus looks like itself. |
| Summer after 11th grade | The busiest season for tours and the easiest to schedule. The tradeoff: campuses are half empty, so you see the buildings and not campus life. |
| Fall of 12th grade | Fine for filling gaps, but it competes with applications and deadlines. Keep it to schools that are genuinely in contention. |
| Spring of 12th grade | Admitted-student days, and the most valuable visit of all. See below. |
Does visiting help their chances?
Sometimes, and it has a name: demonstrated interest. Some colleges track whether an applicant has visited, opened emails, or attended a session, and use it as a tiebreaker among similar candidates. Others state plainly that they do not consider it. The large public universities generally do not; smaller private colleges more often do.
So if a school does track it, a visit that gets recorded counts for more than wandering the campus on your own - register even if you plan to walk it alone. And if travel is not realistic, a virtual session, or even an admissions email you actually open, still registers at plenty of schools.
What to look at once you are there
Take the tour. It is the fastest way to see the place, and a good guide will answer questions you did not know to ask. Then give yourself an extra hour afterwards, because the ordinary weekday version of a place is not something a tour can hand you.
- Eat in a dining hall. They will eat there roughly a thousand times.
- Read the bulletin boards. Flyers tell you what is going on that week: clubs, campus-sponsored events, study groups, free food.
- Sit somewhere for fifteen minutes. Watch how people move around each other. You learn something about a place that way that nobody can tell you.
- Talk to any student who is not the guide. Guides know the place well; so does everyone else there. You will often get introduced to someone along the way - a student worker, someone in a department office - and that is the moment to ask what they like about it.
- Ask the guide which dorm they lived in as a freshman, and how it compares to the one you are being shown. It is an easy question to ask and you tend to get a straight answer.
- Walk the route from a likely dorm to the main academic buildings in whatever weather you have.
How long does a college tour take?
Plan on half a day per school. The standard package is an information session of about an hour followed by a walking tour of about an hour to ninety minutes, and campuses usually schedule them back to back. Add the extra unscripted hour above, plus parking and lunch, and a morning is spent. Two schools in a day is comfortable when they are close together; three is a forced march that turns the third campus into a blur.
Do you have to visit at all?
No. Colleges admit plenty of students they have never met, and an application is never rejected for the family not affording a plane ticket. Visits earn their cost twice over - they teach your student what they want, and at schools that track demonstrated interest they register as a signal - but both of those have workable substitutes: local campuses for the first, and the virtual sessions and opened emails described above for the second. Visit the finalists if you can. Skip the rest without guilt.
Seeing schools without the travel
Visits cost money and days off work, and seeing every school on a list is impractical for most families. That is normal, and it matters less than it sounds.
- Go local first. Any nearby campus teaches your student what large or small, city or countryside actually feel like, even if that school never makes the list. Those preferences carry over.
- Cluster the trips. Most regions have several schools within an hour of each other. One trip, three schools. The College Finder maps every college near a zip code, which is the quickest way to find out which schools sit close enough together to see in a day, and colleges by state lists them all if you are planning around one state.
- Use the drive. The conversation on the way home is where you find out what they really thought.
- Save the flights for the one or two schools they are really hoping to attend.
The one visit worth prioritizing
Many colleges run admitted-student days in April, and for a family choosing between two offers, that visit is worth more than any of the earlier ones. By then the abstract question of whether a school is appealing has been replaced by a real one with a number attached, and your student is deciding between places that have already said yes.