When should you start visiting colleges? NOW!

From my previous post you might be aware that I spent last week on a college counselors' tour called "Best of the Bay."  Even though I'm a lifelong California resident, I had very little knowledge of the particular schools that I got to see up there in the San Francisco area.  (Hey, California's a big place.) So while I knew the list of questions that I most needed answered to effectively recommend (or not recommend) each college to my kids, in almost every other way I was like the average prospective student or parent checking out a school for the first time.

What the tour reinforced in me is the advice that every college counselor will give you:

Do not commit to a school until you have visited in person.

There are two ways to approach this requirement, and both are equally valid.

1. Visit colleges of interest before applying and use that information to determine which schools you will actually apply to.  This approach saves time and money on applications but costs more time and money on travel.
2. Apply to all colleges of interest (after doing adequate research to make sure they are a good match, of course) and then visit the schools you are genuinely considering after acceptances have come in. This obviously saves a lot of money and time in most cases.

Many people mistakenly think that they can gauge a college by the website, the brochure, talking to alumni and admissions reps, etc., and indeed this is adequate to include a college on your list for application.  However, there is nothing that trumps the gut feeling you get when stepping onto a campus in person.  

Every counselor I have ever met has stories of students who got accepted to "their dream school" or "the perfect school" (on paper) but hated it when they got there.  Hopefully their first time on campus was a visit prior to National Commitment Day, May 1st, and the student had time to choose another school. No biggie.

But sometimes that first visit is the day they move into the dorms.  In those situations, the student typically does not make it past the first year (or the first semester or even the first month).  This then causes a pile of unnecessary problems, such as wasted tuition money, having to find another school (sometimes you'll have to wait until the following fall to start over as a freshman somewhere else), the student's feeling of failure or discouragement about college, and on and on.

All of this could have been avoided if the family would have heeded the unanimous advice and visited the school to get their own firsthand, instinctive reactions to the place before plunking down their deposit.  Remember--college counselors might be repositories of information that you don't have about institutions of higher learning, but you are the expert on you.  No professional's opinion is more important than your own because this is a decision you and your child have to live with.




How to visit colleges

Basically every college has some mechanism in place for prospective families to visit their campus.  These tours are free, typically led by a current student, and are usually held all throughout the school year.  Not many colleges have Saturday tours, unfortunately.  (And here's a piece of insider knowledge--students are more likely to want to apply to a college if the tour guide was attractive.  So much for all of that time and money spent on research, right?  Don't worry. It has far less impact on which college the student chooses to attend in the end.)

As you might have noticed when looking at college websites, they are not designed uniformly so you might have to explore a little to find a way to sign up for a tour. You would think that colleges would make this information more prominent but usually it's embedded a few pages back, so don't give up!  Or if there's a search box on the home page, enter some key words like "campus tour."  It will be somewhere around the "admissions" or "prospective student" pages.

Some high schools take students on tours of local colleges, and I highly recommend that you send your child on these trips.  Even if it's not the school you think you want them to attend, knowledge is power.  Seeing any campus will help your child start thinking about their "wants and don't wants" so your research can be that much more focused when the time comes to create a list of good matches.

For this same reason, I propose that the answer to "When should we start visiting colleges?" is NOW.  Not that you have to do the official tour every time at every college you pass by, but if your child is in high school and college is a consideration (or expectation) for their future, make wise use of your vacations and other travels.  If there is a college in a town that you are visiting, include a walk or drive through campus on your itinerary.  Do the same with local colleges in your "spare time."  (I know none of us actually have "spare time" anymore, but you know what I mean.)

On either guided or self-guided tours, don't expect anything in particular from your child.  Just observe.  Is your sophomore excited by the prospect of this kind of life in the future, or do they seem overwhelmed and fight against your suggestion to visit a college?  In the latter case, you don't need to keep pushing, but just record that information for your analysis of the big picture.  Being really honest with yourself about who your child is (rather than who you want them to be) is of utmost importance in this process.

If a senior is still digging their heels in about visiting or applying to colleges, perhaps they need a gap year program like AmeriCorps or CityYear, or maybe they'll be agreeable to starting part-time at community college. Forcing a child into higher education only backfires so it's better to work with what they've got.  The goal is to produce a happy, successful person, and everybody needs to get there their own way.

One last way for your child to visit colleges is to send them on one of those college tours by for-profit companies.  They typically take a busload of high school students to a circuit of colleges in a given geographic area, such as New England, Southern California, Florida, etc.  You can find these companies by doing a web search with keywords like "college bus tour" or related phrases.  Be advised that they generally cost over a thousand dollars.


The most important element: Your child

It is so difficult to distinguish where that fine line is between supporting and micromanaging your child's college application process. Take heart in knowing that millions of families have survived it and you are in good company all over this country at this very moment!

But one way to help determine where you stand in relation to that fine line is to honestly assess whether you are doing more work than your child. If so, it's time to step back a little and refocus on a plan that gets your child engaged in what's going on.  Let their interests and preferences be the guiding force behind your joint effort.

If it feels impossible to get them interested in anything you are offering them, perhaps it is time to consider other post-high school options, or to enlist the help of a professional or trusted adult outside of the family who can find a new angle on the subject.  Sometimes kids feel so much pressure to please their parents that they become paralyzed and they need to work with someone in whom they have no emotional investment. So try not to be too hurt if they prefer to work with someone else because what it just might mean is that they care so much what you think that it is actually distracting them from making progress and decisions.

If you go on a college tour, click here for a list of things to consider.