Visiting Colleges and Universities: When is the Right Time? By Susan Packer Davis, ThinkTank Learning Admissions Consultant/Academic Counselor
s Parents of high school students often ask me whether they should invest time and money visiting colleges and universities in advance of the college application process. While I understand that some students want to see the campus in person before deciding whether or not to apply to a particular school, visiting a college or university is not really essential to applying. I have been advising college- bound students for over thirty years, and I have long held the opinion that the best time to visit a college or university is after a student has actually been admit- ted to that school, not before. Of course, if a student and his or her family have plenty of free time and the required resources to visit col- leges and universities during the student’s junior year in high school, during the summer before the student’s senior year, or even much earlier in the student’s high school career, then by all means a student should visit the schools he or she truly wants to see. Visiting colleges and universities can be an exciting and informative adven- ture! The student and his or her family would do well to remember, however, that a visit, even one that includes a stop in the admissions office and a pleasant interaction with admissions personnel, will have no effect on the stu- dent’s admission to that school. At that point, the student has not even filed an application; the admissions commit- tee does not really know anything about him or her, and certainly cannot evaluate his or her chances, or even eth- ically comment on his or her eventual admission. In addition, it can be heartbreaking for a student who has visited a school and completely fallen in love with it to later be denied admission. The only real, significant advantages of visiting colleges ahead of applying are to help a student write one of those “Why (Name of School)?” essays - a task that can certainly be accom- plished by other means - or to perhaps eliminate the school altogether from the student’s college list because he or she for some reason found the place repellent.
A student’s college list should be quite broad and cer- tainly not limited to schools he or she has visited. A col- lege list is not a list of schools where a student will absolutely attend if admitted, but rather a list of possibil- ities and potential choices; having visited a school should not be a prerequisite to that school being included on the list. A student can learn enough about a particular col- lege or university these days to place it on his or her list of prospects without ever setting foot on the campus. A student can research the school on the Internet, take a vir- tual tour and/or e-mail a professor who is conducting research in which the student is interested or who has written papers or books in the student’s chosen field. The best time for a visit to a college or university is after a student has actually been admitted to that school, when he or she knows for a fact that he or she could actu- ally attend. A visit at that juncture takes on a much deep- er meaning; as he or she walks around the campus, sits in on classes or stops at the coffee house, the student knows he or she could actually go there! Every experience on the campus at that point becomes truly meaningful, from staying over in the dorms (and eating dorm food) to talk- ing with a current student. Everything becomes real. In
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