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[quote=Anonymous]I understand the need for high school students to get a personal feel for what a 40,000 person campus feels like compared to a 3,000 person SLAC. And seeing what things feel like at a very selective school compared to a school where it's easy to get in makes sense. But for anybody living in the DMV, this can be done by taking the metro or with a short drive to Baltimore or Richmond. You could even visit lots of small private SLACs and state schools in rural places by driving just 2-3 hours from DC.

But what is the goal of touring schools all over the country as a high school student before you've applied or been accepted? If you happen to be going to Chicago for a family event, sure, visit University of Chicago and Loyola while you're there. But why take time away from school and spend money on an airplane flight for the sole purpose of visiting a school in another part of the country? At my child's school, trips to see colleges get an excused absence. Are the people doing this those have never been to Texas and are worried that it's too full of MAGA people to put it on their list of places to apply, so they want to make sure it's acceptable? Or maybe they want to visit Boston in the dead of winter to see if their kid could stomach that environment?

I could see why someone would fly to view UCLA and NYU if they get into both and have the great fortune of needing to choose, and they live in Ohio and have never been to either LA or NYC. But why spend so much time and money when you haven't even been admitted? Just spend the $50 to apply, and if you get in then you can take a trip if you're worried there's something about the school that you can't see from watching videos and asking current students.

I didn't visit any schools as a high school student and I loved where I ended up, on the other side of the country from where I grew up. I applied to schools all over the place that met very clear criteria. The fact that one school might have had nicer landscaping than another, or that its dorms were nicer had nothing to do with whether I wanted to go there. There's a thread in this forum about ridiculous things that turned off kids when they visited various campuses, none of which should enter into such a major decision about which school to attend. Why indulge that tendency among some high school kids? Almost every school I've seen offers prospective students a chance to chat with current students about campus life, and they have really well produced videos of the campus. is this just sort of upper middle class rite of passage? It feels like when brides take their mom and best friends shopping for a gown and make an afternoon of the whole exercise, another thing I didn't do.[/quote]

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