My parents started taking me on college tours when I was 13 / 8th grade!!!

One piece of advice: if you can afford to travel and tour, prioritize your safeties and match schools for the visits. Also prioritize schools that want "demonstrated interest".

Don't tour the reaches until your DC gets accepted. No need to fall in love with these schools so early, and these schools (generally) don't care whether you show them the love (Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Duke for example).

One fall of jr year tour because we were on campus for sports. Was useful because DC’s reaction was “Oh, college just isn’t that intimidating!”

Then two 3-school summer tours after jr year (one an adjunct to sports again (Northern California); the other in the Midwest). Some senior year clean-up in Sept/Oct, visiting 3 campuses (all separate trips) in the NE that DC already knew, but hadn’t looked at from a college admissions standpoint.

Worked well for us and was fun rather than stressful. Didn’t interview on campus. Just toured campus and hung out in the towns, doing things a student could afford to do.

I would say wait until second half junior year as they change so much during high school. You might see big changes in preference even in city - suburban - rural from Junior Summer to Spring Senior year. I know it means it's crammed in but we started early and ended up seeing some schools twice. First time around in sophomore year was too early to create an informed opinion. They barely know what they like about HS at that point.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We started group tours and open houses the summer after sophomore year. Interviews don’t happen until at least summer after junior year.

Be careful not to start too soon, or your kid may fall in love with some schools that are out of reach. You need at least a solid idea of sophomore GPA and PSAT scores to get an idea of what’s in range.

For us this is the reason we started spring of Sophomore year. We wanted DC to get interested and see the “goal” of keeping up and getting good grades. It just “need to Study and take rigorous classes to get into a good college”. DC understands that if grades don’t pan out, then that’s life. This was worth the gamble for us. I’m sure many kids want HYP and cannot get it because lack of qualififications.

I think it’s good advice to wait. We toured a variety of colleges when dd was a sophomore when we were visiting relatives, etc. She had never had more than one B on a report card at that point, so we weren’t concerned and felt like she’d have a shot at a variety of schools (we aren’t concerned with the HPYS nonsense). She fell in love with Vassar, which would be fine...but calculus and physics junior year were really hard on her GPA and her SAT score is the same as her PSAT score was, which is good but not great. So while I’m not going to tell her to give up, I’ve spent almost a year trying to help her find other schools she likes as much that will be in her range and she can’t help but compare everything to Vassar. And this is a kid who is largely indifferent about most things, so we didn’t expect it to be an issue.

Anonymous wrote:We started group tours and open houses the summer after sophomore year. Interviews don’t happen until at least summer after junior year.

Be careful not to start too soon, or your kid may fall in love with some schools that are out of reach. You need at least a solid idea of sophomore GPA and PSAT scores to get an idea of what’s in range.

For us this is the reason we started spring of Sophomore year. We wanted DC to get interested and see the “goal” of keeping up and getting good grades. It just “need to Study and take rigorous classes to get into a good college”. DC understands that if grades don’t pan out, then that’s life. This was worth the gamble for us. I’m sure many kids want HYP and cannot get it because lack of qualififications.

If you do an informal tour, be sure to still register at the admissions office so that they know you have been there, especially if they track interest.

We started group tours and open houses the summer after sophomore year. Interviews don’t happen until at least summer after junior year.

Be careful not to start too soon, or your kid may fall in love with some schools that are out of reach. You need at least a solid idea of sophomore GPA and PSAT scores to get an idea of what’s in range.

Spring and Fall Break of 10/11th grade for general tours. Spring break of Junior year, summer in between and fall of Senior year for more form formal tours and interviews.

We did an informal, drive by, this is the campus of a huge school, this is the campus of a small school, this is the campus of a school in the middle of nowhere and this is the campus of a city school during the summer between sophomore and junior year while driving to and from our family vacation. DC's younger sibling was more interested than DC. This worked out because they are just competitive enough so that #2's interest drove #1 to state opinions.

We then found the most likely in-state school and visited fall of junior year. These helped our DC build a list to visit. We visited one separately and two on spring break of junior year. We visited one more in September of senior year and applied to 4 or 5 without visits or with just the first driveby.

Did you arrange formal tours and interviews? Did you visit informally? How did you narrow down your list?