Written by Greta Dornbirer
When thinking about visiting colleges and deciding where you want to attend, students and parents often feel consternation about when to start college visits. Because I was a homeschooled student who was the oldest of five, I was the guinea pig for everything, which meant that I started thinking about college early: I first visited Hillsdale the summer after my freshman year. While I am grateful now that my mom planned so far ahead, since it made my college search process less stressful in the long run, the actual visit did not make much of an impression upon me. I didn’t care about college when I was a freshman in high school, and I wasn’t particularly interested in visiting campuses. It wasn’t until the fall of my junior year, when I visited Hillsdale and other colleges, that campus visits seemed worthwhile.
This raises the obvious question: when should students prioritize visiting college campuses? If you’re thinking to yourself, “Should students even go on college visits?” the answer is yes. The popularity of visiting campuses in-person seems to have decreased since the COVID-19 pandemic (from my experiential knowledge). This is unfortunate, however, because there is truly no better way to get to know a college than by visiting it. You can only discern so much about a place from its website, where you are limited to reading descriptions of the culture and community, rather than seeing it for yourself. Choosing where you want to be for the next four years is a big decision, and visiting will be one of the most helpful steps in evaluating where you want to be for those formative four years. Programs and amenities matter—you can see most of these features on college websites—but culture, community, and atmosphere shape you. The people with whom you surround yourself will influence you for four years. When you visit a college campus, observe the kind of people that a school attracts, in addition to the programs, clubs, and dorms that the college offers.
There are two ways to go about visiting colleges: 1) visit all the schools you plan to apply to, either during your junior year or in between your junior and senior year, or 2) visit the schools you’ve been admitted to toward the middle or end of senior year. Here are the pros and cons of each approach:
- Visiting colleges that interest you
Pros: You can weed out any schools that you might not actually want to apply to. Maybe there’s a school that looks great online, but you don’t like the atmosphere. Great! You don’t have to apply there anymore. You might better understand how to rank your college list, based on which campuses you liked the most.
Cons: You may visit a few schools that you ultimately didn’t like, and that could feel like a waste of time or money, especially if you have to fly across the country to visit a school. - Visiting colleges that have accepted you
Pros: You don’t have to feel like you are wasting time or money visiting some colleges that you might walk away from, especially if you live across the country from some of the places you are visiting.
Cons: It might be difficult to rank your list of colleges until you’ve seen those colleges in person. You also might end up applying to some schools that you don’t like that much, and you wouldn’t know that until after you’ve visited during your senior year.
You can also take a mix of these approaches, depending on how near or far the colleges you want to visit are to where you live. Mainly, you are deciding where you want to cast your wide net in your college search, which you can do either during the application process or during college visits. Either way, you will narrow down your list. Before either of these approaches, however, you should make a list of colleges that you are potentially interested in—either to apply to or to visit. Consider beforehand what qualities or programs are important to you in a college, and keeping these priorities in mind, make your list.
Remember that the college decision process is a mutual selection process, meaning that the college is selecting you, but you are also selecting the college. You have an active role to play in this decision, so ask good questions and be engaged as you visit. Plan ahead, definitely, but don’t start too early. Take the time to enjoy high school, take challenging classes, work hard, do the things that you love, and prepare for college without letting the college search overshadow your high school experience.
Greta Dornbirer graduated from Hillsdale College in 2022 with an English major and a classics minor. She currently lives in Hillsdale and recruits Ohio and Indiana for Hillsdale’s Admissions Office. In her free time, she loves to go on walks, find cute coffee shops, read good books, and have long, deep conversations with friends.
Published in September 2023
