We always recommend that students visit as many colleges as possible. It is very common for a student to think they want one type of school and to be charmed by another, and for this reason visits are invaluable.

Luckily, you don't have to fly across the country to begin to explore what you appeals to you in a campus.  For example, in Southern California alone there are examples of every type of campus: 

Large state school: SDSU, Cal State Long Beach

Urban research universities: UCLA, USC  (and UCSD, less urban, though)    

Small, private: Chapman, USD, Loyola Marymount, Occidental        

Esteemed liberal arts with sciences and engineering:  Claremont Colleges   

Tiny, elite: CalTech, CalArts

Most schools now provide excellent virtual tours on their website. Talk to us about other clever ways to connect with college reps and discover colleges.

As important as it is to see what a campus has to offer, it is equally important that the student understand which attributes matter to them. Students often create their first list based on a few broad criteria: how close (or far from) home it is, whether it has big-time athletics, and, honestly, if it sounds like a 'good school'.  Using only those criteria won't result in a campus that is necessarily the right fit. It doesn’t matter if a school is well-ranked for their pre-med program if you want to be a writer.

I use a tool with over 200 different attributes that my students can rank as essential, nice to have, or unimportant. Among the features we talk about are access to professors, ease of travel between school/home, research opportunities, law and medical school admission history, potential majors, support for learning disabilities, Greek life, honors colleges, percentage of students who live on campus, access to a big city, career and internship services, strength of programs in the student's intended field of study, and more.  Having a student think more deeply about their preferences allows me to suggest great schools that meet their needs, desires, and abilities. 

The college match process is both data-driven and subjective.  I attend counselor conferences regularly for public and private schools across the country and am active in the educational consultant community so that I can be well-versed in the data side of the college search. To speak knowledgeably with my students I must also have personal experience to share and so I visit college campuses continually.  Here are a few of the colleges and universities I have visited since 2012:

MIT, UCLA, USC, Cal Poly SLO, UCSD, SDSU, USD, Chapman University, Princeton, Cal State Fullerton, Cal Poly Pomona, San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Conservatory, Loyola Marymount, UCI, Long Beach State, Cal Baptist, Santa Clara University, Stanford, Menlo College, University of Virginia, Georgetown, George Washington, Vanguard University, Cal Tech, Pomona College, Harvard, Boston College, Yale, Instituto en Madrid, University of Washington, Gonzaga, Brown University, Tufts, Boston University, Providence, University of Hawaii, University of Puget Sound, NYU, Juilliard, Columbia, Marymount Manhattan, Fordham, American University of Rome, University of Florence, Reed, Oregon State, UC Merced, Monterey Language Institute, Annapolis, Goucher, Occidental, Vanderbilt, Belmont, Tennessee, Ole Miss