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It is true that I like to plan and organize things, particularly if they are related to something I’m excited about. I will never become a corporate event planner or a travel agent, but I like planning things that matter to me. Right now, for example, I am in the midst of planning an event at my church for families with LGBTQIA+ kids. I love to plan trips for my family, complete with detailed itineraries that everyone makes fun of and we always stray from but at least we have a starting point and options. I love options. Which is why I have thoroughly enjoyed envisioning and implementing my 16-year-old’s college search process. Why am I doing this instead of her, you might ask? I’ll tell you.

• I understand what college is and how it works much better than she does, since I went through the search process and attended college and graduated, and I know many other people who have done the same. At first I thought she magically knew all the things I knew about college, but it turns out that’s not the case.
• One thing I’ve learned about parenting her over the past 16 years is that I have a pretty good sense of what she wants and what she needs even if she doesn’t realize what she wants and what she needs at the moment. I am proud of my track record of things I’ve mildly coerced her into doing (which she resisted simply because they were unfamiliar) that she ended up really loving. So I have come to understand that she often hesitates about jumping into something she hasn’t seen for herself. I think she connects with experiential learning. It turns out that our college visits have helped her learn about her interests, or at least reveal to us interests we didn’t realize she had.
• I like to plan ahead. See above comment about often-mocked but still appreciated vacation itineraries. I’ve wondered for a while why so many families and schools wait until it’s almost time to apply to colleges to start looking at colleges. By the time you’re a senior, or even well into junior year, your GPA is pretty firmly established. You may not have the opportunity to sign up for any more classes. When you’re touring colleges, they say they want to see that you’ve challenged yourself in high school. By late junior year or early senior year, you’ve already taken or at least signed up for all your high school classes. You’ve already been doing most of the activities you’re going to do. It’s certainly possible you will take up a new sport or learn to play a new instrument as a junior or senior, but probably not likely. So that’s why I started this process when my daughter was in 10th grade, so there was still time for her to absorb the information we learned from college visits and act on it. I also anticipated that she would be unavailable for the entire summer between 11th and 12th grades because she aspires to work as a camp counselor at the sleepaway camp she attended for eight summers. That would mean no college visits during that time, which is often when families have the opportunity to tour.

Many people have asked how I started the search, since the universe of universities can seem so overwhelming, given that there are approximately 4,000 of them in the US. So the first thing is to narrow the scope. This does not mean that the initial list you make will be the final list, or that your kid won’t change their minds about what they want many times. And that is totally fine. But you have to start somewhere. Here’s the path we’ve taken so far. (Disclaimer: I am not saying this is the path for your kid, and I am not inviting debate or discussion here. Just explaining our experience).

• During her freshman year, I was concerned about the lack of self-confidence she expressed when talking about people she knew who were being accepted into colleges that she felt sure she could not get into. Similarly, she seemed daunted by the prospect of taking AP classes because she had heard how hard they were. Of course this prompted me to launch into one of many “you can do hard things” speeches that parents pull out of their back pockets when needed. I attempted to explain to her that she did not have to go to any particular kind of college, or a famous or prestigious college, and that she could take a gap year if she didn’t want to go to college right after school. She could work or volunteer or take time to think if she wasn’t ready for college. We’ve emphasized this a lot. But that she does eventually have to go to college and she does have to take hard classes because she is capable and it’s important to challenge yourself. At this point it was still all theoretical.
• While we were on vacation, we toured a well-known college in that city. Not because of any particular program that school offered, but simply because it was there. As in, “hey, here’s a college! Let’s look at it just for fun!” I hadn’t really prepared her for this tour and she mentally freaked out, as demonstrated by total silence, walking 20 feet ahead or behind us at all times, refusal to discuss anything during or after the tour, and unwillingness to read the brochure. So that didn’t go super well.
• Later, when everyone was in a better mood. Perhaps this was days or weeks later, I don’t really remember, she asked me a lot of questions about how college works which I didn’t realize she didn’t know. After that, she seemed to feel reassured that she could, in fact, handle the concept of college, and was more open to thinking and talking about it.
• One of her teachers suggested to me that my daughter might be interested in one of the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. My first reaction was, “Whoa aren’t those super expensive? We are not rich!” But her teacher assured me that these schools give generous scholarships, which turns out to be true, and was one of the first lessons I learned during the search process, which is that the sticker price of a private university is basically meaningless. I am still trying to understand exactly why that is the case, but I know that it is. There is a lot of money out there, whether or not you qualify for need-based financial aid. For example, at one school we visited, they give you an automatic $25,000 scholarship if you were a member of the National Honor Society. I felt so vindicated when we learned this in an info session because I made Zoe apply to her school’s NHS even though she didn’t understand why it mattered. Another school that we’re planning to visit this fall just sent us an email saying “every admitted student receives at least $24,000 in renewable scholarship upon admission.” Like I said, the way this works does not make sense to me, but there it is. What I have told my daughter is that she can apply anywhere she wants, and we’ll see where she gets in and what aid they offer her. Anyway the point here is that we took a day trip to the nearest Seven Sisters school, which was beautiful, and my daughter was receptive to learning about the school, appreciated its intimacy and traditions and proximity to a cool city, and she was able to start seeing herself as a college student.
• At this point I was able to start asking questions, since she had some context for coming up with answers. We discussed geography, and she said she wanted to stay on the East Coast, basically within a day’s drive. A smaller school where she can get to know professors appeals to her, so we’ve concentrated on schools with populations roughly 5,000 or fewer. However, a few larger schools with smaller programs in her area of focus have recently made their way on to the list, but she definitely wants to be part of a tight community. We’ll get to that later. She also mentioned that she did not want to go to a school with a Greek system or a big focus on sports. It turns out, we’ve since learned, that this means Division III athletics. I think almost every college we’ve visited is Division III, which means they definitely have sports but sports are not the most important thing at the school. At one college we we toured, when they took us to the gym, I asked if many students attend games. The tour guide said that their women’s volleyball team had recently won the division championship, and that volleyball games in that gym were usually standing room only, better attended than basketball or football, which my daughter and I both thought was awesome. She knew that she wants to study abroad so it was important to find a school that offers plenty of opportunities for that. And I knew, even if she didn’t yet realize it, that we needed to look at schools that offer generous financial aid.
• Armed with this information, I started looking at lists. My first stop was Colleges that Change Lives. I don’t remember where I first heard of this book, which is now also a website and a whole organization, but it seemed like a good place to start. First of all, college should be a transformative experience, and second, I liked the idea that someone had already vetted these schools and decided they were special in some way. I read about many of the 44 colleges, focusing on those within roughly 600 miles north and south of us. I requested information from any of them that seemed even remotely like a good fit. At this point, my daughter didn’t really have any idea what she wanted to study. The only class she was especially interested in was psychology, so we used that as a placeholder. Most colleges have psychology programs, so we weren’t ruling anything out based on academic offerings yet.
• I created a spreadsheet with a row for each prospective colleges, and columns to fill in info like location, size, admission rate, average GPA of admitted students, percentage of students of color (we wanted a school that is diverse, like our high school and community), percentage of students who study abroad, etc. I’ve modified the spreadsheet many times and it has given birth to baby spreadsheets with subsets of information.
• Understanding that Colleges that Change Lives is just a small slice of the big pie of possibly great colleges, I opened up the Fiske Guide. This is one of the few nods to my own college search process, which was much narrower and seemingly haphazard. I love a nice big reference book, and Fiske is just that. I had bought a copy earlier when I was introducing the idea of the Seven Sisters schools, so my daughter could get a little insight into them. Each entry is only a couple pages long, and they include ratings on social life and environment and cost and things like that. She underlined and highlighted elements of the entries that interested her. This was kind of a baby step in terms of her engagement in the process, but it was an important one. One of the most useful parts of the Fiske, in my opinion, is where they say something like “people who applied to this school also applied to these other five schools.” If you liked this book, be sure to check out these other books with a similar vibe. So I looked up every school on our list in Fiske, and added relevant details to the spreadsheet. Then I looked up every school listed in the “if you liked this school” part of the entry, and read about them to see if they met our other criteria. If they did –or came close–I added them to the spreadsheet and requested information on their websites.
• A friend whose daughter had just gone through the college search process mentioned Niche.com. This is a handy website where you can look up a college and find a lot of information at a glance, including their “grades” for each school based on value, academics, campus, etc. These may be useful but should not be taken as gospel. Different things matter more or less to different people. Overall it’s a great resource, but I have two favorite features on Niche.com. 1) a more robust version of the “if you liked this college…” component of the Fiske, which suggests schools that similar to the one you’re looking at based on several different metrics, like “here’s another school with 2,000 students or fewer,” or “here’s another school with a top nursing program,” or “here’s another school in Pennsylvania.” So you can certainly go down many rabbit holes, but eventually you feel like you’ve thoroughly examined each category. 2) You can compare schools side by side, just like you would when you’re buying a refrigerator from Home Depot or a coffeemaker on Amazon. Comparing schools has been useful when looking at net costs, acceptance rates, and other numbers. I will reiterate that these are all numbers and not the only factors in decision making. Niche.com can’t tell you if the vibe at a school feels right to your kid. But it may be able to tell you if your kid is likely to get in or not, so you can make sure they’re applying to some schools they definitely will get into, as well as maybe some schools they’d like to attend but might be a reach. So I added several schools to the spreadsheet that Niche.com suggested.
• We started to schedule visits. I’ve heard from many experienced parents that it’s just as important to tour schools you don’t like so your student continues to sharpen their sense of what appeals to them, what matters to them, and what they might want to avoid. So, while I didn’t want to waste our time going places I thought my daughter would hate, I definitely included some maybes on the schedule. Here’s what I’ve learned since we started doing tours. 1) Don’t schedule more than one school in a day, even if they’re in the same town or city. It’s too much, mentally and physically, to absorb and process. 2) Do schedule an info session and a tour. You will get different information and perspectives from each. Info sessions are typically (but not always) led by admission staff, while tours are led by students. 3) Ask questions during both the info session and the tour, but also remember you can read the brochure and look things up online, so you don’t have to ask everything. 4) Bring a water bottle and wear comfortable shoes. Maybe a raincoat and umbrella. Some people I know like to eat on campus when they visit. I do not, because 1) I feel like it’s weird to eat there when you’re not a student and you have other options, like a real restaurant. 2)You can find out how the food is from other sources, and 3) a given meal might not be an accurate representation of the food overall.
• Somewhere in the middle of all this, my daughter discovered what she wants to study and do for a living, which is something in the realm of filmmaking, video production, photography, broadcast journalism, or media arts. Every school seems to call it something different, and she is still exploring what areas of the field she wants to dig into–which is great–she has so much time ahead of her to figure it out. But once she had this epiphany, that definitely changed the shape of our search. We started looking more intentionally for schools with film/video/media arts programs. This is slightly tricky because, as I mentioned, different schools label these things differently. She doesn’t want to study film, or theory, or just communications. She wants to make things. So that has added and eliminated schools to and from our list. It is important to note, however, that we have not struck a college from the list simply because it doesn’t have a media program if it is in a consortium with other schools that do offer great options in this field. It’s quite possible that she could attend a small women’s college that has amazing leadership opportunities and a progressive vibe and close-knit community while also taking film and photography courses at one of its partner institutions. We have learned that most schools, at least in big cities, are part of these consortia and you can easily cross-register for classes and basically have the resources of several schools available to you.
• And that brings us up to speed. So far we’ve visited 8 of the 14 colleges currently on our list. We have tours scheduled for three more this fall, and are planning to take on two more next spring break. We have one late-breaking entry that we haven’t schedule yet, but it’s relatively close by, so we can squeeze it in. And there are few more schools that are basically like notes in the margin of the spreadsheet right now. Maybe someone suggested we check them out, or we heard them mentioned somewhere, so I will do a little research to see if they merit a trip. I’m sure that some of the schools will be crossed off the list after we visit, and some may rise to the top. We still have 14 months until any applications are due. I imagine by then my daughter will have forgotten her impressions from some of our trips. Between now and then she will probably meet with some admissions officers when they visit her school, or at college fairs. Her school counselor encouraged her to contact the admissions office or professors in the departments she’s interested in to ask questions, as colleges look favorable upon applicants who have demonstrated a deeper than average curiosity and interest in the school. The list of schools where she actually applies will probably look pretty different from our current list. We have time to sort it all out. Once she knows where she’s been accepted, she can always visit again for admitted students day or an overnight.
• Of course I’ve already been thinking about next spreadsheet. This one I’m going to have her create, but I’ll help. This one will include the name of the admissions officer and the application requirements and deadlines, and the requirements and deadlines for the scholarships each school offers. And of course there will be another spreadsheet for other scholarships. Thank goodness for the internet. When I was in high school I had to look these things up at the library. I think I only knew about a fraction of the opportunities that were out there. Fortunately, I found one school I wanted to attend, and I applied early and got in and I loved my time there and it all worked out. But I was a different kind of student with a different personality than my daughter, and the world is different than in was in the 90s, so I want to open up the world for her as much as it’s in my power to do.

In the meantime, I will keep loving our road trips. Our next one is to upstate New York, to a city neither of us has ever seen. Every time we travel–for college visits or otherwise–we get excited about finding local coffee shops with resident cats, browsing through independent bookstores, and eating at funky little restaurants. We usually end up walking for miles. We listen to our favorite music and stock up on snacks for the car and notice weird and wonderful things outside as we drive. We laugh a lot. I’m soaking up every minute with her before she leaves on this grand adventure that I’m helping her imagine into being.