When is the right time to initially start looking at colleges?

Answer: I used to think that families should wait until winter or spring break of junior year, once they have a better idea of their student’s grade point average, scores and accomplishments. My opinion, however, changed dramatically after I returned from a college tour with my own daughter, a freshman in high school, who begrudgingly accompanied me to visit East Coast schools in Boston and New York as part of my consulting practice.

While college looms large for all our students, it is still somewhat of an amorphous entity when you are 15. While we as parents remind our teens of the importance of obtaining good grades and participating in strong extracurricular activities, it takes on new meaning when those same messages are made by an admission officer. Not only was she learning about the admitted student body in terms of their academic accomplishments, but she was consistently encouraged to develop or follow her passion and figure out what made her unique and valuable to the student body.

Although she was accompanying me as a matter of convenience, visiting colleges early on in her high school career became a great opportunity for her to begin to consider what attributes might be important when she was ready to narrow her college choices. There was none of the anxiety junior students face when they visit colleges, envisioning that they might not be competitive enough to be accepted. A younger student still believes that they have innumerable options ahead and approaches college visits with the same open-mindedness as a kid in a candy store.

Our time together will always be remembered as a coveted opportunity to spend more hours than we usually had in our busy schedules. I spent my evenings listening to her begin to wrestle with what she values and where she sees herself five years from now. The advice she heard from numerous admission officers allowed someone else besides her parent to reiterate how competitive college admissions has become and the need to take many challenging courses throughout high school. Probably the one immeasurable benefit, which ultimately proved to be most valuable, was that renewed fire in her belly that all my nagging could not incite. While I would not recommend that families specifically plan a college tour before junior year, my own experience does make me appreciate how beneficial it might be to visit colleges, if you just happen to be in the area anyway.

Joan Franklin is the owner of MI College Support, an independent college counseling practice. She can be reached at (206) 232-5626 or joanfranklin@micollegesupport.org.