As springtime rolls around, I often receive the following question from parents eager to help their high schooler (usually 10th or 11th grade) start the college planning process:

I am fortunate over the last 12 years to have had parents who are devoted and caring enough to even ask this question. Many, many high school students across the US are left to fend for themselves when it comes to the college search. As a teenager, having a parent willing to work through the college process alongside them is tremendously beneficial.

So, before I answer this question, I will say the following: if you, as a parent, are even asking this question...your child should give you an extra hug tonight!

Now to answer the most common question I get asked: "Where do I even go to start?" (referring to the college search process):

Answer: Visit a few schools, all driving distance away, all doable on a normal Saturday morning & afternoon. If you make these visits a “big deal” to your child, you’re doing it wrong. They should be an easy hop, skip, and a jump from home. Mix & match the following characteristics:

The goal of this extremely basic six-characteristic overview is to introduce your child to the types of schools out there…to allow your child to get a feeling for what a huge state school feels like compared to a tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere…compared to a city school with minimal campus feels like.

Do they have a preference to one vibe over the other? Each type of school I listed above is a four-year college…and yet each experience is very, very different. You can and should completely ignore admissions requirements for now or even the notion of a school being a fit. That is not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose is to introduce your child to a handful of very different types of schools and see what he/she relates to. In covid times, you can substitute the in-person visit for a virtual tour (ex: Vanderbilt's) if in-person tours are not possible. Fiske guide reading, and Niche.com discovery are also great solutions here.

To provide an example, I grew up in Concord, MA. As a 16 year-old, college was the furthest thing from my mind. However, I benefited from trips with my parents to the following nearby schools:

-Middlebury (small, rural, campus)

-Brandeis (small, urban, campus)

-Boston University (big, urban, minimal campus)

-UMass Amherst (big, rural, campus)

Guess what? Zero of these four schools ended up making my list but that wasn’t the point of the visits. After visits of all four, I was certain of two factors:

1) I needed a school that was significantly bigger than my high school and

2) I needed a campus environment (unlike BU or NYU, where campus is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the city).

These early-stage open-minded college learning experiences are crucial to set the foundation for the entire process. Start early and you can complete weekend learning excursions like this. Start late, and you may be pressed for time, rush through the process, and have to skip out on this type of valuable exploration with your child. Don’t let that be you!