Editorial: All aboard: college tour road trips

Junior year is a tough year for many students.  The combined pressure of a heavy course load and standardized tests are stressful enough on their own, but when combined with having to plan for the future, can be extremely overwhelming.

Junior year is the time when many students go on college tours to visit schools that they are interested in.  There are many steps in the college application and admissions process, and an important step is actually going to visit schools.  Touring schools is a vital component of the college application process; it enables students to get a sense of the environment of a college and learn more about what a school has to offer in terms of programs and classes.  It gives potential applicants an opportunity to see if they are really interested in a particular school and can see themselves attending the school in the future.  However, although it is very important, it is highly time-consuming and costly.  Many schools cannot be reached by car.  Since many families visit colleges and scope the surrounding area during a weekend, they often need to book hotels as well.

However, many families may not have gone through the college admissions process in the past and may be clueless as to how to go about touring schools.

Thus, it would extremely helpful if there were college tours organized by the school that students could sign up to attend.  This would be beneficial since it would mean that students would not necessarily have to visit colleges by themselves.  This would lower the cost of the trip, allow more people to have access to tours, and save parents the trouble of having to constantly take off from work to accompany their children on visits.  It would be especially advantageous to those who might not be able to visit schools because there is no one available to take them.

School organized visits would be more convenient to students, since some students have to plan out each college visit on their own.  In addition, with the added advice of guidance counselors, students would be more aware of what to keep an eye out for on tours, instead of being completely overwhelmed in a foreign campus among a large tour group.

Of course, it is not possible for the school to organize trips to every single college each student is interested in.  However, even if this was just made available to the most popular colleges among Schreiber applicants, it would take a large burden off many students and their families and encourage more equal opportunities among students.