Planning a college visit? Here’s a helpful new tool

Posted Aug 26, 2010 by Dennis Joyce

Updated Aug 26, 2010 at 10:49 AM

Many college-bound students choose fall to tour campuses, such as the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg.

Goseecampus.com is a website that’s launching just in time for high school students and their parents making college visits, a season that peaks somewhere around Columbus Day on many campuses.

Registration is required but the website is free, elegant and easy to use, and if nothing else, it’s worth plugging in colleges you may be interested in just to see their detailed profiles listed in a way that allows for apples-to-apples comparisons.

Or, if you’re still casting about for a college, you can plug in majors by region and see who offers them.

You’ll have to decide for yourself about the value of Goseecampus.com beyond that.

It has convenient links to college admissions offices, and they seem to work fine. But it also promises links to airlines and restaurants and a “community” of discussion about each campus.

When we plugged in Barry University in Miami as a test, no restaurants came up. Not even nearby Momma Jennie’s, famous for its pizza, which is one of 13 establishments that appear near Barry on a simple Google map search.

And Goseecollege.com appears to be too new for any discussion yet.

You won’t want to rely on the data in the profiles, either, since there’s newer numbers available online. Data for the University of South Florida, for example, is from 2008, and for the University of West Florida, it’s from 2007.

But Goseecollege.com is a fun and helpful tool in an important search for many families.

Also worth checking out is the College Board’s search (click here to go there) and one mom’s helpful account of a Boston-area college tour that will hit home for parents who’ve been through the process (click here to go there).