How to Visit Colleges on the Cheap

It's wise to make a list of criteria a school must absolutely have and must absolutely not have. For instance, is Greek life important? Are you looking for a rural, suburban or urban campus? Are there certain extracurricular activities you'd like to be involved in?

The Web offers lots of free services that can help students narrow down the schools they really need to visit. Online forums, blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can connect prospective students to those who are already on campus to find out whether it's a party school and how clean the dorms are. Online mapping systems can easily determine whether a campus is really just 15 minutes away from an urban center.

Many colleges also have videos of campus life on their own Web sites. Lynn O'Shaughnessy, author of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price, notes that Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., once had a live Webcam showing the library, cafeteria and other bustling centers of student activity.

When O'Shaughnessy was visiting schools with her daughter, she used online travel sites like Priceline.com to get discount hotel prices, including a "super-nice hotel" in Portland for $42 a night. If you're looking at the plethora of schools in Boston, it might be wise to stay in a suburb like Medford where the hotels are cheaper, and make the drive into town to visit the schools.

However, the author notes that students still need to do their homework and view campus brochures with a skeptical eye.

"Even if you visit, you shouldn't assume everything they tell you in an admission office is right on the mark," O'Shaughnessy says. "Their job is to market the school."

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