Spending hours planning, researching and traveling just to see something which is one short Google search away does not make any logical sense. This doesn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on transportation, hotels, parking and food. Traveling to visit college campuses just isn’t worth it.

As you progress through the years of high school, grades become more and more important. Visiting colleges across the country wastes your classroom time, creating a stack of makeup dates for tests, assignments and notes. These can pile up fast, stressing you out, and can have long-lasting effects on your grades. In time, this can lead to lower GPAs and even worse test scores, making the college that you just vacationed to out of reach.

There are some benefits to exploring new colleges, such as seeing a day in the life of a student, professors, and how they teach, even the dorms and different buildings you may study at, but the downsides outweigh the upsides. The fairytale university experience you think you’ll get from traveling is simply overhyped.

These trips aren’t all good once you get there, either; bad experiences can sway you away from your school of dreams. Simple things like the weather being poor and people you meet being rude are major factors in deciding on a place to go. Being realistic, every college has some people who are not a match for you, so virtual tours can really help you make a neutral decision, not just based on a few bad days of being there.

To sum it up, visiting college campuses that you may not even attend in the future is not worth the hassle. As much as college is an experience, it is to get an education for a job in the future. When you visit these universities, all the attraction fades away from academics, and can create biases based on minor things. Finding the best fit for you does not mean wasting your time and money on a glorified vacation.