ETA- I actually see the logic in the visit-after-you’re-accepted strategy, mainly because at a certain point, there is just so much randomness involved. It’s pretty hard to know what is a target school and what is a reach. All the “reaches” seemed to have elements of a lottery.
I wholeheartedly agree that it can be very hard to determine whether a school is a "target" or a "reach" and that you can't visit everything ahead of time. I think that it is particularly hard if you have a kid with excellent grades and scores who expects to major in something common. Very few schools get eliminated when you run your stats through the search engines. FWIW, DD got into all but one of the schools that we visited (4 of 5) and only one that we didn't visit but DD went to local info sessions (1 of 3). Who knows whether visiting would have made a difference. Like you said, it felt like a great big, extremely stressful lottery.
I agree in principle, but if you are thinking of following this approach, I would, based on our recent experience, advise taking a light course load for the spring semester of senior year. With only a month between the final college acceptance notifications and the decision deadline, it was hard to fit in more than a couple out of state visits.
It's a great idea if you can make it work. This wasn't an option for us since DD is an IB student. Most of her non-IB friends who are "honors" students had a bunch of AP classes senior year. Her only friends who had easy last semesters were all early decision and /or recruited athletes.
