What grade to start going to college open houses?

We went summer between Jr./Sr. year. Applied in October.

Edited to say maybe it was Spring Jr. Year as I remember kids being in the cafeteria and the campus being busy. It's not like that in the summer. But it wasn't any earlier than that. And I never visited colleges. I was in Europe.

We are visiting our first college over spring break this year. DD is a sophomore.

We went summer between Jr./Sr. year. Applied in November. If she gets into her 2nd and 3rd choice and not her first we will do a final determining trip to both in the spring

First one was summer after 9th grade year. They had a big program, which included parents, on how to do the college search, info on financial aid, test taking/prep, etc. so it was geared toward those in 9th and 10th grade. Was probably more helpful for me than for DD. A few here and there 10th grade and then most of them were summer after 11th grade. She's been accepted to all of the ones she's applied to, so we're now on our second round of visits/scholarship competitions for the 5 she is most interested in. 9th grade DS is being dragged along to most of them and he is getting a good idea of what he likes and doesn't like.

It's startling how early those letters arrive!

Our District recommends visiting at least one freshman year, maybe two sophomore, then get serious. But I tell you, we tried casually visiting a campus before sophomore year and DS was totally not into it and annoyed. Maybe it's good advice for families unfamiliar with college? ETA or kids who know what they want to do?

The junior year trips went much better- made sense. My neighbor chose to only visit after he was accepted to a few schools, before final decision. That worked well for him.

We had one DD who played sports and when they were at team camps during the summer they went on group tours. It really helped her eliminate schools early on. We visited spring of Junior year and early fall of Senior year. This was 17 years go though.

We visited colleges when we were in the area when DD was a freshman; not that she was particularly interested in a particular school. We took it "seriously" in the latter part of junior year.

Both my kids' schools had field trips to the local Cal State University and University of California campus at the end of 8th grade. I went along on DD's UC San Diego visit and left wanting to enroll myself.

We toured a number of UC and Cal State campuses the summer before junior year and it just reinforced DS's top pick.

My kid didn't go until the beginning of his senior year. I think he already knew where he was going and didn't have the interest most kids do. He wanted a solid engineering college and went more by the websites.

We took my youngest to a sophomore showcase her sophomore year. It was only an hour away, but it really got her to start thinking about what she wanted in a college, where she might like to go, what she needed to think about. Then we did several visits her junior year to universities she wanted to check out, then did a couple more visits during her fall semester of senior year to finalize it.

We went between Sophomore/Jr year. Why? Because that gave dd time to figure out what she'd like and if there were anymore schools she'd like to see.

One of the college presenters asked this very question. He praised those that went between Sophomore/Junior year.

DD took her ACT's during Jr. year and had that all done too. She applied in the Fall of Senior year. It worked for us and seemed a little less stressful on all of us.

My younger dd is a junior, and we've got a few visits lined up for this spring. We haven't started any sooner because she just wasn't ready. I am not convinced she's ready now, but it is time to start thinking about these things.