My older daughter is a sophomore in college and my younger daughter is a junior in high school so my experiences with the college process is recent and ongoing. As others have said visit some schools. Even it’s just an informal self-guided tour you can walk around campus, walk in and out of buildings, visit the bookstore, tour the surrounding area, etc. Visit schools of different sizes, urban and rural schools, etc. Also, a college campus on a weekday can look much much different than the same campus on a weekend. We’re fortunate that we are in New England, close to Boston, and there are something like 300 colleges/universities of all shapes and sizes in New England so you can get a pretty good taste of the various different options that exist out there. We did plenty of formal college tours but I thought the balance of doing our own informal tours with the formal tours gave a pretty look at some of the schools. The formal tours show you what the school wants you to see, so there is definitely some bias towards the “cooler” aspects of the campus and college life.
My older daughter thought she wanted to go to a small private school so we visited a handful. She quickly realized it wasn’t what she wanted for various reasons. Then she thought she wanted to be in a big city, and some visits changed that. She knew she didn’t want to be too far from home, and she ultimately landed in a state university, about 2 hours from home, near but not in a small city with a lot of good restaurants, shops, attractions, etc., and a really good vibe. She is thriving there, is super involved in a bunch of different activities and has made some great friends, while many of her friends from high school transferred to schools very close to home after their freshman year, or even after their first semester last year.
Daughter number 2 is in the process of starting to look at colleges. We’re doing the same process, just driving/walking around some campuses, setting up some formal tours, etc. She also wants to tour some schools farther from home, which my older daughter didn’t really want to do, so we’ll be setting up some tours for some of the schools she wants to see.
One thing that seems strange to me is starting the process for an 8th grader. My kids had absolutely no idea what they would want out of a college at that age, what they wanted to study, whether they wanted to be near or close to home, whether they’d try to play college sports, etc. It just seemed too far in the future to even enter their consciousness. I know some kids are more focused at an earlier age and already know what they want by then, but that definitely wasn’t the case with my kids. Maybe your daughter is one of those driven kids, or maybe the coaches are just convincing her she needs to be. If it’s the former that’s great. If it’s the latter, be really careful that they aren’t pushed so hard at this stage that they go off the rails. Let her be an 8th grader if that’s what she wants to be.
I’ll qualify all of the above with the caveat that everyone’s experience in this process is different, and the above advice may be worth exactly what you paid for it.
but there’s a lot I remember about that trip… that my dad took me to visit those CA schools had a big impact. I think there’s value in taking your kid’s aspirations seriously if you have the means to do that. Certainly not everyone has the money to visit schools that require plane rides to.