Recce Trips: A Growing Trend

When you're about to shell out over Rs. 14,00,000 per year for an education abroad, what better way to make sure you're getting your money's worth than to go and check out colleges for yourself? That seems to be the current attitude of many students planning further studies in the US.

An increasing number of Indian students are making recce trips to the US to check out potential colleges instead of relying on the Internet for their information, or buying into the marketing spiel of the many colleges hosting "road shows" in a bid to attract enrolments. Many feel that glossy brochures are easy to print, and that people who come here to talk about their colleges are being paid to "sell". Students – and their parents – believe that it's a lot of money to spend without actually seeing things for themselves, and prefer to ensure that they are going to be comfortable in that environment for a couple of years. Otherwise, they feel, it's money down the drain – not to mention the fact that they're in for a couple of unhappy years on foreign soil.

Ragini Ghose recently travelled to California with her 18 year-old daughter Deepika with the specific intention of visiting five colleges to get a first-hand feel of the potential 'fit' between the college and the student . "Everyone told us that it was totally unnecessary to make a recce trip because all the information we needed is available online," says Ghose. "I went with my instinct. We used the Internet to narrow our choices down, and set up dates to go and actually see the campuses first hand."

Rani Batra, mother of two college-age children, agrees. "I took my daughter on a recce trip to satisfy me," she says. "It's one thing to sit here and look at web sites and send emails and another thing to make a personal visit." The visit proved invaluable; her daughter, Pooja, discovered she actually preferred the homely atmosphere offered by the liberal arts colleges than the huge, somewhat impersonal universities. "When we went there, we found that liberal arts colleges offered smaller class sizes and a friendlier atmosphere than the universities," says Rani. "This is the kind of information you simply cannot get online. You have to go there and see for yourself what suits you."