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By Richard Halicks

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In these tough times, visiting college campuses before your teen makes a final selection isn’t all that feasible. What to do? Take a virtual tour.

Read an excerpt here:

Flights, rental cars and hotels make visiting a slate of college campuses impossible for many families.

After all, the average price of multiple trips ranges from $3,000-$5,000.

But there’s always an online virtual tour, where nearly 300 schools -– from Alaska to Alabama, from Yale to Dayton, to everywhere in between -– are just a click away.

"There are a lot of colleges out there, and it's really hard to get a lot of information about them all in one place," said Patrick Wheat, a junior at North Springs High. "The online fair was a fun and interactive way to do it."

This tour, aimed at the technologically savvy and financially prudent, gives both sides a break by substituting a Web tour for the real walk through campuses. Colleges pay anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 to participate, but find making fewer recruiting trips with boxes of printed material cost effective in the midst of furloughs and budgets cuts.

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