I have two questions that I investigate for every college, but I do not hear often from others.
What questions do you ask that you don’t hear that frequently?
I always asked what the closing time was for the late-night food venues on campus. It’s nice to have a place to get a snack when you’re up late studying.
For 1, it is mainly dependent on the destination major. Note that majors other than CS, business, or engineering may be difficult to get into at some schools. So checking this for all possible majors for an undecided student would be prudent.
For 2, that can often be very major or course dependent within a given school. Nominally, a credit hour corresponds to 3 hours of work per week of work (including in-class time and out-of-class time), so a full course load of 15-16 credit hours would be nominally 45-48 hours of school work per week (although recent studies indicate that the actual is probably significantly less). But courses with labs, arts studio, music performance, and big term projects may be higher work than other courses of the same credit hours.
You mean, going to college is like holding down a full-time job? 
For long distance colleges: “How do students usually get to the airport?”
For some schools, there were excellent mass transit options. For other schools I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there were campus shuttles at break times and/or AirportShuttle options.
Besides determining average class sizes, faculty to student ratio, and flexibility of shifting majors (all pretty standard):
I did a spreadsheet of the department’s major requirements and the university’s general ed requirements for each school. The differences between the structure of the same major at different colleges were surprising and quite indicative of which departments/colleges would be better fits.
I also looked up the teaching records of faculty in the major department at each school. (Yes, that meant putting a certain amount of trust in the aggregate opinions on RateMyProfessors.com when I couldn’t get in-house evaluation statistics or commentary). Inspiring teachers can make all the difference in the world.
I’m a college senior so obviously I don’t go on many formal tours anymore. However, here are the questions I wish I’d asked:
@Hanna That is a good point. Saturday, I was able to ask four women who are in her potential major. Hopefully, I was able to get a rough assessment.
@whenhen Do you think you would get an honest answer to 1? I have heard that asked and the answer is usually along the lines of “you can always get the class. It just might be a time you don’t like.” I wonder if there is a way to really find out?
@gettingschooled I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to ask “Describe a time that you or someone you know was shut out of a course if that ever happens. How, if at all did you resolve it?” To get a truly honest answer though, it is probably better to ask a passing student.
Can non art majors take advanced art classes and can they actually get into the classes?
What are the policies around drinking?
You might need to get access to a student portal, but I can tell what the class schedule is and how hard it is to get into some classes by looking at the registration pages. Right now, I can go into my daughter’s Spring 2016 registration and see how many sections were offered, how many seats there were, and how many signed up for the course. Registration is just starting for next fall, so you can see some of the courses starting to fill up. No incoming freshmen will get to sign up for classes until late May and June orientation sessions, except that some departments pull the seats for incoming majors in required classes (my daughter had 4 of her 6 classes pre-reserved for her). She was able to talk her way into a few classes last fall that were full when she changed her major. Not that hard.
I guess you could just ask the department that - are required classes reserved for majors first? How often are certain classes offered? Every semester? Every spring? Every other year? My daughter has experienced all of those.
“Do you think you would get an honest answer to 1?”
You might. You also might get a diplomatic answer that contains a lot of information between the lines, like “I’m in the Honors College, so it’s never an issue for me,” or, “It’s fine as long as you sign up the first day and you don’t try to switch.”
Re: “honest answer to 1”
Of course, getting consistent and comparable answers to question 1, even if everyone is perfectly honest, is not necessarily trivial. One student may sign up early and not be too picky about class times, while another student may be tardy in signing up and not want to sign up for any class earlier than 11am. Even if they are in the same major and want mostly the same classes, they are likely to have very different experiences in getting the classes that they want. Not to mention that specific popular classes, or classes in popular majors, may be more full than other classes.
If the on-line class schedule shows capacity and actual enrollment, it may be worth looking in it for classes of interest, to see if they are completely full, or if there is “breathing room” in each class section to accommodate students who want to change to a different class or section after early registration.
Honest answer to ‘How hard is it to get your classes?’
I think it also depends on how you pose the question and to whom. If you ask an admissions office person, even a student, you may not get the straightforward answer. But what happens if you ask a student ‘Can you describe the registration process? How does that work?’ Sometimes you get an earful about running around to different professors, lotteries to get registration dates, and which classes always get filled quickly. It’s the same thing for housing.
I’ve got plenty of honest answers including, “It’s easy to switch to CS as long as you get an A, in the foundation courses.” Of course how easy is that?! You have to dig a little deeper But at CMU, where CS is a separate school with a limited enrollment, it’s not going to be as easy to switch as it is at Harvard where as far as I know pretty much anyone can major in CS and between 2008 and 2014 three times as many people majored in CS. (And even more if you count the double majors.)
Take a look at gen ed requirements, and whether your probably major has any quirks. My son’s college had some of their own programs for study abroad and if you did one of them all the credits counted easily. Unfortunately none were in an Arabic speaking country. He did three terms abroad in Jordan. Got a year’s credit in Arabic and gen ed credit for everything else, even though equivalent courses at Tufts would have been accepted for the International Relations major. It meant he had to take some courses senior year that overlapped the material of courses he’d already taken in Jordan.
The question I never got an answer to:
What happens if there is a snowstorm on the day when the dorms close for Winter Break and students are stranded on your campus?
And perhaps the more important question (because I suspect that the college would make some sort of arrangements for the students’ safety if the storm was in the college town):
What happens if there’s a snowstorm in a student’s hometown on the day when the dorms close for Winter Break and the student is stranded on your campus?
If the snowstorm in my hometown scenario happened, I wouldn’t expect the college to do a thing. I’d put my student up in a hotel near the airport until the could fly home, or ask my student if they have a friemd from nearby that they could stay with. I am pretty sure most colleges would not kick students to the curb during a major snowstorm at their location, too.