<p>Has anyone viewed these videos? If so, which ones and were they worthwhile.
Thanks!</p>
<p>I have viewed about 20. I think most were worthwhile. Which schools are you interested in?</p>
<p>Top 20 or so LACs and some of the top 25 universities but not hyps.</p>
<p>Stanford's is OK. Penn's after the first 5 minutes (which had camera or tape problems )was OK. The tapes I saw of Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, were good representations of the schools I have visited. The tapes of Washington U, Wisconsin, Brandeis, Hamilton, Oberlin, Reed, and Tufts seemed like good representations of the schools. NYU came across as a sidewalk school and was not in depth.</p>
<p>We ordered three. Frankly, even I found them boring. My daughter found them excruciating. Just like in real visits, the impression depends very much on things like the weather, the turnout of other students viewing the school, and the tour guide. But on the videos, they don't even show the guide or any other staff associated with the school. For American, they taped the info session and had the camera focused on the wall or a flag or something the whole time. Sorta annoying. It is VERY difficult to gauge the size of the school grounds from these videos. Places that I know are small came off the same as the large universities. Several videos were taken in the summer, when no students were around. I found myself trying to glimpse what the students looked like, but often the camera seemed to avoid capturing living beings. So, it ended up being mostly a tour of the outside and inside of buildings. They really do start to all look the same...
Just my two cents. We have one video left that D hasn't even looked at yet.</p>
<p>Some are definitely better than others. I guess I won't order American's. The ones in the summer aren't usually as good; although, I liked U Oregon's. I liked the tour guide.</p>
<p>We ordered three or four and the technical quality was dreadful--grainy and wobbly with uneven sound. I remember Carleton, Kenyon, and Davidson, and there may have been another. The openings are all the same, so the overall length is somewhat less than you might think. We found the questions asked by the protagonist (I seem to recall he is a college counselor in northern New Jersey) very cut and dried; the most informative aspect was the tone and degree of articulateness of the various student tour guides, but as on any tour, that can be very variable. Just about everything and everyone looked its/his/her worst in all the videos. The videos discouraged my daughter's admittedly tepid interest in Carleton (too far, too cold, and something not appealing about this particular tour) but not her somewhat greater interest in Kenyon and Davidson. Kenyon came off the best of the three in the videos. Davidson is the only school we subsequently visited, and although the video did not misrepresent, in retrospect now that I have been there I would say the video did very little to give a sense of the place, either physically or socially. </p>
<p>I know the point of these videos is to get an unbiased view of a school as opposed to the stronger sell you might get from admissions presentation, but the downside of that is that they basically just aren't very good and may sell some very appealing schools short.</p>
<p>So did I. she was very enthusiastic. And, as I recall, even though it was during the summer, there were a fair number of students viewing the school. The one for goucher had only the guy with the camera and the guide. yuk. Maybe i should have d take a look at oregon- that was the third one :)</p>
<p>if visiting in person is NOT an option, the videos provide some sort of information beyond what you can get from a website. They could even jog your memory if you have visited and several campuses are blurring together. But basically it's some guy holding a camcorder walking along on the regularly scheduled tour. As long as you understand that's all you're getting, I think they have some value. (I'm assuming that they avoided pictures of recognizable human beings because that would have required getting a consent form sign, and they were trying to be incognito)</p>
<p>Mommeleh, see, we liked the same one. My wife watched 5 minutes of the Goucher one and said, "forget it".</p>
<p>Funny you mention the Goucher one. We actually ordered it and viewed it after we had visited in person and found it matched what we remembered quite closely.The quality definitely varies though.</p>
<p>Carolyn, didn't you have problems with Collegiate Video last year? Just wondering...</p>
<p>My son found a web site which had a lending library of free videos. A few could be kept for free, but most had to be mailed back. All were produced by the colleges themselves and I suspect that the colleges paid them something for this service. He found them to be very repetitious. All the students were happy, no roommate problem, all the profs animated and engaging, a leafy green campus, etc.</p>
<p>If CV's dvd's present the good, bad and the ugly, they may be of some use. If not, I question their usefulness.</p>
<p>We ordered 4 and found them to be a mixed bag. None were in the summer. My daughter thought they generally were helpful, but boring, about 10 minutes and she had decided yea or nay. We actually thought Carleton and St. Olaf's were the 2 better ones. The Trinity Univ one also has a tape of the information session which is a not bad discussion of college admissions, but gets a little tedious - they taped the info session then transferred the audio to a video of the Riverwalk boat cruise in San Antonio, so you would have something to look at while you listen to the admit officer - I found myself alternating between nodding off and being a little dizzy.
It is hard to get a feel for the size of the campus. The videos made more sense after we had been on a couple of real tours, because then as you are watching, you could look for the clues that you had looked for on a tour - things like what did the kids wear, were they studying in the lounge area or just hanging out, walking or bikes, backpacks piled up outside the cafeteria or being carefully guarded from theft.</p>
<p>The one for MIT was horrible...son watched for 20 minutes and then donated it to the local library. As the tour guide was explaining "this building over here is building X where the library is housed" etc. the camera stayed focused on a dad in the crowd and never moved. There wasn't (in that 20 minutes) any panning around so you could see the campus, the buildings, etc. In the five minutes that I watched, the tour guide was talking very softly and all I saw shots of were the people asking the questions. I'm sure other tapes are better, but we were very disappointed.</p>
<p>I am convinced there is a huge business opportunity here. Here's the business plan: To provide well-produced videos for each school that have the production values of the slick promotional ones, but that take an independent, unbiased view of the school. The campus will be photgraphed both in a fly-over and ground-based views; dorm room options will be shown, typical students (not just the shining faces) will be interviewed, typical freshman classes will have exerpts shown, the surrounding town/college hangouts will be highlighted, and voice-overs will give interessting statistics like costs, rankings, admissions stats, etc. In addition, more highly ranked departments will be profiled. And even better, the entire package will be on DVD, with extensive menu options to skip to (or over) various parts. Any potential business partners out there???</p>
<p>Dig, how did I know what you were going to post?!</p>
<p>Achat - I didn't have problems but Blaineko, another poster, did. When I responded with some suggestions for how to deal with those problems, I ended up getting a few very nasty notes from someone at Collegiate choice saying I should not have believed that Blaineko. Uh? It was all very weird and I have been VERY careful about what I say about collegiate choice since then (hopefully I won't get another round of emails for saying this much) :(</p>
<p>Dig,
YES!!!! I think you have hit on something. Check your PM - just sent you one.</p>
<p>I appreciate this thread since I was considering ordering some. My S wouldn't last 5 minutes, from what I am hearing.</p>