Honest thoughts on making most of college tours

Another suggestion if you are doing whirlwind tours of multiple colleges. Take notes and pics and short videos and label them. Someone back in the CC archives reported on their impressions after doing the grand tour of Boston area colleges. They said that they really liked Boston University because it had a fairly defined campus and it was across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts. They were remembering Northeastern University.

Ask to eat in the cafeteria - you can overhear a lot. Ask if your kid can sit in on a class. Go look at the buildings the tour didn’t cover - for example, one of my kids was involved in visual arts, so we’d go find that building and look at the student work there. One of my kids had an unusual study abroad interest, so we would stop by that office. One LAC offered special tours for STEM majors, so we arranged our visit around that. Pick up a student newspaper if you see one - I guarantee you will read about things that admissions wishes you would never hear about!

When you go on your tour, try to have lunch on campus and look at the student interactions. Pick up a copy of the student newspaper and go to the student center and see what placards are up in the walls. Go to the library and see how it’s study spaces are organized.

I’ll disagree with @BivalentChomps. What worked for our family was to visit lots of schools to decide which ones. my kid would apply to. I didn’t want her to apply unless she had visited and felt good about the visit.

I’ll also say, though, that sometimes you can just have a bad visit, and you have to watch out; don’t shoot down a school just because the tour guide was a dud.

@melvin123 I think our situation is different because our D is going for performing arts which basically means you need two acceptances - one academic and one into the PA program. She was accepted academically to all of the 20+ schools she applied except for 2 - and that’s only because she didn’t pass her audition and academic acceptance is contingent on that.

I think if you only have to visit a campus one time then you’re absolutely right. In our case we should have realized we’d be going back to those schools if she passed her auditions.

I took my S on a few college tours in the east coast. He had older high school friends at two of the schools we were visiting so we were able to arrange for them to show us around after the official campus tour. My S also happened to like those two schools the best after the tour and I think it’s likely just because his friends were able to give him an insider’s look into campus life. So if you have any connections at the schools you’re touring, be sure to tap into those.

I’ve now been on about 18-20 official tours (2nd kid is finishing junior year) and I can say that I’ve gone on two tours that went into dorm rooms of actual current students (hopefully they are getting paid for the hassle of this) plus several others that went into staged dorm rooms, a couple that just went into the lobby of the dorm, and a couple that didn’t go inside the buildings at all (mostly UCs).

With my oldest kid the first few tours it felt like she wasn’t getting that much useful out of them as every school she seemed to like about as much as every other school and then suddenly we hit the 6th one that week and she really disliked it and again the 8th one. So that gave her some insight into what she didn’t like and why and helped her narrow her list down.

For me, the tours were more of a way for us to get a taste of a school. You can really get a vibe or gut feeling on a tour and then, once your kid is accepted and you go back, the tour takes on a whole new meaning. Some of the tours we went on were meh some were great, some we left halfway thru…I see the tours as not a necessity, but a helpful first step on the whole crazy college ride.

For my D’s second year in college, she and her roommate had a high housing lottery number and as a result they got a really nice room (with a fireplace!) that was on the ground level right next to an entrance to the dorm, so it was conveniently located. They were also both neat freaks and kept their room impeccable. They had friends who were tour guides who would ask if they could show their room during tours, but they had to arrange it ahead of time for a specific time, because of course one of them had to be there to allow people in and make sure nobody touched/took anything. They also couldn’t be sleeping/napping, just out of the shower, etc. It’s also disruptive if you are trying to study. So if you understand the logistics, you will realize why dorm rooms aren’t typically a part of a tour.

We found tours useful in getting a vibe of the campus. Agree with other comments, that often it’s picking up the student newspaper, seeing if students smile at each other, looking at events posted on the walls, etc.

My H and I are looking for a new place to rent (he does temporary assignments so we move frequently) and we’ve been selecting places to look at in person based on the online profile. We toured a house yesterday that looked completely different in person (in a horrifying way) than it did online. We were actually laughing figuring out the angles they used to take flattering photos, because in real life it was not a pretty sight.

We toured one college with our D that was kind of like that - how it looked on the internet did not match how it looked in person, and not in a good way.

That said, she did not visit the college she attended before move-in day, because she had been originally waitlisted, and we did not have the budget for her to see it before she started. It was not an issue and it was even better in person than she thought it would be.

I’ve visited approximately 60 schools with 4 daughters. Basically, I tell them “every school has dorms; every school has a library; every school has 5 acapella groups. Look at the people. Feel the personality of the campus - are these your people? Can you picture yourself walking around here; having lunch here; studying here?” I’m three for three with happy students who picked the right school. We’ll see how it works for D20.

Second the idea of eating in the dining hall and people watching. If there’s an easy way to engage students do that.

Often b/c my D had homework from high school while we were visiting so we’d leave her for a couple hours in the library, in a campus coffee shop or in student union lounge to do some studying while we went back to the hotel or walked around the town.

That ways she got stuff done and picked up on the general vibe of the campus and its students w/o us around.

She felt like she could blend more – can’t imagine why, lol!

We tried to get as much value as possible in each visit. That included typical info session and tour but than expanded into meeting with appropriate admin / prof in S’ area of interest. For example, he’s a finance major (went in thinking accounting). Several weeks prior to our trips, we reached out to the Dean of the UG Business School at every school we visited. Just sent him/her an email explaining we’d like to know more than the basic tour, etc. Most were quite accommodating, connecting us with head of student services or a prof or the career center (or all of the above). So we would do the regular stuff, go eat lunch / walk around, and then have a nice one on one conversation. Got tours of the B school, discussed curriculum, study abroad options, you name it. You could really tell the schools that were interested in providing service and resources vs the ones where you would just be a number.

At one school I remember this wonderful woman who seemed a bit tough on the exterior who was in charge of student services, internships, etc within the B school at a popular NE university. She met with my son for an hour, asked me to sit in on it in case I had questions, etc. She basically said "once these students are enrolled in the B school, they’re all my kids. I work with them to make sure they get internships and jobs, are taking the right classes, are tracking to graduate on time, etc. " Things like that happened in varying degrees at several schools. A few told us we could learn anything we wanted via the website (not very friendly). For the most part, those were removed from the list.

You can learn a lot by spending quality time on campus. But do some research ahead of time.

I totally agree with the people watching and vibe comments but I’d also like to say that an initial tour of colleges can help to flag items that the student definitely responds to or doesn’t and that helps the family to narrow the college list even without visiting every option.

My kids both wanted to leave CA for college and travel is expensive! We used the same basic tour approach for both - on Spring Break of Junior year we visited a wide cross section of schools that they might be interested in based upon location, major, EC and stats matchiness. We tried to include large, medium and small schools, private and public, rural,suburban and urban. I think my oldest D visited 7 schools and my younger 9. For each school we tried to do a similar schedule - info session / tour / eat a meal at a student cafe / read the student paper / hang out someplace central. The point behind the visit wasn’t just to determine if the school was a fit it was to get feedback from the kids on what they definitely did or did not respond to. Once we knew what they liked and wanted in a school, then we went back and re-evaluated the college list, took off schools that didn’t meet their “tour” criteria, added ones that did (including those all important safeties!). Once their college acceptances were in we revisited their top choices and at that point “vibe” and interaction with other students really became important. My older D applied to 6 schools (I know) and she had only visited 2 of them. My younger applied to 14 schools (performing arts) and she’d only visited 5 of them… so most of their schools hadn’t been visited before applying but we knew each school met their criteria for a “match” in the various criteria identified from our tours.

In general, I would say I agree that the content of many college tours was generally repetitive and uninteresting but the attitudes of the guides and the admissions department representatives made huge difference in our overall impression of each school.

I thought my 16 year old said something astute this week after his first college tour. We visited a local college as a “jumping off” point so he could get his feet wet and use as comparison to other schools. After the tour we were having lunch discussion the school. We compared our impressions of the school due to being local to the things we learned/saw on the tour. He said, “when we go to other states to visit schools, we should talk to the locals about their impressions of the school.” I thought that was a solid thought. We certainly know a lot about the schools in our own area.

Not OP, but I’m also in the camp of people that are turned off when the info session or tour spends too much time on simply listing basic figures that can (and should) easily be researched on the college’s website. I care about the faculty to student ratio and will have read that already. Of course it makes sense for the college spiel to have some basic information, but it’s a waste of everybody’s time to devote the entire session to things that are on the website; the visit should be about discovering tidbits that are more in-depth, things that would be hard to understand from a listing of facts. So instead of just reciting the ratio, I’d want a tour guide to give a little more detail on how that relates to the actual student experience. The official ratio may be 25:1, but does that mean freshman and sophomores are all in classes of 300 students and then when they get into their major courses are in classes with only 10 others, does this vary widely by major, how exactly does this work in the actual student experience? How likely is it that as a freshman, the student will be in all huge classes?

We have found the adcon presentation helpful, as we always learn one tidbit my son probably would have missed online. I personally pay attention to what the presentation itself is emphasizing. U of Michigan was ALL business; message from Michigan was get your act together and don’t think just anyone gets to go here. USC was the opposite; their message was while you’ll be studying hard here, you will have a BLAST and make a bunch of new friends who are all incredibly good looking.

My son has zero interest in the general walking tours but will spend all day with a student who has his intended major. Since ‘fit’ appears irrelevant to him, all future tours will be within the dept. of his major. If that is not possible, we will do a self tour.

To the OP’s point, I think, yes, many schools could do a MUCH better job at this. Or maybe I am just getting too old for this.

@cypresspat How did you find students to connect your son to? Were they family friends? We tried that but obviously don’t have connections at every school.

@rickle1. Helpful post! I am a total sucker for the individual attention, when we get it. I like your approach. Will need to steal that. Because my son has targeted schools bigger than some small countries, I haven’t dared to ask for a darn thing. But I have a college friend who runs a dept. at one of the schools I thought my son should target. I emailed her to ask a question and express a concern, she emailed me back immediately, and then I got another email from the head of the dept. I had the concern about and THEN an email from a professor with a research focus my son expressed interest in and THEN emails from an assistant coach for each of two of my son’s sports (he has zero recruiting chances, but my friend must have somehow remembered my son’s sport interests), all telling him to let them know when he visits. So either these guys are really lonely or they have a culture of being pro-student. Since we will be paying some institution a really big chunk of change, I do expect them to give at least a hoot about the students. That particular school is the most selective on his current list, and I think I expected less of a welcome because of that, but I lobbied him hard to put this school on his list because of the Uber-professional response I got from my little two sentence email.

Contrast this to the big UC school we visited which forced all of us visitors to park in a specific parking lot and then shuttle us aaaaallllll the way across campus for the info session which most of us missed because they only had one bus. Were they not expecting us? That even ticked off my son; off the list!

@birkygg. At UCLA, we got lucky. They have an engineering specific tour and we were the only people on the tour and the guide happened to be his intended major. Poor girl got peppered with questions for 90 minutes and made the grave mistake of giving son her email address so he can ask 10,000 more questions. At USC, we hung around the engineering building for a bit, and happened to bump into a student (he noticed a T-shirt my son was wearing). We ended up chatting with him for an hour and his major was close to what my son wants. The other scenario was a friend of a friend situation. But for the schools where we can’t rely on luck, my son identified the professors who are doing the kind of research he is interested in and asked for a chance to learn more during our college visit. If an email conversation came out of that, he also asked for a good way to talk to students in the major. They often have undergrads working in their labs so that is pretty easy. Those students are super helpful because some are underclassmen and focused on required courses and all that, while the older students are super knowledgeable about on campus recruiting and internships, etc. My son is a sponge in front of those kids. The adcon reps and tour guides? Not so much. He wants details. Many details.

Right now he is engaged in an email conversation with the recently retired VP of HR from a huge international company that he thinks is perfectly okay to interrogate on their recruiting practices. She is a past client of mine. I expected him to ask her one or two questions, not make her his pen pal. He is wound a little bit too tightly on this college selection thing.

@birkygg

My kid was a tour guide and worked in undergrad admissions. She never provided private tours to those in her assigned tour groups. I don’t think that was allowed.

BUT she did give some CC members here, and their families, tours that they privately set up…not through the admissions office. DD did this on her own time…and her goodwill to meet @mominva , right?

As noted, some colleges do have tours for specific majors…engineering and music come to mind because we did those.

We didn’t tour colleges until after acceptance letters had arrived. This way in addition to just taking a general campus tour, the kid was taken more serious and able to do overnight stays, sit-in on classes, talk directly to faculty and current students, check out research facilities and meet other admitted students. It’s also quite helpful to be able to prioritize the list of colleges to visit knowing the actual final price tag including merit and need based aid.