@maya54 - do check the university’s website. If you feel strongly, you might consider letting someone in the admissions office know about the conflicting information. Your experience doesn’t sound positive at all.
@twogirls did I tell you about my (meaning my own, back in the day) tour of UNC? The guide spent half the tour (not kidding - more than a half hour) standing in the gym describing the process to get basketball tickets. Now at that time there was a rather famous basketball player at UNC, the one who went on to star in a movie with Bugs Bunny and put his name on top-selling sneakers, but still. It turned me right off.
I am sure they get better training now 
OHMom that’s pretty funny!! Yes they have a pretty intense training program now… Although they do love their basketball!
I cannot for the life of me understand why it’s so important to have a climbing wall on campus. Every single tour we’ve gone on so far, that has been a major point.
drewdane, maybe it’s so that the students know if they are figuratively “climbing the walls,” they can also do it literally. 
OHMomof2: On a recent tour, U. of Colorado guide focused strongly on their athletic programs and how to get tickets to the football games. My daughter couldn’t care less about sports and was really turned off by the emphasis.
I’d be in favor of colleges offering two flavors of tour that prospies could sign up for: one that highlights the sports programs, “diversity” offices and xxx-studies majors, climbing walls, and other bread-and-circus/safe space sideshows; and one that talks about what the university offers to educate its students. Knowing the relative numbers of signups for the two types of tour would be enlightening for colleges and applicants alike.
Now that I think about it, sports was not discussed much at all when we toured CH. Out of curiousity, we took our own detour to see the different facilities.
When we toured Stanford the first time, the guide told our group “Well, it’s a bit hot today, so I think we’ll skip the sports complex and keep the walking part of the tour under 2 hours” Needless to say, me and a couple of other heavy-set parents were very relieved.
@Requin : Great idea. Over-emphasizing super duper sports facilities has turned my kid off several schools, in cluding the University of Co.
It’s not a tour, but Harvard shows a film at the info session that makes a fuss about a student using the same sink that one of the Roosevelts used. DS went on that visit with his mother, and texted: “could they be any more full of themselves?”
When they returned from the trip, I told him that one of the things that had stuck with me from elementary school science is that, given the number of molecules in a glass of water and how water is continually recycled, my science teacher had told us that the odds were that a glass of water we got from an above ground reservoir had at least one molecule that had originally been in Cleopatra’s urine. I think that’s more impressive than Roosevelt’s sink. :)) Whether it’s true or not :))
We’ve had two interesting tours - one I won’t name, the other I will. The “no name” was at a school where protests were happening recently. The guide was a first year student, and really didn’t know a lot about the school, the buildings, or anything other than her classes and where she ate her meals. She did know where the protests were going to be, and managed to avoid over half of the campus, even though we told her we knew they were going on, and didn’t mind going by. The whole tour was awkward an uninformative, as well as a speed-walk through what we did see, and she was clearly happy to be done with it.
A week later, though - Macalester. Probably THE best tour ever, and a feature I’ve not seen elsewhere - parallel tours. One guide takes the prospective students, and another takes the parents. The route is the same, but the two groups are far enough apart that anyone can ask a question without any fear of what their accompanying relative(s) - whether parent or kid - will think. Utterly brilliant. The parent tour was led by a first year student, but she’d obviously been extremely well-prepared before taking a group solo. She was able to answer nearly every question, and knew to whom to send us for the couple that she didn’t know how to address.
@IxnayBob now there’s a factoid one doesn’t run across in their everyday travels! Priceless!
Yes. Love the parallel tours. Kenyon did the same thing, and I thought it was genius too, for the reason stated, plus parent and child get two different experiences and can compare notes later.
You can always tell what the school just poured a bunch of money into so they can keep up in the “arms race.”
At one school the tour guide spent what I felt was an inordinate length of time in the new recreation center that my D may barely set foot in. At another school it was the new library, which admittedly looked awesome but it’s not like a tour group can do much in there. At yet another school it was their fancy new tech center.
On the Indiana Bloomington campus, I must say it was quite an experience to look around the arboretum we were standing in, and hear that we were in the footprint of the former stadium. The school transformed the land into an arboretum after they opened their new stadium adjacent to campus. That was a real WOW factor for us, maybe not for everyone.
I wonder if the parallel tours at Kenyon are new? We didn’t get one on prospie weekend about 7 years ago.
I wish I had a dollar for every time a tour guide explained that the library gets quieter each floor you go away from the main floor. D and I started predicting it on tours last year.
I don’t get the U of Colorado tour spending a lot of time on getting tickets to athletic events. You can just go up to the ticket booth and buy one to almost any game. It was much harder to get Dalai Lama tickets, and then he cancelled.
I disagree that tours should skip the athletic buildings on the tour. If it is important to the school, if you are spending your student fees on the buildings, you should see them and decide if it is worth it to you. You don’t want to get to Duke and then learn “Hey, basketball is really important here” or discover after you accept that William and Mary charges a huge athletic student fee and you are required to pay even if you have no interest in athletics. Looking at the $10M swimming pool might give you a hint that athletics are important and maybe the school isn’t for you. Seeing that the gym looks nicer than the dorms might show where the schools spends its money.
Oh, I don’t mind SEEING the athletic facilities. It just shouldn’t be half the tour.
My daughter and I were struck by the number of tour guides who told us about their college’s fun,quirky tradition of letting out a collective primal scream at midnight the night before finals start. So unique! At each one!