We had a head-scratcher private tour when we visited an out-of-state university and the tour guide started the conversation by making snarky remarks about Texans. Then started making digs about Texas A&M when our kid mentioned her sibling being an Aggie. We weren’t offended, but the whole time we thought, okay, so this is really your approach?
Yet people still donate hundreds of millions of tax deductible dollars to this “charity” each year.
@dfbdfb mentioned squirrel-watching clubs.
I toured a school once that had a Squirrel-Watchers-Watching Club. I wonder how unique that is.
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@dfbdfb My D and I started keeping track and had an over/under bet about how many schools we’d visit before we would encounter one that did NOT mention a Quidditch team.
Still waiting! Not one so far. Which is fine with her, that’s actually an activity she’s interested in. So funny how many schools believe they came up with the idea before everyone else.
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My favorite was ‘you can design your own major.’ I kept thinking “don’t you offer enough majors? Is basket weaving not enough, does it have to be underwater basket weaving?”
At the school DD attends, we heard about the telescope about 30 times, that there was a telescope, that it was the biggest, bestest, most wonderful telescope ever, that it was in ‘that’ building, that it was in ‘this’ building (from the other side, in case you missed it the first 10 times someone mentioned it).
Also, don’t forget all the emphasis on “fun,” which I had little memory of hearing when I toured colleges in the late 1970s.
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Bingo has been given its own thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1837440-college-tour-bingo.html
I know a number of kids who supposedly had no interest in sports, and then they get on campus and discover it’s a huge social thing and a heck of a lot of fun, even if they aren’t 100% interested in the details of what actually happens on the field/court.
So try to get your kids to have an open mind about the emphasis on sports, and parents, try not to let your disdain show through.
IME when you see complaints about “lack of school spirit” it’s usually because the students aren’t engaged with the sports teams. Students don’t get together to watch the Literature Classics class. 
If you tour Amherst College, two things they will NEVER let you forget: Robert Frost taught there, and Calvin Coolidge went to school there. Repeated ad infinitum…
In all the tours I did with my Ds, I never heard about a squirrel watching club.
D2 would have been working on her application to that school immediately.
@snowme. At Duke the squirrels had their own Facebook page.
Here are my bingo contributions
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we have these blue lights you can push and a police officer will be here in (two minutes… One minute. 30 seconds. Depending on the school )
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Our library can get any book in the world
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The ---- building looks exactly like Hogwarts (this was quite an exaggeration usually based on some spires on the outside of the building or a chandelier inside… except for U Pitt…it truly did look like the great hall at Hogwarts )
We got an unofficial tour of the dorms at Caltech from a student from our town. I should have taken a photo for later translation of the Dwarven runes above the opening to “hyperspace”, which is sort of a space between the walls that “wink wink” no one enters, just like the tunnels. Also ran across about 20 kids taking the oath of the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones (must have been Blacker House). And the dorm murals…there are whole websites devoted to them.
@maya54 " 1) we have these blue lights you can push and a police officer will be here in (two minutes… One minute. 30 seconds. Depending on the school )"
Almost all schools have them. At one small school it was asked where they were. The guide responded that the school has to have a high enough crime rate to receive federal funds for the blue lights. Their crime rate wasn’t high enough. Is that even true? I could physically see two campus police cars at the time so I think there is security.
@maya54 Yes, Hogwarts! Note: Bingo now has its own thread http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1837440-college-tour-bingo.html
@MADad We had the same issue with Clark and Freud. He was there for a few days. Time to let it go…
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Thank you for explaining.
We found that most tour guides asked what we were interested in and catered the tour to us. For example, my D’s have absolutely no interest in theater, so we were able to skip that part (unless there were others who wanted it), and concentrate more on things they wanted to know more about, like the science buildings and dining halls & dorms. In general, our tours were very good.
I thought they gave us a pretty good idea about the culture of schools. For example, we toured Bard, and the tour guide asked if anyone were interested in sports. When no one said yes, he said “that’s okay, no one here really is either.” We saw no athletic facility, but the guide waved vaguely off in a direction and said there was a building there where you could work out if you wanted to and field where people played football and frisbee.
When we toured UConn, athletics was mentioned frequently. We went through the beautiful complex, and the tour guide said, “the facilities are amazing, and you have access to XYZ. Does anyone play sports? Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you were going to play for UConn you’d have been contacted by now.” The way she said it was actually pretty funny (and not offensive), and really communicated just how seriously they take themselves.
My personal bingo item? A mother who says loudly, at the info session, “my son/daughter is a soccer/lacrosse/field hockey/track superstar being recruited.” All D3 schools, may I add (well, not UConn, but the rest were small LACs).
@MADad: The Calvin Coolidge reference at Amherst is one I will have to pass on to my son. He had to skip his Amherst trip and wound up not applying, but that kid loves the heck out of Calvin Coolidge facts. Everytime he wrote an essay (read: force fit an essay topic to reflect on aspects of Coolidge’s taciturn ways and how he is fascinated by the Silent One) on CC I just wanted to shake him and ask, “Whyyyyy?!!!”
Instead I just learned to smile and say nothing.
I’ve never toured a campus without them, even in ridiculously low crime communities.
However, there is apparently some discussion about their obsolescence given that most students carry cell phones.
This didn’t happen during a tour, but it’s in a viewbook. I’m visiting campuses in Minneapolis/St. Paul. And I came across this (direct quote) in the Macalester guide they handed me in the admissions office:
“Minnesota is no colder than any of the major cities on the East Coast.”
Pants on fire! I’m giving this five Pinocchios. Unless your definition of “major city” includes Bangor, Maine and excludes Washington and Philadelphia, this is flat-out false. I see lots of puffery and questionable opinion in these catalogs, but I don’t remember ever seeing a quantifiable untrue fact.
Loved the school and its values, so I was pretty surprised and disappointed to see that.
I have lived in MN for 30 years (until this week), and it does have more sunny days, and often less snow than other snowy parts of the country. The storm tracks often go south of the Twin Cities in recent years. It definitely had less snow than the East Coast last year! It may be a little colder, but honestly the weather doesn’t suck any more than Boston or Chicago.