Haha- For us, UCONN took the cake… the single most impersonal tour we experienced. Mobs of people gathered on the sidewalk and a bunch of tour guides then yelled at a few of us at a time to go with her/him… Much of what you all have described- speed walking and talking.
—Where is the nursing school? Oh, it’s sort of that way… and vaguely pointed.
Then, at the end, there was a mock-up of a dorm room IN THE BOOKSTORE- and it was huge… no way it was to scale- and the final kicker was that it was basically an advertisement of all these items you can but right there in the bookstore!
We toured 2 schools that had an empty dorm that was used for tours.
At one private school we toured, they had very small dorms and each room had 4 people in it. It was very cramped. I don’t expect the Ritz-Carlton, but considering how much they were charging for their housing, it didn’t seem worth the money.
Oh and btw my D21 goes to a school in the Philly suburbs and finds it fine for school but doesn’t want to live there after college. She and friends enjoy taking the train into Philly for various activities and she has multiple doctors in Philly. You just have to be street savvy in the city like any other city in America.
My son gives tours for the admissions office. Every time someone posts about a tour at his school (good or bad) I can’t help wondering if it was him.
He told me today they are seeing a lot less people over Spring Break than they did this summer. Leading about 25 people per group. They are going inside buildings. When we were touring schools for him Hamilton was the only school that actually took him on a tour of campus because of Covid. So I hope all prospective students and parents are enjoying their tours.
Parent of tour guide here too - same here about is that my kid - we could probably make our own topic. My child tells me about uninterested families talking over her and through the tour, obvious questions being asked or a domineering parent that a 19-20 year old tour guide tries to manage, no shows galore etc… Let’s remember these guides are students first and love their school and doing their best and nothing lights them up more than a great tour.
We had some tour guides that were not a good fit and I agree that makes it a bit hard when trying to evaluate a school - but guessing they were the right fit for some families and not just us.
We never cared about a dorm tour, as that would never be a defining factor - quality of professors, classes, ease of getting food and health care yes - dorm - nope. Saw in one “staged” dorm room with over 20 tours between our kids - so we never had the expectation.
With all the discussion of college tour issues, I figure it’s worth a mention of the old CollegeHumor “Honest College Tour” sketch, where some of the things mentioned here recently are played for laughter.
We went on several of tours with model dorm rooms too.
At my daughter’s school when she was a freshman last year, she got an email asking for volunteers to show their rooms during admitted students days. I don’t think she offered hers, but I’m sure some kids did.
In hindsight, I do remember the one college that we did get to see a mock dorm room two years ago, it was some awful building that gave us all the creeps. So logically if schools are trying to sell their school, many do not want parents to see the actual dorms! Although all of us had pretty terrible dorms back in the day, kids today probably have higher expectations - especially with all the TikTok videos floating around of elaborate set ups.
I had a single at Vandy in 1985 - half the kids did in those days. Awful room on the first floor, and my main job was letting in the boys who buzzed in for 4 floors of girls.
When I toured with my 2013 grad, we saw actual dorm rooms at all but 2 colleges. Most were on the first floors of the dorms so there was somewhat less of a disruption.
With my 2021 grad, in our pre-pandemic campus tours, we were only allowed in the lobbies of dorms at a couple of the colleges we toured. No room tours. Others were just a walk-by “there’s the freshman dorm, way over there” type of experience. Of course on the post-shutdown tours, we were lucky to see the inside of any building.
Luckily there are hundreds of YouTube videos and tours of dorms on most every campus and the students doing the YouTube videos give the real low-down on each dorm, which the student tour guides won’t give you.
Depending on the size of the tour and the size of the school - it can be very disruptive to the current students. I might be in the minority, but didn’t view seeing inside that important - appreciated when we could see the library and other common spaces (more to check out the posters, try to find a newspaper and vibe) but limited or no classroom viewing wasn’t a negative
for us. Not good or bad - just find it interesting what different families find of value in a tour.
This entire discussion about dorm rooms is a bit surprising.
Tours range from the “model” unit not found within a dormitory building to ad-hoc knocking on doors. Regardless of the view provided on the tour, at best your basing a 4-year decision on a glimpse into the possible…and it’s very likely your kid will never live in a dorm room like the one on the tour.
The most important thing about housing is the number of years it’s guaranteed, not the room you see on a tour. If it’s not 4 years of guaranteed housing, be sure to drive around the neighborhoods and get a feel for where you’re kid will likely be living junior/senior year.
You can tour the engineering building and be relatively sure that your kid will be in it if accepted. The gym, the library, the theater, the dining hall…absolutely will be part of the experience. The dorm room on the tour… maybe is about as close as it gets.
Use the tour to observe the general maintenance of the facilities and the interactions of the people on campus. Don’t let a dorm influence the decision.
I think the dorm room tour might not be as important for the specific school you are going to. As you said, you don’t know exactly what your particular configuration at the school will be like and it is at best a possibility. But for kids like my S24 it is really helpful to see any dorm room (and ideally as many as possible) because he just can’t envision at all what being a college might be like. Seeing dorms (for my kids) isn’t so much about making a decision as it is about understanding college life and making the future possibilities concrete.
I don’t know what Philadelphia smells like, but my S23 and I were astonished at the smell of Northfield, MN when we were visiting Carleton and St. Olaf because of the Malt-o-Meal factory there; it’s not all day, but when the wind blows a certain way and they’re making cereal…it’s a very distinctly toasty/malty/cereal smell!
I went to Penn for grad school (and have been back to the city several times), and I can attest that Philadelphia sidewalks can occasionally have an unpleasant odor—I always assumed there were leaks in the sewer system (since it’s very methane-like), but I don’t really know.
That said, it isn’t all that much worse than most cities with aging infrastructure.
If I’m gonna plunk down $10-14k/yr for room and board, I want to see ONE dorm room ahead of time. I sort of consider it like buying a house…would you go buy a house sight unseen? No.
My child tells me about uninterested families talking over her and through the tour, obvious questions being asked or a domineering parent that a 19-20 year old tour guide tries to manage, no shows galore etc… Let’s remember these guides are students first and love their school and doing their best and nothing lights them up more than a great tour.