S has been receiving flyers regarding college tours coming to our area for presentations and representatives:
Coast to Coast college tour: Dartmouth, Northwestern, Princeton, Berkeley and Vanderbilt
Exploring education excellence: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Rice and Chicago
Anybody familiar with these tours? Are they worth going or take a pass?
Yes, they can be a relatively easy way to learn about a variety of schools without traveling around a lot. You get to hear/talk to admissions people from these schools.
As a student who went to WAY too many of those things during my junior/senior year: If your son has any internet knowledge and is capable of learning about the college process on his own/with your guidance, skip it! For me, who spent a lot of time on CC and other college-related websites to learn about the admissions process, it was a massive waste of time. Those top schools don’t “track interest” so it won’t help you there- and I found that these fairs were full of people who thought that talking to the admissions officer there would mean admission, so there was inevitably a crowd surrounding the rep after- very hard to ask personalized questions (much easier to do over email or phone). The info about the colleges was always generic IMO, and the questions asked by students and parents almost made me and my mom laugh a few times- “If my SAT score is 1500+, should I retake?” “Is 10 APs enough?” “Is a job a good enough summer activity for my daughter, or should she also get an internship and take a college course?” Sheesh.
TL;DR: Skip it. You can find the info out online and ask reps questions through other means.
I went to the Exploring Educational Excellence last year. It was pretty informative about the 5 schools listed but they don’t go that far in depth for each school.
Lol so 1 yes, 1 no and 1 undecided at this point.
Tie break coming in, maybe. IF you haven’t been to any tours or presentations, you have to start somewhere. Is your student actually interested in any of those schools? I am sending my fourth to college this fall, so I have been to waaaaay to many of these things. However, I figured if I learned even one thing new, it was worth the time, and I usually did pick up one piece of new data at each pres I attended. I will confess, we also left a few early (out to restroom never to return).
I can’t speak to these tours specifically, but they are representing schools that are pretty geographically diverse - so if student is interested in any outside your local range, you should probably go. Even if they are a flop, you can just look at them as time with your student, who will be going off to college soon. Put a nice lunch or dinner out on top of it and it can be a great day regardless of the presentations.
Yes the stuff is online, but sometimes you can get a sense of a school in the way it presents itself at these things. And the more you go to, the more you learn to disregard the fluff and understand what matters.