<p>This company "Collegiate Choice Walking Tours" sells videotaped tours of colleges. They charge $23 for one and $162 for ten.</p>
<p>Has anyone ever used them? Are they any good? Are there other companies that do this? In what ways might they be appropriate and useful?</p>
<p>I don't think they can substitute for a visit but they might help narrow down the list of colleges that you want to visit. I bought some and liked them. They vary in length. LIU Southhampton is 22 minutes. U Michigan Ann Arbor is almost a feature-length film...118 minutes.</p>
<p>I know of one other company that does this. I think i actually found out about it through a banner add on these forums. It was called "theU" or something like that. I just tried googling, but nothing showed up, so i'll summarize it from memory.</p>
<p>They offered tours of the 50 "most popular" colleges, but they leave out alot of the prestigeous schools that aren't that large. They spend about 15 minutes per college, and its alot cheaper than "Collegiate Choice Walkin Tours" if i remember right you get all 50 colleges (on 5 dvds) for around $70. They show the UCLA tour for free on their site, the style is too informal for my liking. It is tailored more towards people looking for the the most "fun" college, not the best educational experience.</p>
<p>I have bought several different Collegiate Choice tapes. As they will tell you, these are not slick, professional videos. This is a counselor who takes his camcorder along a tour. He does ask good questions, and you at least get a feel for what the campus looks like. Depending on how interested you are in a college, you might find them boring. But I did find them worthwhile, especially when judging colleges from a distance (in conjunction with websites, viewbooks, etc). They have also helped jog my memory of colleges we have already visited.</p>
<p>These tapes have been discussed and reviewed many times here on CC. I agree with Firefly - they're not professional and that can be annoying at times with jerky vertigo inducing filmwork and lots of shots focused on blank walls and bulletin boards. Many of them are also quite dated --- you won't see that spanking new science center built last year, or the new athletic center that opened 4 years ago, and some of the information provided by the tour guides refers to things that have long since changed. One of the most annoying things to me is that they do not show many current students except in occaisional quick pass bys - they don't even show the tour guide who's giving the tour--- which is, of course, one of the things that makes a "visit" different from looking at a view book. We have visited many of the campuses that we viewed first on these tapes, and in some cases found them to be radically different in our minds after being "on the ground" than the impressions we had watching the tape. In some cases, we almost disqualified schools based on the tapes that turned out to be much nicer in person; in other cases we found ourselves disappointed more than a few times because we had been swayed by the producer's obvious favoritism for certain schools.</p>
<p>Still, if you can't visit, they're better than nothing. They can be good for getting a sense of whether you want to spend the money and time on a real visit (although as I said, some schools come across better or worse in person!) For some schools, they can also be a good way of refreshing your memory after a visit. For those types of things, they're worth the money, but I'd want to actually visit the school in person before making a decision based solely on anything I saw in these tapes.</p>