A Survival Guide to the College Tour
Survive the collage tour madness. (Think of it as education.)
September 18, 2007
By Mary Medland
Photography By Bryan Burris
Parents and teens tour Goucher College’s Baltimore campus. Admissions counselors recommend that prospective students get a good feel for the schools they visit.
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On a warm day this past spring, my husband and I and our 16-year-old son are touring New York City’s Fordham University along with a bunch of other parents and their teenage progeny. The Fordham students are out on the quad, gabbing on cell phones, playing Frisbee and sunbathing.
Our tour leader, Tom-from-Central-New-Jersey, is walking backwards as he points out campus landmarks when two girls sally past our group. In a voice the parents can’t possibly miss, one of them confides to the other, “I got so wasted last night.”
Oh, great. For this we’re going to pay how many tens of thousands of dollars?
Tom is unperturbed. “Oh, hi, Emily,” he says to the erstwhile wasted one. To the rest of us he says: “Don’t pay attention to Emily. Anytime she sees a tour she says something outrageous, just to drive the parents nuts.”
Ah, the ritual of the college tour.
Getting into college nowadays is a far cry from the experience of Baby Boomers like me. My peers and I remember applying to three or four colleges and perhaps visiting one or two. An interview? Maybe. Many of my friends say their first visit to campus was the day they showed up with a suitcase and a rusty, trusty Smith-Corona (often a manual typewriter, at that).
These days, many high school students and their parents make the rounds of 10 colleges or universities, with some visiting as many as 15 to 20.
What’s behind the change? Demographics. The Baby Boomers started entering college en masse in the early 1960s. Increased enrollment led colleges and universities to increase capacity on their campuses. But in the 1980s, a post-Baby Boom “baby bust” came home to roost and colleges found themselves competing for a shrinking pool of applicants. It was in this environment that colleges and universities began to adopt marketing practices used in business. The college tour is a prime marketing tool.
Today, competition for acceptance to college is intense. The number of students graduating from high school has increased every year since the 1995-96 school year, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The U.S. Department of Education predicts the trend will continue until at least 2013.
Bill Frank of Lutherville, whose daughter Kathleen graduated last spring from Maryvale Preparatory School, is the parent most likely to walk away with the College Tour Oscar: He estimates that over the past two years, he and his family have visited a whopping 30 colleges. (Kathleen settled on the University of South Carolina.)
Parents should pay attention not only to academics and dorm life, but also to safety, on campus and off. Less than two miles from Fordham’s lovely Bronx campus, as we drove toward Manhattan at around 4 in the afternoon, we came upon a dozen squad cars and a bunch of ambulances. Police stood over a body that lay covered with a blanket.
My son, a high school senior, hasn’t decided where he wants to go. But it’s good to know where not to go if he does attend Fordham.
“College tours are absolutely worthwhile,” says Monica Moody Moore, vice president for enrollment management at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
Moore recommends a tour and, if possible, a day of sitting in on classes or even an overnight stay, along with an interview with an admissions counselor.
Visiting a college will give students and parents a feel for the place, says Erica Green, a Goucher College alumna. “What is interesting is that the look of the college is very important,” Green says. “I’ve heard students say the campus was so well-maintained that they enrolled at Goucher, even though it had not been their first choice.” (Appearances do count. My family wrote off one college because of broken concrete and cigarette butts littering a sidewalk.) Says Moore: “If a college does not care for its campus, it is not going to care for its students.”
So do your homework, make a list, gas up the car and good luck. Every website devoted to the college-tour routine advises parents to look, listen and ask a lot of questions — and warns that your budding collegian will wince when you do. But, hey, you’re writing the checks!
