I’m the guy who studies every page on a college website before we tour and I’m the guy who rolls his eyes when people ask questions whose answers are easily found on those webpages.
This is MY problem, not theirs.
ETA: I do, however, enjoy when students ask questions, no matter what the question.
Spot on Hanna. Those are the questions that annoy me when in an info session vs where is the engineering building which can be answered quickly.
My all time favorite answer to a parent’s question was when someone asked where is the rest room, the admin officer said “I bet you are glad I took your question first - it is down the main stairs, to the left…”
During a tour of Columbia, in the rain, a kid asked the tour guide “how many auditoriums do you guys have?” The tour guide, of course, tried to be polite and answer in some rational manner. Not appreciated by the group.
Ah - I’ve stood by helplessly watching as one of my best friends goes down the road of being “that family” on the tours. She’s been with me as I went through the whole process with D this year and I’ve funneled all sorts of information to her for her junior. They just spent Spring Break driving around to a bunch of top schools (some OOS publics) that her daughter picked. I told her repeatedly to check the NPC and CDS (because her D’s ACT score is below 30) before getting her D invested in these schools, but she never did. “Those are the schools that D picked that she wants to visit…” sigh
@SuburbMom Maybe for some people doing tours is a way to have “quality time” with their kids? We did no tours at all with #1. He wasn’t interested, and largely left the task of composing a list of colleges to me! Of course I checked with him and explained the rationale for each college, but he himself was too busy to tour and accepted my judgment about college programs.
For #2, it was essential to tour in part b/c we had no personal experience with any art colleges, and in part b/c our daughter wanted to see the schools and the cities in which they were located (she wanted to attend college “in a real city”). And so we made one grand tour by car, my wife and I taking our daughter and a classmate to see 11 colleges in 10 days. One of those colleges turned out to be “IT” (RISD) for our daughter. We made sure to work in some vacation time, a couple of days on the Maine coast after visiting Colby, and a little museum hopping in NYC.
I can see how the endless parental monologues about their child’s specific circumstances and inane questions could potentially detract from the tour as a whole. I can’t understand why someone else’s kid saying “business” instead of “economics” would bother the OP so much. Some kids get dragged on tours a year or two before they even need to be thinking about where they might want to apply so I would cut them some slack.
I might take my rising junior on a couple of tours this summer and the chances of him performing extensive research on a school or picking a potential major before the tours is zilch. That doesn’t mean he won’t get anything out of it. I personally will research the schools so as not to ask dumb questions (and to make sure he’s touring schools where he has a reasonable chance to be admitted).
@eh1234 IMO there is a big difference between studying business and economics on the undergrad level. An applicant looking for an undergrad business program who wants to study a field such as accounting, finance etc. will not have his/her needs satisfied by pursuing an economics degree – the two courses of study are very different – one is not better or worse than the other, but they are different. When my S was looking to study business as an undergrad, we were sure to only visit colleges that offered an appropriate program.
In general I don’t understand how people don’t take the five minutes to look online to see if a particular college offers a major in the applicant’s area of interest before they expend the time, effort, and cost of making a college visit.
Neither of my kids had more than a very general sense of what they wanted to major in. So those kids may choose a college first and a major second. If the goal is IB, for instance, they might major in Econ or Math at one school rather than Finance or Business at some other school, because they like that first school better.
@OHMomof2 Yes, of course that is a totally different scenario. There are many students (including my D) who enter college with a great deal of flexibility. I should have been clearer but I meant my comment above to refer to students who had specifically defined areas of interest. As one example, we were at a LAC when a mother asked a (very long winded) question but the bottom line was her S was interested in a Latin major and she wanted all the details – well the school did not offer Latin and the mother and son (to everyone’s surprise) stormed out of the info session in a huff like they were angry at the college – when a two minute search of majors at that college would have saved them the trip.
^ I feel like I understand it better when a kid does it than when a parent does it 