I am applying for a position at a college in admissions, specifically overseeing the tour side of their admissions. I would love to get some parent feedback on college tours you have been on. What made a tour stand out? What could colleges do better? What would you change to make your experience better? Thanks for your insights!
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Good questions. What comes to mind for me, although we did this many years ago, it was more so what stuck out as what turned us off with a tour rather than what was wonderful about a tour. Is that of any interest to you?
We went on 13 college tours with my oldest in the last 2 years. Only one college did this (Endicott, outside Boston) but I thought it was amazingly well-done. Admissions started the whole group in a conference room for the info session (internships, study abroad, etc.), then brought in the student tour guides and split us up into smaller groups based on intended major. In our case, sports management/athletic training/exercise science. There were only 3 families in the group, which made conversing and asking questions easier. The guide also focused on the school of study and gave a more in depth tour of the building that was targeted to the audience. I understand that colleges like to have prospective students see the entire campus, but my sporty son had zero interest in seeing Marist’s fashion school. Just our take.
Another college had two guides together for a group of about 30 people, instead of splitting up into two groups of 15. Very hard to keep up and ask questions. Did not like the setup.
Only one school, Quinnipiac, had students not only use microphones, but also walk backwards facing the families the whole time. We were assigned to a tour guide, with a smaller group, which was nice, but I kept worrying our guide would trip and fall. My son will be attending there in the fall, so maybe that made more of an impression than we thought.
One last thing I noticed that made a favorable impression, to me, at least-when students would give little anecdotes about their life outside of academics; “Everyone sleds down this hill during the first snowfall”, “Taco Tuesday is so amazing that students start lining up at 9am”, “My friends and I love this particular coffee shop”, etc. It just gives insight into the college campus and culture in a cute little way.
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Agree. When we must choose one or a few from many, the first step is to eliminate some options. For the colleges to not get chopped, they need to remove the elements that cause the negative feelings - things like parking difficulty, schedule conflicts, delay in communication, etc. All the good stuff are icing on the cake, likely varies for different people, and hard to change - a school in a college town is not going to impress people who enjoy big cities, a set of great cafeteria options may not matter to a lot of people, etc.
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We toured 15 schools. What I liked-
General campus tours in the morning where we saw a typical dorm (don’t show me the nicest newest where no freshman have a chance of getting into), a library, a typical classroom, and got to eat in the dining hall.
Major specific tour in the afternoon with a tour leader in the intended discipline. For us that meant seeing labs, maker spaces, club/team spaces, and facilities.
Tell me what’s unique about your school and not what we heard repeated everywhere else.
We toured pre covid and there were still plenty of schools that didn’t show us any academic spaces. My d felt like it was a waste of time.
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We went on about 20 tours.
Instead of the exact same tour for everyone, divide up tours by areas of study.
Part of the tour will be the same (ie student center, dorms, etc).
Major specific tour - For example, a tour guide leading a group of prospective business students - a tour of business buildings, library closest to the business school, tour guides speaking about the program and their experience with internships, career center etc.
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Have a well trained cadre of tour guides. Are they engaging, do they know how to make sure folks in the back can hear them, can they tell the anecdotes as mentioned in a prior post but also be honest about school shortcomings if asked. Think of the number of posts denigrating the tour guides or hearing that a poor guide impacted a student’s decision to apply. They aren’t just tour guides, they are in marketing and sales!
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Hire student tour guides who are confident and relatable; he kind of kids that are comfortable sharing their experience and the kind that know A LOT of other kids on campus. They need to speak clearly. They don’t need to know a million facts about the school, but they need to seem cool and like they have personality. They need to be involved in a lot of activities. They are selling the school and the kids on the tour need to want to be just like the tour guide.
I have been on 1 million tours and the best tour guides make a connection with the people they are guiding by being relatable, kind, and interested.
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Thumbs up times a 1000! My biggest pet peeve is just hearing about all the same things every school touts (cheese club!) D26 and I found it far more interesting to hear about what makes a school unique or different. Really different.
Some examples:
- UChicago’s info session talked specifically about their use of the Socratic method as part of their pedagogy. It was an important element and if you didn’t like that, you might be in the wrong place.
- Haverford, obviously, talked about their honor code and it’s centrality to life there.
- RPI leaned into their idea of “Why not change the world?” by illustrating alumni and specifically what they were doing to enact that change. It felt like a culture of do’ers.
For tours specifically then, the students would actually talk about their experiences with these elements. So the two UChicago students that gave the tour would talk about their classroom experiences (both where it went right and where they struggled, which was helpful). They would talk about the discussions they would have in the dining halls and in the dorms. The tour itself sort of emphasized what the pervading culture of campus was.
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I toured colleges quite a bit with my S24. I actually also just did boarding school tours with my D30, and I think a lot of the same considerations apply.
I agree it was nice when the guides introduced themselves and we could then pick which tour to join. I will say that “loud, clear voice” and “not too many other people rushing to join the group” started trumping things like who had the closest major.
I am sure it is a luxury, but we had a couple great experiences with guides operating in pairs.
It was helpful when guides really encouraged questions at various stops. Like not just a basic, ”Any-questions-no-OK-moving-on,” but like, “OK, so these are the athletic facilities. Anyone planning to do athletics? What are you looking at? Any questions about that?” That sort of thing.
Finally, engaging other students they knew when they crossed paths was often memorable. I think this is sort of related to the pairs thing. Seeing how people talked and joked and such with each other really helped the whole community/vibe side of things come alive.
Thinking about all this, I am realizing some of this might take up some time, and maybe might even mean tour routes would have to be cut back a bit. I think that is a tradeoff I would be fine with, if meant a more lively, interactive tour.
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We preferred the colleges that offered info sessions before the tour, ideally with a student panel. A few schools we saw did not regularly offer info sessions, and I felt like we didn’t learn as much or get as good of a feel for the schools that only offered tours. I also did not enjoy the tours that mainly stood outside buildings (this was well past Covid), rather than seeing the inside of the library, academic buildings, etc…
Finally, we had a few tours where there were way too many people on the tour, and it was very difficult to hear the tour guide, so a good guest to tour guide ratio is important.
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My child was a campus tour guide. This was some of the written feedback from families:
X was very thorough and personable.
X was knowledgeable, friendly and shared all of the information that was important to me and my parents.
X was a a fabulous ambassador - well-prepared, authentic and engaging.
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My kid also worked in undergrad admissions. She had a few things she felt were important based on the many tours she was on with us.
- Groups shouldn’t be too large.
- Students should be given the opportunity to sign up for specific tours…engineering, music, for example.
- Guide should give students ample time to see things, and ask questions. Our kid also followed up with answers for students if something was asked that she didn’t know.
- Personal stuff….tour guide should look like they are working, not like they just rolled out of bed. Her school actually provided shirts and jackets for their guides…and they wore khaki slacks, shorts or skirts. They should answer about their college but not make it sound like their college was the only place that had things…unless there was something very unique about something.
- Students should be given the opportunity to talk to other currently enrolled students, if they asked in advance and this could be arranged. It usually could be.
- Tours shouldn’t be too long…or too short. One tour we were on was three hours long (I’m not kidding). It was great, but it was LONG.
- Many of our tours included a snack and beverage stop in one of the dining halls and we thought that was a nice touch. It was also a time when everyone could sit and relax, and the tour guide could give some additional info or answer questions.
- Some colleges actually had separate tours for students and parents, and those worked out well for us.
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I think offering additional programming beyond a short info session and campus tour is huge. It’s one thing if I am driving an hour or two, but if I am flying across the country with the primary goal of touring a school, I want more options offered in order to better get to know the school.
We definitely made our own plans to fill our time on tours we traveled for, but the campuses where more specific major/college tours were offered were very helpful. Ditto for offering programming related to other areas like the honors college/program.
I also really appreciated the schools that made it easy to make an appointment with a representative (advisor or professor) from the department of the student’s intended major.
I remember one school where my D22 toured, there seemed to be no way to arrange this officially through the admissions office, so I advised her to first try a general email to the department. When no one answered that, she tried a specific professor (I can’t remember if it was a department head or maybe a director of the undergraduate program for her major). That person was super happy to meet with her and said that almost no one ever contacted them for a department visit. They asked how she thought they should encourage more students to make an appointment to visit their department!
For my D22, department tours and meeting with advisors/professors from each of her top 3 prospective schools really made the difference for her in finding the right fit. We learned how one school was really more focused on their grad program in the discipline and didn’t have many opportunities for undergrads (and couldn’t answer her questions about a specialization that was listed on their website but apparently didn’t really exist in real life). At the most prestigious of the three schools, we learned that they also didn’t really focus on the specialization my D wanted, while the third school (that she ultimately picked) not only had the specialization she wanted, but had courses, clubs, and other resources directed toward helping students pursue the career goal she was interested in. All of that would have been really difficult to figure out without a department visit.
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Our many, many tours were quite a while ago, so what I find compelling is that what I remember most is what we did not like. We liked that the four guides could walk backwards easily, and greeted some friends as they went by 
The one that was a clear negative (and I will not mention the school, but it was a T20 LAC) had a receptionist that couln’t be bothered to look up from her knitting and a tourguide who was clearly unhappy, said they were only there b/c they were a 3rd generation legacy, they didn’t take us to the library, said that they had never set foot in the bio building and gleefully pointed out the dorm that their bf lived in. Complete waste of time.
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Uh, seems like a student tour guide wearing khakis would drive people away! My student tour guide conveniently forgets to wear the college gear and was like oops when she wore a UNC sweatshirt to give a tour at not UNC.
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First question I would ask you is- large or small college, because I think that affects what you can realistically do with tours. But one thing I would suggest is that each prospective guide gives you a sample tour so that you can see whether or not they are likely to be a good ambassador.
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… and to coordinate these. One college C26 was interested in did not have a single day offered when the general tour was on the same day as the department tours. I know this college draws heavily from instate and the metro it is in, so maybe that didn’t matter to most prospective students, but to fly across the country when they mostly weren’t even on consecutive days? We never ended up visiting, primarily because of that.
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This was 2006-2010. Jesuit college. They wanted the student ambassadors to look nice but not ostentatious. So…they could wear the khakis of their choice with the college swag of their choice. No jeans, no ripped pants. NO PJs.
We went on one tour where the guide was wearing a Lily Pulitzer dress. My kid was not impressed. We went on another where the guide was wearing what looked like pajama bottoms, and a t shirt. Really looked like she rolled out of bed. My kid was not impressed.
My kid’s opinion…these students were doing a job, and needed to look nice. She usually wore shorts because it usually was warm weather.
But more important was what the guides had to say and how they conducted their tours. My kid also did the engineering college tours. And she always asked if there was something special the group or some in the group wanted to see…because she always scheduled herself with some extra time if it was needed.
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Make sure the tour guides know how to “read a room”. At one school we toured, the student insisted at the outset of the tour that each member of the tour group (about 18-20 people) (parents/guardians included) introduce themselves and include hometown, spirit animal, and pronouns. Why do we need to know this? We don’t need icebreakers. We want to learn about the school. We spent 45 minutes in blistering New England heat (rare) to learn that Emma’s aunt from Cleveland prefers She/Her and is a tiger. The tour guide did not win over any of the adults in the crowd and did not seem to recognize the visible signs of annoyance / impatience from the audience.
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