Not Good News

shawbridge
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:45:24 +0000

Having survived a few college tours, I think it would be unwise to place much if any reliance on the college tour or the tour guide as an important source of information in making decisions. We had a cute, personable, but rather self-absorbed tour guide at Brown. Could she have been more informative? Sure. Was she fun? Reasonably. Was she entitled? That word didn’t even come to mind. Does that mean that all Brown students are cute or self-absorbed? Or is it a piece of evidence that is reasonably uncorrelated with what we as parents want to know? I’d say yes to the latter. I’d also agree that the admissions presentation done in a relatively uncomfortable setting and could have been a lot better, in part because many of the “well-informed” parents asked questions that they could have easily learned by reading Brown’s literature in advance. Frankly, I was a little annoyed at the (entitled?) parents who would waste everyone else’s time asking questions to which they should already have know the answers if they’d done the least little bit of reading. In addition to having done our pre-reading from Brown, we also read non-Brown evaluations of Brown, websites sampling student opinion, and spoke to students. We attended a class on a Friday morning and he stayed over with kids he knew Friday night and returned Saturday late afternoon. He felt he got a very good sense of the kids when he socialized with them and they left a party and went to a museum and talked about art. He felt that they were intellectually curious and willing to be uncool to pursue learning. He liked the kids he saw. Of course, this was a small sample too – he didn’t hang out with the football team or visit a frat. But, these experiences seem likely to produce more reliable information than a random tour guide.