The campus is very pretty, but it is also isolated. On the plus side, the professors at Rose self select for teaching undergrads and it shows. During Catapult, my son had a project that was a lot of work up front, and then taking regular measurements (tell your daughter to avoid the bio-diesel). The advisor, a biology professor, had my son help him with his research during their down time. He was terrific.
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One of D24’s friends rejected VT, in large part for being too gray. Might I suggest “does not have unlimited meal swipes” as a possible second reason to reject it (as that kid did)?
[I’m not knocking VT at all, D24 is attending and loves what she’s experienced of the campus and the food].
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Can’t speak for Alabama and the few others listed here, but getting stuck on a coach bus for an hour with a student who only wanted to talk about sports and frats, getting no vibe from walking through campus, walking into no buildings (other than the visitor center at the start), etc., was just a major turn-off. As @EyeVeee noted above, they would have been better off focused on one area but where you could actually walk and get the feel of campus, visit a library, lecture hall, dorm, etc. – all the things we enjoyed about most of our couple dozen college tours. The bus took all the joy and warmth out of it – no sense of presence on campus.
We got more out of visiting the cafeteria and paying for lunch on our own initiative than we got out of the entire tour and orientation experience.
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And where is my daughter getting married in October? “Six miles outside Terre Haute, IN” (Brazil, IN) Not nearly as exciting as it sounds.
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Northeastern info sessions emphasize the coop program because there is a great deal of misunderstanding about how it works at Northeastern and other colleges that offer it. This can be seen in comments and questions here on CC. For example, students in coop programs spend 8 semesters in class just like other students. Academic credit is not given for coop.
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Where else can you choose a corn dog as a side item? Plus, watermelon milkshakes…
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@NemesisLead posted a very detailed review of several New England LAC visits, and ended with…
One surprise to me as a business person. I was a little shocked at how unsophisticated some of the schools were in selling what is effectively a $400K product.
Sales skills aren’t often refined when you have 10 customers for every widget you can produce.
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Very, very true. I can’t argue with that except to say that they are still in competition for top students. Given enough time, some schools will fall while others rise. Professionalism matters even if judgement day is decades away.
These schools may be trying to steal candidates from one rung above them (maybe a Williams College). When they fail, they might look at their sales technique.
And they are still selling a $400K product. Some of the admissions officers didn’t even have a PowerPoint deck. They were just winging it and giving a stream of conciousness. Some of the campuses were locked up like tombs. Some of the kids giving tours were hurting their schools. We got a parking ticket from one school after using a parking pass that they gave us. This suggests administrative disarray.
The list goes on.
Resting on your laurels will get you trounced in any human endeavor. More focused and professional organizations will eventually surpass you.
The schools know this and ignore it at their own peril.
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Every school needs a great sales organization but so many fail - I don’t think it matters the school level.
Most every school has a somewhat low yield. Not the creme de la creme but most.
Everyone is fighting for students - and some - even highly ranked schools - are fighting for full pay students.
It boggles the mind that this first layer of in person contact is routinely falling short.
As for Smith itself, I couldn’t find the most recent CDS but 3 years ago, they yielded 37%.
They can’t afford to push people away.
We give colleges a pass because of rank or a name - but I dunno - if you can’t get a basic level of salesmanship down, are you really worth the parental investment?
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They definitely remind you sometimes they are non-profits!
I will note, though, the parking ticket thing seems outside the scope of normal admissions stuff. I don’t know for sure about Smith, but normally campus police are pretty independent, and Admissions may have very little direct input on what they do.
This doesn’t counter your point about competitiveness at an institutional level, but I do think it is a different kind of thing than, say, Admissions doing a poor job screening and training tour guides.
Particularly when you hold aside ED. Lots of famous colleges are below 25%, or even 20%, yield among RD admits.
And yet many also still have very low RD admit rates. They just get so, so many applications, they can lose 75%-80%+ of their RD admits to other colleges and still fill their classes just by admitting a fraction of their RD applicants.
This is not an excuse, but I think it helps explain why not every famous college seems to be devoting enough resources to things like campus visit quality. For now, at least, they are getting so many qualified applicants that they don’t need high yields in RD, just predictable ones.
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Visits are tricky – there’s a lot of serendipity. A visit when the weather is bad, everyone’s about to take midterms, or the team just lost a big game can flatten the feel of any campus.
Getting a guide you click with or touring with like-minded souls can make a place very appealing. And the opposite can happen as well. Like a glitch between admissions and campus police with parking passes.
The visit is really about getting a feel for the place. For us, it took something pretty major for a school to get knocked out of consideration, but then again, if you have a really long list, why not? To each his own! (That thread about “stupidest reason kid disliked school” is a hoot.)
While I understand the need for putting your best foot forward (and recognize that serendipity can derail this – the info session dominated by questions about summer storage, food allergies, or an esoteric question about Latin prerequisites), I’m a bit resistant to colleges “selling” themselves. Shouldn’t they be saying “here’s who we are and what we do” and letting students decide if that’s for them? There’s a ton of packaged material on the websites – this is the opportunity to make it human, answer questions, etc. All to say that we probably respond to different approaches, which is great, because there are so many schools out there. And most of these schools are putting together classes that are working for them.
I appreciate that this poster is letting their kid take the lead – and deferring to decision-making prioritized by facilities. 
Even though they’d like a slick PowerPoint!
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They’re ready for the real world.
Of course, some of our leading, most creative companies eschew Power Point presentations -but most love them.
So this student is ready for the real world!!
I think OP is really just saying - if they can’t present themselves in a positive, cohesive way, why would anyone feel confident about giving them their hard earned $$.
Your point is correct though - that it’s tricky - because some fall in love because of admissions (not the school) and others get concerned.
That’s why it’s so important to walk campus after and stop kids and talk to them. Or go to lunch and ask someone if you can sit with them. And walk the surrounds. Make an academic appointment if possible.
So you can get an authentic feel vs. the packaged feel.
It makes sense, rather than to rush, to spend enough time for a school truly interested. Of course, once the list is culled and after getting accepted, they can always return to the finalists and dig deeper.
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It isn’t about a “slick” Powerpoint. It is about 100 simple things.
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Tell us how your school is DIFFERENT. What makes it stand out from its closest peers? We usually got, X% study abroad. Students can get up to Y$ for an unpaid internship. This showed us how a LAC is different from a Uni, but how is your LAC different from other LACs?
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Good sales is not slick. As an example, some schools came across as warm and friendly and others as cold and distant. You are selling a culture. Demonstrate it.
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Open your campus. People are crossing continents to visit you and you lock them out?
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At least two schools had admissions offices that had peeling paint on the outside. This is your first impression of the facilities? It is a little thing, but it is unforgivable.
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At one extreme, a school greeted my daughter by name when she checked in and commented that she came a long way from CA. Most of the others just took her name and told her where to go wait. Little thing.
The list goes on. Little things.
It is not like we were offended by any of this. Just surprised at the amount of room for improvement.
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I think admissions tends to spend time on admitted student experiences over other tours. Perhaps this speaks to the point above—getting more applications than they can handle doesn’t lend itself to investing in prospective student tours, but rather on yield, when it matters most.
When my D22 was deciding a couple of years ago, we went to admitted students tours at Kenyon and Macalester. All of the little things were in place… excellent tour guides matched to D’s interests, branded umbrellas to protect us from the rain, panels of students answering questions, snacks, coffee/tea, lovely swag, sample classes, lunch dates. They knew us by name, made us feel at home. These experiences and the people we met actually made it quite easy to see the culture.
At the huge public school admitted student days, it didn’t feel as personal, of course, but we still had great, well organized experiences at UMichigan and UCLA. Fantastic tour guides, tons of energy, good panels, great access to buildings and food.
If an admissions staff is small or on a budget, it’s easy to see why they’d invest in the kids they admitted choosing them vs. another application in an already overwhelming pile.
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Agree. This should be welcoming and maintained.
This is a regular beef. But then again, so is security. This can also be a summer vs in-session difference, at least for academic buildings.
This is more nuanced as it needs to be done so as not to diss anyone else. I recall, after seeing close to 20 schools, the differences. Mostly because so much was the same! They usually do say what they do that’s different, but they don’t call out that it’s different.
I definitely agree that the personalization comes at the admitted student tours.
Out of curiosity, did you tour private high schools? That level of care/ “we see you” is pretty important when you’re talking about 14 year olds and is quite common. Just wondering if maybe that’s how the bar got set.
And btw, not disageeing that these things couldn’t be improved. Just saying that there’s another side. Guessing, too, that if you toured some less selective schools, you’ll see more prospect cultivation.
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You spend so much money to acquire prospects - if you’re a business, it’s much cheaper to close those prospects you have than to have to find new ones.
So I’m in agreement with @NemesisLead .
An AO is a sales job. It might not be what they want to hear and they may truly believe in the venture they are selling (hopefully because they are taking a low paid sales job).
They should have sales training - and that’s not just the people but the investment - peeling paint - yeah not good.
When we went to U of S Carolina in November, we walked into the admissions building. They had a Menorah right there. As a Jewish family, unsure of Jewish life there, that was pure gold.
The little things!!!
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One of the best admitted student days was where I least expected it, our flagship LSU. Not a school known for efficient processes or customer friendliness. But they nailed it by choosing the perfect professors for their presentation and sample classes (at least the ones we attended). The two professors we saw clearly exuded passion for their fields (environmental engineering and English, so from different schools), had great presentation skills and could connect to the (large) audience. Well done from a sales perspective!
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I’ve said this before in other posts, but we stopped doing formal scheduled tours at schools, because way too much rested on the highly variable tour guides. There are lots of ways to get a good vibe from a campus and community that don’t require a formal tour. Most schools have self-guided tour info. readily available, you can explore at your own pace and ask questions of various students you see, etc. If your student needs to ask highly specific questions, have them schedule an appointment with admissions, or their department of interest, etc.
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Interestingly, I told my daughter to discount the student tour guides. They are still very young people and just don’t have enough life experience to expect a super high level of professionalism. I just asked her to assess whether or not the students seemed happy and genuine.
The admissions staff we watched more closely.
An interesting thing that we did not expect going in…but we started to watch. At some schools, the lowest paid people (cafe workers, dining hall workers, bookstore workers, etc.) were SUPER ambassadors for their school. This was one of the things my daughter loved about Holy Cross. These people were over the top nice and super helpful when we mentioned that we were doing an admissions tour. At other places, this was not the case. And others were in between. It just suggests something about the culture when the lowest paid people are enthusiastic about a school.
But in the end, all of this analysis is plagued by the “small N” problem. You might run into 3 Super Ambassadors in a row or 3 people having a bad day in a row. You have to be careful about drawing conclusions. A visit has to be done in the context of other research.
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100% agreed - and bonus if they are washing their hands after touching something not clean - before getting back to their jobs!!
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