If you are comfortable giving your feedback to Dartmouth, I expect the admissions leadership team would be interested in hearing this information.
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I had thought of this. I don’t like making trouble for a kid, even one that was this haughty. If she were even a grad student, I would have reported her.
On another level, Dartmouth should have Quality Control in place to prevent this sort of thing.
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Then the student will continue to be that way and cause more negative impressions. They will learn there are no consequences for their behavior.
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Like any service business, they should mystery shop.
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Adding on here, I reluctantly “reported” a student at our Northeastern student panel to the admission rep - I know the student wasn’t being racist or mean - just young. He was speaking about meeting so many different people at the school and proceeded to talk about having dinner with “some Asian kids” and they ordered chicken feet and other weird food. He went on to say it was gross and not anything he would ever eat.
About 1/3 or more of the audience was Asian and it was uncomfortable.
I did not want to get him in trouble, but thought it was important for the senior admin team (they were outside of the presentation theater) to be made aware and speak a bit to cultural sensitivity.
The student did a great job talking about the diversity of students - but just blew it with too much detail and judgement.
We learn from feedback.
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We gave Cornell admission feedback on our awful guide. She was incredibly off putting, and threw admissions under the bus, saying the adults in the room talked a good game about certain things but it totally wasn’t true. She was stressed out and was hating her experience. How she was hired by admissions was a mystery to us.
We had a similar experience with a terrible student ambassador at Northwestern.
Then there were the schools where the tours were just terrible in terms of access to buildings, labs, classrooms, etc…. And our experience was pre covid.
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Or maybe they don’t always care about that.
Back when I toured Mount Holyoke with C17 and C19, the families that were there were asked whether they were touring other colleges in the Northeast. There were mentions of UMass Amherst, and the admissions staff said it’s a very different type of place, which is better for some students. Someone mentioned Wellesley, and they had nothing but good things to say about it, pointing out that the big difference was arguably location, with some students doing better in an urban area and others in a rural area. One family was visiting Hampsire the next day, and there was much praise for it, saying that it caters to a very specific type of student, and it delivers something very rare. Vassar even got brought up, and there was a joke about it having been a formerly women’s college that “lost its way”, but it was all very respectful.
And then somebody said they’re touring Smith—and you could see the claws come out.
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Maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but any tour I take where the guides or info sessions openly disparage other schools is a huge turn-off. It happened several times this spring during our tours in Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina. I will be interested to see if that shows up next week when we head to Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia.
I’m the kind of person who just wants everyone to get along and celebrate accomplishments without having to demean other people. It’s a tough row to hoe these days, but I’m going to try to keep it front and center for S25 for as long as he’s under my roof.
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My kid took Kenyon off his list because several people were very disparaging of Denison, where everyone had been warm and gracious. It’s possible we hit it on a bad day, but it was a real turn-off for him. So yes, we are of the same mind there.
I think a school can explain why they do what they do in a way that can be very appealing. Bates did a great job of explaining why their short term is at the end of the year without disparaging the middle of the year “Jan Plan” (which also has pluses.) Likewise, they talked about the intention behind having one dining hall (bringing everyone together.) While my kid, who’d gone to a BS, was less thrilled about a single dining hall for 4 more years, I really appreciated the thoughtfulness that had gone into the planning and what the school was prioritizing.
Ultimately, students should be picking places where what the school offers is what they want. Every school should not appeal to every kid. Hopefully schools are able to get students to think about what they offer with an open mind without encouraging them to apply where they won’t thrive.
When DS was looking at BS (a slightly different proposition given age), the Head of School said in her introductory remarks at an open house, “If you decide that this school isn’t for you, that’s fine too. This process is as much about figuring out what you want for your next four years as where to go to get it.” That remark framed all our visits, including college ones.
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Same. I recently toured UNC Chapel Hill and the guide disparaged Duke at least 10 times. It was far over the line, and I am not a Duke fan at all.
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That reminds me, we have heard from several tour guides that they hope students on their tours find a fit as good for them as the tour guides found in the schools they were representing. Love that comment, since it does recognize that not every school is the right fit for every student.
Thanks @gardenstategal for getting my brain to remember the good stuph we’ve heard, too!
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My D goes to school in North Carolina. She finds Duke students to be very unfriendly and unpleasant. As a tour guide herself, I doubt she disparages any other colleges on her tour.
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Was it more sports related demeaning - like SEC vs. SEC or flat out, we’re better because…blah blah blah and they stink - blah blah blah.
I agree that highlighting differences is ok but not disparaging - not a good luck.
But with big time sports, I can see fun being poked at one other. But in a fun, not demeaning way.
And these schools likely play up a sports angle - it’s why many go.
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That’s ingrained into the culture there, as far as the rivalry with Duke goes. If your student ends up attending, they will experience it - especially when UNC plays Duke in basketball. Even the businesses on Franklin Street get into it. There’s a funny meme that went viral about a tween girl (huge UNC fan) who had to suffer through a campus tour (or accepted student day) of Duke with her older brother. I can’t remember her name, but they even made “Free (name)” t-shirts.
I didn’t mind it if was a good-natured jab that didn’t go on too long. If you tour UofSC, chances are you’ll hear a jab at Clemson, and vice versa. I remember doing a college tour of Elon and the business school program presentation walked a very fine line with trying to convince you why their program was better than UNC’s & Duke’s.
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I understand sports rivalries well. These were far from good natured jabs.
To be clear, I wasn’t with a potential student I was with a group of counselors mixed in with a typical tour group. We all felt the same way, it was over the line and harmed our perception of the school.
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I understand. Were you able to provide feedback to admissions? They may or may not care considering there is no danger of application numbers dropping there.
I toured there twice (older D is an alum) and found their presentation rather underwhelming when compared to other schools we toured.
There is also a (in)famous article, written by a UNC alum, of his experience touring Duke as a HS student (which for him was a running theme of “Ha-ha, you’ll never get in here”). It went viral within the UNC community and gets reposted during rivalry weeks.
The best tours we had were at UTK & UofSC and that’s because you could tell the tour guides 100% loved those schools and were excited to be showing them off. Anything less, as far as a tour guide goes, is a potential fail, IMO.
I didn’t, not sure if anyone from our group did. Whether or not a school needs more apps, turning off college counselors and/or potential students or parents is not good business.
Poor presentations and/or less than tour guides are one thing, mean-spiritedness is another thing entirely. The words spent bashing Duke would have been better used to discuss academic programs, clubs, really anything else. And again, I am specifically not a Duke fan in any way, with similar feelings to mom270’s above post.
Lastly I would encourage parents and their kids to not expect polished sales presentations from tour guides. Some are great, most aren’t.
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This right here. We’re talking about people who are 19 to 21 years old. Their job experience is probably limited to working retail at the mall or slinging coffee or mowing lawns in the summer - they’re utterly unequipped for the position. Which is fine; they’re kids. And the job really is ambassador, requiring a disposition, grace and self-awareness some people that age might mimic but few really possess.
They get a little training and some script ideas and fact sheets to memorize, but there’s a solid chance your guide for the day at X college is in the middle of their 4th or 5th read-through of a 90 minute play/improv exercise. They’ve often spent no more than 30 weeks on campus themselves and are also spending 50+ hours a week on academics, in addition to participating in clubs, exploring study abroad options, looking for internships next summer, rushing sororities, going to basketball games, etc. So they have limited time to focus on this part time tour guide gig which 99% of the student body wouldn’t take on. Expecting them to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of arcane topics that most students wouldn’t know, despite the self-selection process of becoming a guide, is unrealistic.
Whether schools might benefit from hiring Admissions Office staff who give tours as full-time employees is an open question, although as others have alluded to above, these are tours for prospective applicants. You want to put your best foot forward, of course.
But even if every tour is run by someone who really has the game down, something about their presentation style or appearance or age or whatever will still turn off 10-15% of their audience. Just witness this discussion thread - there are dozens of examples of “nothing wrong with them, but personality totally didn’t jibe with my kid’s”. Another 50% of their audience won’t apply to the school due to other factors, like the campus itself, the overall culture, the location, etc. And at least half of the remaining approximately 40% won’t get admitted at really selective places. Given limited bandwidth for admissions offices, I think they’re wise to focus on admitted student days/weekends as the place to bring out the big guns.
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I’ve always wished it were possible to have a thread on CC “hosted” by student tour guides. It would be so interesting to have their point of view. Our S19 was a tour guide (“docent”) at Denison for 3 years, and he has some pretty good stories and insights. I think that Denison does a good job of vetting and training the docents while avoiding the problem of them becoming overly-scripted, but still there will be good days and bad days and good matches and bad matches. S19 was a psych major, and I think the job was good training in trying to get into the minds of the folks he was showing around. When he himself was touring schools, he didn’t seem to be much affected by the guides, good or bad, and maybe that helped him keep perspective when he was doing the job himself. He also wasn’t much affected by weather. He “discovered” Denison on a rainy, miserable day in March after attending an admitted students event the day before at sunny Trinity University in San Antonio. Actually, admitted students days were one thing he really didn’t like - he preferred to see schools on more ordinary days and didn’t like all the bells and whistles put in place for the special events.
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On the subject of college tours, we really hated the ASU campus tour we had at the half-day event that D24 & I went to. The event had hundreds and hundreds of people there and they had a ton of tour guides, which was good. But OUR tour guide was the fastest walker in the west. Fast enough that we really had to hustle in order to keep up with her. It was speed walk from one spot to another, listen to the tour guide talk super mega fast about that building we were in or in front of, tour guide asks really fast if there’s any questions, have her say, “Ok, moving on,” and then hustle-walk to the next stop.
It was a horrible experience. Nobody in our tour group asked questions. I asked one question, but the answer wasn’t really helpful at all. The campus tour made it all feel enormous and really corporate, like you’re just another number.
Regular campus tour didn’t even include tour of any dorms. That was a separate tour and it was a 15 min walk from the event location in the middle of campus to a dorm.
At the end of it all, my kid said, “Heck, no. I hate this place. I am NOT going here.”
Every single other campus tour we went on at other colleges was better than that experience. 
D24 & I still giggle about that tour once in awhile because listening to that tour guide talk felt like watching that old 1980s Federal Express commercial where the guy talks super duper fast. 
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