Myth #9
“All my friends signed up for a group college tour over Spring Break. That’s probably a pretty good way to visit colleges; I should go too.”
Some group tours can be a good way to visit colleges and I suppose that any college tour is better than no college tour but . . . most group tours are a good way for tour businesses to make money and a terrible way for students to visit colleges. Take a minute and think it through logically and with a sense of the “real world”. Think back to any student trip you took while in High School. Were you primarily interested in learning? Did you spend more time on the trip material or talking to that new guy or girl you met? More time listening to the teacher or hanging with that cute kid from your class? The typical group college tour is an interesting school field trip and might even be a worthwhile social experience but it’s an inefficient and expensive way to evaluate colleges!
But even if your kid is the most conscientious student in America . . . the tour isn’t appropriate. These tours don’t consider the specific needs and interests of your student . . . they consider the group at large. They have to; there’s no other option for them. If you have 20 students with different interests, the tour operator has no choice. I recently looked at the itinerary of a reputable tour. During the Boston stop they visited Harvard . . . a large and super selective urban university, Wellesley . . . a relatively small and highly selective all girls school in a suburban setting, MIT . . . one of the world’s premier technology institutions and Babson . . . a small suburban business college known for its highly regarded entrepreneurial program. These colleges have almost nothing in common with one another. Tours should help you get a very specific feel about a college; they shouldn’t be the mechanism to make your first cut of general interest.
There’s another aspect of group college tours that might be even more problematic. These tours simply don’t spend enough time at any one college to get a real feel for what it would be like to study, socialize and live on campus for the next four years. That’s the real value of a campus visit, to uncover the feel of the campus and the character of that particular college. I once worked with a very talented student who did research on the web, spoke to all the right people and made MIT his number one choice. Then he visited the campus. The first hand experience was so different from his research that he went back and made another visit . . . from Florida. At the end of the 2nd visit he was still very impressed by MIT but realized that it was so different from what he had imagined that not only wasn’t it his number 1 choice . . . he stopped his application! That’s the power and value of a campus visit.
The jump off the bus, take the tour, jump back on the bus nature of the average college tour simply can’t deliver a meaningful experience. Even if they happen to include a school that’s of genuine interest to your student, the visit won’t be in depth enough to make a well founded difference in the decision process. Visiting colleges is incredibly valuable but conventional group college tours are all too often a waste of time and money.
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