The Choice Blog: Tip Sheet | A Family’s Lessons From the College Tour

Beth Kissileff

I never went on a college tour when I was a teenager. My parents wanted me to attend the college where my father was employed; it would have been tuition-free for me, and so they weren’t eager to encourage other explorations.

Before I left on a recent college trip with my daughter I had believed these college visits yet another unnecessary aspect of the lives of privileged children. I thought the college tour was yet another accoutrement without value in itself, but only as something to brag about.

However, while with my oldest child, Tova, on a four-day, six-campus jaunt, I came to appreciate that one can’t know what one wants until one sees it.

I love to browse physical stores. When a book’s title catches my eye, I peruse the table of contents and see who the author thanks in his acknowledgements. This, I then realize, is what I must read next.

The book wouldn’t have occurred to me at all until I saw it. When I am in a store, I can pick up an object, try on a piece of clothing to check the color, the feel of the fabric, and most importantly the fit.

That seems to be the most overused word in the college search process: fit. But the college tour, my daughter and I have found, is a helpful way to try the campus out for size.

This is our advice to parents and students embarking on the college tour.

If you only have time for either a tour or an info session, opt for the tour. The same material is generally covered and you don’t have to sit for an hour in an auditorium on a beautiful spring day.

There are things one learns on these tours that one might not realize ahead of time. One urban college did not guarantee housing for all four years. As a result, many of the students live in off-campus apartments and join sororities and fraternities, creating a sense of fragmentation on an already large campus. One campus had bicycles everywhere because it is so sprawled out that it isn’t really accessible just to walk.

Find a way to meet with a smaller group of students informally. For us, it was at the Hillel, the Jewish student center, but any type of interest group can be accessed.

E-mail students from your high school at this college or look online for the clubs or student groups that interest you and see if you can schedule time to speak with them on campus. Most students are excited about their school and eager to share with newbies. And if they don’t have good things to say or don’t have time for you, that should say something about the culture of the school.

This is the essence of the title of a recent book by a college admissions professional and parent, and the mantra of my daughter and her college guidance counselor.

I agree, I am not going to college. However, I am footing the bill and do have a say in this.

While each student’s experience is unique and a student is free to do as he or she chooses, the culture of a place has an influence, for positive or negative, encouraging some things, rewarding others.

One tour began with a visit to the stadium, while others barely mentioned big-time sports. At one campus, the norm is to switch majors two or three times; at another, the admissions representatives asked the students on tour what they would be studying and seemed to expect them to have an answer.

Here are some questions we asked during our visits:

On the classroom experience:

What is the percentage of classes that enroll more than 20 students?What percentage of classes are taught by tenured professors, non-tenured professors, and graduate student teaching assistants?Are professors happy and do they want to be there?Do students love their classes, or do they see them as a necessary evil to meet their requirements?What are the most common majors?If a student’s interests shift, will she still be able to study what she wants?What kind of academic and social support system is in place?How much opportunity is there for undergraduates to do research?

On the campus environment and surrounding areas:

How is the college connected to the city or town it is in?Do students interact with locals?How do students dress and act? Do they seem happy?What do students do on weekends?

When driving, our GPS battery ran out but we had printed out Mapquest directions and managed to arrive at our first tour on time.

Having a backup plan also applies to the college search: When applying to college, don’t think there is one place and only one where you will be happy. Go on the tour to think about the things you want in a college and apply to a variety of institutions that can give you those things.

Remember that college is a first step, not an endpoint. No matter who you are, or what you do in college, you will be starting from the beginning when you go to work. Have a sense of humor and humility about the whole process. This is only the first step in your career; what you do with it is up to you.

Beth Kissileff has taught at Carleton, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and the Universities of Minnesota and Pittsburgh. Ms. Kissileff’s daughter, Tova Perlman, contributed to this piece and is a graduating senior at The Ellis School in Pittsburgh. Ms. Perlman plans to attend Brandeis University after a gap year in Israel.

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