It took 1.23 seconds for Google to deliver approximately 166,000,000 results for the search term "college tours," so you can imagine how much advice there is about the usefulness of visiting colleges during the research process. More and more, campus visits are promoted as being essential to students' and families' sense of each college or university. But a recent New York Times article called "Skipping the College Tour" by Erica Reischer challenges that notion, suggesting that psychologically they "may hinder students’ ability to pick a college that will further their interests and goals."
"Oh, no," you're thinking. "We just finalized our plans for an East Coast trip! And it was hard enough getting our kid to go in the first place!" Don't worry, though. It's not that tours aren't useful at all, but that, according to the article, they promote an over-reliance on "our present selves (the self making the decision...) and our future selves (the self experiencing the outcome of this decision)." Reischer writes that psychologists have found that we're not so good at "predicting what our future selves will actually value and enjoy." ("That suit looked so good in the store...") So while a student's "present self" may become enamored of a campus because of its beauty (or despite its ugliness) or its peppy tour guide, that may not help in the long run in terms of making a good choice.
It's the difference between imagination and experience, says Reischer: We imagine how we'll fit on campus, but imagination isn't a very good predictor. It flows toward what we'd like to have happen instead of being realistic about what could happen. We seduce ourselves into being at a blissful haven based on a small slice of time and well-rehearsed words. When students return from a college campus and talk mostly about the beautiful weather or the cute tour guide, they've imagined themselves in an ideal, not a real, place.
Of course, if you can visit campuses during the college research process, you really should. But the article suggests there's a better way to get a sense of the campuses that will make your student happy. And that is to rely on "experience surrogates," or, in regular English, current students and recent graduates. They're really the ones who can give you the straight dope on what classes are like, how things are in mid-winter and how you might actually fit in on campus.
This advice seems pretty commonsensical. It's the foundation of review sites like Yelp! when you think about it. What do people who have actually experienced the service or establishment I'm interested in have to say about it? What do they consider its best/worst features? When did they visit? Would they return? If people like me like it, there's a good chance I'll like it as well.
Personally, I take most reviews on Yelp! with a large grain of salt. I enjoy reading the bad ones for their often garbled but hilarious spelling and grammatical structure as well as their sometimes absurd complaints ("We had to wait five minutes for our table!"), but I often check it out when considering a new restaurant, especially when I'm in an unfamiliar area. My "experience surrogates" help me out by offering me their realities; I don't have to imagine what my chicken piccata will taste like. Even if the outside of the restaurant looks like the entrance to a mineshaft, if my peers say the food's worth it, I'll give it a go.
With this idea in mind I searched for some Yelp! equivalents that focus on college and checked out some of the comments various surrogates made. If you can't get to a campus, these sites might provide some reasonable commentary to consider; if you can, they might leaven your personal experience. As with Yelp!, it's probably best to ignore the worst reviews/comments and focus on the most balanced. Even so, reading them can give you a glimpse into what students have thought about their campus and professors. I'm not endorsing any of the sites, per se, just listing them for your information; I'd be happy to hear your thoughts or add other sites you come across.
1. RateMyProfessors.com. The name says it all, with reviews often going to some brutal extremes on the negative side. It's created some controversy over the years because of that, but if you want to hear some unvarnished student voices, drop in.
2. niche.com has a college search section that includes student reviews. It's the best designed of the several sites I checked, and the reviews seem fairly even tempered. Because Niche is a large site dedicated to helping people find places to live as well as schools and colleges, I suspect it keeps a good eye on reviews to keep them informative, not cutting. You don't have to register to check them out, but if you want to make a list, you do. There's other relevant college information as well. Not as "busy" as some similar sites.
3. At the other end of the design spectrum is studentsreview.com, which has the worst designed pages I've seen since 1998. Reading its homepage is like trying to read the bulletin board in any college's busy student center. But if you're patient you'll be able to find the eponymous student reviews and again, some unvarnished perspectives.
4. For parents, there's the Parents' Forum at College Confidential, run by my professional colleague Sally Rubenstone. On the site you can read discussions on different topics related to college, financial aid, and more. (If you want to participate, you have to register.) The commentary is freewheeling and idiosyncratic, so don't take any one person's experience as gospel, but it's interesting to see what other parents are commenting about and it's likely you'll see some of your own questions dealt with there. (There's a lot more at the site as well.)
We can never be sure how our college choices will turn out, but we can certainly make the search interesting. Given all the recent advances in AI, VR and robotics, we may well have actual "experience surrogates" of our very own sooner or later who will take college tours for us as we follow along in our easy chairs. In the meantime, we'll have to do the best we can with fragmented real reality.
