Virtual College Tours and What you need to know about Paid College Advertising

Save time and money with these quick tips and tips

I see a lot of families posting about taking college tours. It is expensive, exhausting, and may not be as helpful as you hope. Save time and money doing virtual tours first.

Here is a tv series with 12 seasons, over 150 episodes, of college tours. I had never even heard of The College Tour until they started following my Instagram Account but I think it is worth a watch to learn about colleges in general.

The College Tour does have colleges PAY to be on their series from what I understand and if I remember right it was over $100K but I could be recalling incorrect, so college marketing departments are essentially hiring the College Tour to come and do PR for them. That means everything you see is going to be POSITIVE and biased to make the university look good. Everything takes months to film, script, and piece together, so it is not as candid as you are going to find on TikTok, but still a good overview especially visually of the campus.

Don’t Do Tours First

In my opinion as a career educator and a mom, tours should never be the first exposure to college. I see so many families posting in college boards about how their students “DREAM SCHOOL” is ___________. Dream schools most often come from

• visual impressions of a school

• having a past experience on campus like a football game

• hearing about an experience from someone who attends

• what is portrayed in a movie or tv show

Be Deliberate with Tours

Students will then take the idea of a dream school and try to get it to fit into their plans and needs often overlooking the very reason they are going to college, which is to learn skills to get a job. Yes college makes them a better well rounded person, they can meet life long friends, they can adult, grow, and mature, but THEY ARE PAYING FOR CLASSES.

I always suggest visiting the college website, finding the PDF of the course catalogue, and reading classes before ever taking a trip to visit a school in person.

One of the schools whose curriculum I really love is SCAD. I could see my daughter really loving so many of their classes and really thriving being on a campus with creatives in every direction, but they don’t even have a Musical Theater Major or Minor, and that is something she really wants to eventually take classes in. They also are near hurricanes which is not even something she will consider no matter how great a program is. I know better than to fly all the way to SCAD and do a college tour there…..even if it seems to be soooo cool. Sometimes families ignore classes and majors….and just go and a student falls in love and ends up compromising what they originally wanted and may have regrets.

I had a family tell me last year every school they visited over Christmas break was doing field experiences and archeological digs primarily related to Native American and Indigenous history. Their son loved Greek History. I could have saved them a ton of time and energy and money by finding them schools where there are professors researching Greek history so they could have visited those schools instead or even flown to Greece to look at schools there where they could really find some great programs. If their student did a tour and then fell in love with a campus they may have compromised their original passion of Greek history and settled for Native American History.

Changing Majors

Yes students do change majors so my idea of choosing a school based on a major in addition to all the other factors can be misleading but the goal is to find a college that has the most classes of interest to a student so that if they do change their initial major there is another one there they also love.

How to Tour a College

I always suggest hiring a student in your potential major to take you and your student around privately vs just a school tour where people are paid to tell you what the university wants you to hear. Candid tours are the best and give you the real insight on what it is like being on campus as a student in your major.

What you may not know about Paid Advertising

Another thing to keep in mind is that if a University spends a lot of money on advertising it could include some of these reasons…..or they could just have a large budget for PR and these reasons do not apply.

• They are newer and need students.

• They have had a recent natural disaster, shooting, political issue, etc. and received bad press.

• Their stats are low and they desperately need students, especially in certain departments or they will have to defund those programs.

• They want your application fee and you to attend pay to play programs and have done the math and can make money if they drastically increase applications and enrollment in summer programs.

• They want to decrease their acceptance rate to make them rank higher in prestige by getting more applicants so they can deny them.

One of the reasons I work independently and left the university is all the politics that go on. It is really important to know this and that is why classes don’t lie and I focus on that. I also make a practice of advertising schools of all types and do not get paid to advertise schools nor will I ever. I advertise all schools equally and for free as just information, not recommendation.

Places like College Tours will probably never feature colleges that are not paying them……so that is also important to keep in mind.