Almost Academia

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During spring break, college students tend to travel to such places as Cancun and Daytona Beach, Fla. High school students, on the other hand, tend to travel to colleges. Spring break is one of the peak periods for the college-campus tour, that rite of passage in which high school students and their parents visit centers of higher learning to determine where the child should spend four years and the parents untold thousands of dollars. This year, however, some ugly realities are upsetting collegiate itineraries. War in Iraq has many families concerned about traveling, and the lackluster economy makes it difficult for others to put out the money for plane flights, hotels and car rentals.

But there are alternatives to walking leafy pathways that can bring the college to you. Both virtual tours on the Web and videos provide overviews of a campus, and more families are inquiring about them. But are these onscreen options an adequate way to assess an academic environment?

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Most high school counselors and college admissions officers insist there is no substitute for strolling a campus, but if that is not possible, a virtual visit may give you some sense of what a school is like. Chris Carson, director of CampusTours.com, a website with links to more than 800 schools, says students can actually draw conclusions from these tours that they might not on a guided tour. "Students we survey say they look at these things as a sign of an institution's commitment to technology," he says. "If you've got an old picture-and-text tour, the student may be turned off." Also, Web tours can offer more details than the glossy print brochures schools send out. Jeff Fieldson, whose daughter Emily applied to schools far from their Nashville, Tenn., home, said the Web was particularly helpful for learning about campus organizations. "The catalog just gives you a list of student groups," he says, "but the Web tours link to the groups' own home pages."

Almost all colleges and universities now offer virtual tours, but the degree of sophistication varies significantly. Northeastern simply offers a slide show of still photographs with explanatory text, while Duke allows users to position their cursors in a spot representing a location on campus and, using the arrow keys, see views from every direction. Other schools offer multimedia extravaganzas. The University of Miami has streaming video of classes in session, student testimonials and rousing orchestral background music.

The problem with the Web tours, however, is that they tend to be carefully edited. Jim Conroy, chairman of the college counseling department at New Trier high school in Winnetka, Ill., says, for example, that colleges rarely include pictures of the campus in winter.

Collegiate Choice Walking Tours, based in Bergen County, N.J., aims to give virtual visitors a more true-to-life experience. Cliff Kramon, an independent college counselor, has been videotaping college tours since 1987. He has a library of 350 schools, which he updates about every five years; the tapes are $15 each. Though colleges send out their own videotapes, Kramon's videos, most of which last about an hour, have no background music or slick editing. "It's like your father took a tour and videotaped it," he says, which is why the camera tends to wobble as he follows the student tour guides. But Kramon's tapes offer a verisimilitude that schools may not appreciate. Rather than focus on students contemplating Plato on a sun-speckled lawn, his University of Michigan tape shows them dashing across campus trying to escape a downpour.