OH NO! NOT ANOTHER “GREEN” COLLEGE TOUR- MAREK FUCHS ****
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We have barely begun and I have already had enough. We are talking college tours here. The season has commenced, my daughter is a high-school junior and, well, here we go again—lacing up for another amble around another campus, members of an endless string of silent, sullen parades seen across America these days, all led by a backward-walking guide who’s making rehearsed gestures to the left and right.
The campuses are all beautiful, if a bit more barren than leafy in this early spring season. The students—both on the tours and already in college, scurrying along the paths, spilling coffee on their way to class—are appealing too, brimming with the promise of fresh concepts and untested theories and the hope of a better collective future.
The problem is the tours themselves, which have degenerated into such boilerplate that it is difficult, and sometimes almost impossible, to distinguish one school from another. No matter the campus or state, the tour guides seem to be playing musical chairs with clichés:
“We have a really ambitious plan to be carbon neutral by 2030.”
“Our ethos here tends to be work hard and play hard.”
“There is the dining hall, where each week farmers come in to talk to us in detail about where our local food comes from.”
“That’s the library! It’s open 24 hours during study days!”
None of this is displeasing per se. It’s just lame, boring and, worse for everyone concerned, ineffective.
Tours are the first big point of contact for child and parents. The stakes are high for all, including the schools, which seem to live and die on how their applicant-pool numbers affect the latest round of college rankings. Yet after a raft of these identical tours, I defy you to distinguish Bard from Bowdoin.
Maybe it is me. I am on the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and overhear my fair share of tour patter during the normal course of my workweek. But it does seem that with so much depending on the outcome of their pitch, colleges should put more original effort into the standard-issue, plain (fat-free) vanilla tour.
So from the parent peanut gallery, a few humble suggestions:
Don’t let parents and kids go on the same tour. Each side has a torrent of lively questions they want to ask but won’t ask in front of the other. Like detectives working suspects, colleges should separate the two groups. This will upgrade the honesty quotient of questions asked and be a huge upgrade of the touring experience.
Let the tours come out at night. A lot of college life takes place under cover of dark. A college tour that pulls the tarp off the night will, if nothing else, be a lot more intriguing—and memorable.
Random tour guides. The traditional college tour guide is an earnest student who has been trained within an inch of his life to play it safe and put the college in the best light. Each observation and anecdote is well honed, and it’s almost metaphysically impossible to hear a stray, unguarded thought.
But how about a school that recruits tour guides from the quad at random? For 10 bucks, a college kid will do anything, so why not pay one to show prospective students around? The unplanned, unvarnished truth that comes out of this new-Jack’s mouth will undoubtedly be revealing.
Anonymous questions. Asking a 17-year-old to raise her hand in a group of strangers to ask her deepest, darkest question about the next four years of her life is like asking a goldfish to gavotte. Give out scraps of paper and pencils. Put the anonymous questions in a hat and have the tour guide answer whichever ones they pluck out of it.
The whole college process—from the tomes everyone reads to these ritualized tours we all endure—has been formalized and systematized nearly to death. As soon as you come home from the latest visit, the memory bank fails, and all the schools merge together in the mind.
We know you are going to be carbon neutral in two decades, right about the time we are finished paying off the bills. Just, please, colleges, have mercy on us this spring-tour season and show and tell us something we don’t already know.
Mr. Fuchs is on the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and writes a column for the Journal’s MarketWatch. His book “A Cold-Blooded Business,” is out in paperback this month from Sky Horse.
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