What Know One Tells You About Touring Colleges

So You’re Planning a College Tour

Your entire academic career has been building toward this moment: college applications, and the hope of landing at a school where you’ll spend some of the best years of your life. Wherever you end up, those four years will be absolutely insane, in the best way possible.

But getting there isn’t simple. Acceptance rates are all over the place, tuition keeps climbing, and real information about student life at each school is almost impossible to find online. Before you commit four years and a lot of money to a school, you want to know it’s the right fit academically, socially, and long-term.

So you plan a college tour. That’s what everyone does.

Here’s what nobody tells you: college tours aren’t built for you.

How a tour actually goes

You check in at admissions and grab a folder and a free t-shirt. Then you stand in a group of about forty families while a really nice student (probably not in your desired major) walks backwards across the quad. You see the new rec center, the library that’s open 24 hours, and the dining hall everyone apparently loves. Somewhere along the way, you hear the student-to-faculty ratio is 12:1.

It feels like you’re getting to know the school. But you’re mostly seeing what the school wants you to see.

Blogs and college advisors don’t really talk about this. Most families see the tour as something you just have to do before making a decision, so they take it at face value.

But after a few tours, you start to notice they all sound pretty similar. Same kinds of stops, same stats, even some of the same jokes. That’s because the tour is run by the admissions office, and admissions is focused on enrollment. They pick the guides, train them, and decide where the tour goes. The goal is to get you excited enough to apply.

So you see the rec center, but probably not the dorm you’d actually live in freshman year. Nobody mentions how hard it is to get into the business school if you weren’t admitted directly. And you don’t really get a sense of what the social life is like once the tour groups go home.

Nobody’s lying to you. It’s just the best version of the school, and that’s a hard thing to make a four-year decision on.

Why it matters

On the drive home, you ask your kid what they thought, and they say, “It was nice, I guess.”

That “I guess” matters. Only about half of students finish their degree in four years, and roughly one in three transfer at some point. Extra semesters and starting over somewhere new cost a lot of time and money. A lot of that comes down to students not knowing what they were really signing up for.

We know this firsthand. Everyone on the Vivaday team is a transfer student. We took the tours, trusted what we saw, and didn’t realize until freshman year that the school we toured wasn’t the school we were living at. Then we watched it happen to friend after friend. 

You go on a college tour to figure out if a school is right for you. The tour is mostly there to get you to like it.

There has to be a better way. 

A way in which you can personalize your tours and get the real college information you need in order to make a college decision. 

The modern way to tour colleges?

That’s why we built Vivaday. We kept thinking that if we’d been able to sit down with a current student in our major, someone who didn’t care whether we enrolled, and just ask everything, we probably would have picked a different school.

So that’s what Vivaday does. Where prospective students can click a button and virtually tour any college with a student in their desired major, 1-on-1. There’s no script, no group of forty families, and no admissions office deciding what you see. It’s just a real student showing you what their life there is actually like and answering whatever you want to ask.

 And if you think of a question after the fact or just have one off questions to ask a student, you can do that too and get personalized video responses back. 

No flights, no hotel, and no trying to fit a campus visit into a school week. Just the information you need to choose the right school the first time.

Book your tour today -> Tour any college now