The Campus Visit Experience: How Should It Go?
There’s a saying that eyes are the windows to a person’s soul. But if that’s true then the front lobby and waiting area for the college admissions office is the front door to most campus visit experiences.
Visit your friends in their homes and you can tell how they treat their property by how it looks from their front door. The same goes true for colleges. Sometimes the front door is a dedicated visitor’s center, as I recently saw at Notre Dame and Northwestern (photo up top). Notre Dame actually has two, one for prospective students and their parents, the other for tourists. Other times it’s a space in the student center or another building. Ursinus College (PA), as another example, created a shared space with their book store (photo below left). Then you have schools like the University of Scranton (photo below right) that go to the expense of restoring a building. Both schools begin the campus experience near their front gate.
No matter where it starts, The best campus visit experience begins when students and parents can feel comfortable waiting to begin their tour and information session, not feel crunched in the space.
That’s why I’ve asked Andrew Cohen, who leads the visitor experience at Georgia Tech, to speak with you about it.
Andrew is the president-elect of the Collegiate Information and Visitors Services Association, a national organization that helps admissions professionals to improve the campus visit experience. I hope that you will listen to this interview now. He also gave me some photos of their student center to share. The two are on the left/ That’s where the Georgia Tech campus visit experience begins. Georgia Tech has a signature building–that’s the third photo–that serves a true front door for everyone.
Andrew’s role is slightly different than his peers at the University of Georgia, who operate a true visitor’s cente that’s on the edge of campusr. His team trains not only trains student ambassadors to give tours and represent Georgia Tech at vents; they also train students to handle admissions inquiries by phone and e-mail. That’s quite a responsibility to place on students. In Fall, 2018, before Andrew came to work there, Georgia Tech received nearly 35,000 applications their freshman class. Five years later they received more than 52,000. Tour guides and virtual communicators can aspire to become Fellows in admissions, which Andrew will cover in this interview.
Georgia Tech admissions can be somewhat complex. It is a flagship state university as well as a national research university. There are obligations to admit from Georgia, including transfer pathways. However, 30 percent of the underrate student body comes from other states and ten percent come from other countries. Imagine being a student who has to know all of this information as well as the important landmarks on a campus tour. There’s also a brand message that applies to all applicants that you will hear about in this interview.
I was fortunate to visit Georgia Tech over ten years ago and look forward to returning in June.
My visit was one of the best that I have ever had. However, my good fortune was to attend a Junior Open House one day, then walk into student involvement fair outdoors on campus (below) the next day. I met more students than I typically get to meet on a college campus. Georgia Tech has some of the brightest students that I have met on an extended visit.
However, my visit experiences have varied with spaces and the helpfulness of hosts.
Over the 14 years that I have managed this site, I have seen the most welcoming of spaces in a college admissions office as well as one of the least welcoming spaces at Columbia University. I have posted both, among other college admissions visitors spaces, on a special Pinterest page that I made just for this post. I took some of these pictures, obtained others from other Pinterest pages.
One of my first jobs after I finished graduate school in urban planning was to do market studies for proposed housing developments throughout New Jersey.
The numbers tell you part of the story in trying to assess whether a development will sell. The other part of the story comes when you visit the sales offices of comparable properties. The appearance of the model homes, the friendliness of the staff and the attractiveness and accuracy of the information you receive are all important to a prospective homebuyer. The best home builders never miss a detail. There are far more colleges than there are major home builders in the U.S. Yet a college has to make a similar impression on a prospective student and their family. You can see that most of the schools pictured on the Pinterest page do a good job of this. Some, like Bard (pictured there), also do a superior job with marketing communications to go along with the ambiance of their lobbies. There’s good reason to make a prospective student and their family feel welcome. They might be spending six figures for the experience later. Just as they would if they were buying a house. Only they will have less time to pay down the debt.
People matter as much as a welcoming space.
When I visited Johns Hopkins, I had not signed up for their tour and information session. That was not required. Yet I was treated with the same courtesy that I would have likely received had I signed up in advance. The students and staff at the desk acted as if they knew what they had to do to make me informed and leave me happy that I visited. They did not treat me as if I was a burden to them. In fact, this is the space where students wait for admissions interviews. The students are more likely to feel relaxed in a pleasant setting.
Contrast this with my past experience at Columbia.
You can see that picture on the Pinterest page, too. Here I also came on an unplanned visit. I stopped at the admissions office, where I was told that there might not be a tour that afternoon. The person called, found out that there was a tour going out in a little less than an hour. I asked if he could help to tell me where the visitors center was. He joked that he would not. I got quick directions, but no map. I did not find this obnoxious person very funny and was quite tempted to complain. But I did not have the time. I wanted to make my tour. Besides I have this Web site as my vehicle to vent.
After I left the admissions office, I found the visitor’s center. I told a student at the front desk that I want to take the next tour and was told to take a seat. I did not know that I needed a visitor’s pass to be on the tour until after the tour started. Luckily, the tour guide agreed to wait until three of us, myself included, had gotten our passes. The student who handed out the passes did not look happy. I didn’t care.
A college admissions office should treat a prospective student and their parents like an honored guest on the campus visit.
They should also speak to someone in my position like a trusted adult. I do not care if the school is an exceptionally selective college like Columbia or one where few applicants are turned away. If you want someone’s money over four years, possibly more, you make them feel welcome and treat them with courtesy and respect. On this score the Columbia students who worked the desks when I was there had a lot to learn about courtesy and life. Given what it takes to get into Columbia, it was sad that they did not appear to know those lessons. Courtesy is especially important in these times when parents and prospective students are uncertain about campus culture and safety at different schools.
I’m glad that there are people like Andrew Cohen who care and share their expertise to help their peers do better with the campus visit experience.Please listen to this interview and learn more.
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