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As regular readers know, The Girl is a junior in high school. She’s starting her college search. She’s wildly smart in ways that the usual academic measures tend to notice, so she’s getting plenty of mail from colleges and invitations to virtual college fairs.
She attended one this weekend. Her verdict? “Meh.”
This one was a gathering of dozens of schools from around the Northeast, including a few that are on her short(ish) list. She set aside a few hours on Sunday to see what there was to see, hoping to get a better sense of each college. Her subsequent critique, offered between dispirited forkfuls at dinner:
“Every presentation is the same.”
I can certainly agree that every piece of mail she gets is the same. (One exception: the University of Chicago sent a huge fold-out map of Chicago. We both liked that.) Apparently the virtual presentations are even worse. They’re all versions of “We have lots of different majors, our students are diverse and xxx is a great area!” Even if all of those statements are true, they don’t really distinguish one college from another. It would be as if every car ad said, “Our car can do the speed limit, and more! You can drive it to lots of different places!” Well, yes. What makes yours different from all the others?
Working at a college, I understand many of the reasons behind the seeming sameness. If a marketing department leads with “Well, yeah, we have a major in hypothetical studies, but it’s really not very good. We’re really known for our excellent parenthetical studies program!” the hypothetical studies department would storm the president’s office, and rightly so. That’s exactly the sort of information that could be useful to a prospective student, but there’s no institutional self-interest in disclosing it. So you have to try to read between the lines.
Even worse is the lack of feel for each place. When I took TB on walking tours of various places, we both noticed that each had its own distinct flavor. The brochures don’t give you much sense of that, but walking around campus (when people are there) definitely does. In one case, just noticing the cars parked along a street where many students lived -- all late-model luxury vehicles -- spoke volumes. So far, the online presentations just don’t.
Has anyone seen a virtual college presentation that actually succeeded in conveying the distinct feel of a particular place? If so, what made it work?
