I try not to think about it often, but I do remember applying to college very vividly. The summer before my senior year of high school was spent bouncing between college tours and writing essays, trying to figure out how to explain in my applications that I was not only a qualified applicant, but a real person with hopes and dreams and a personality — someone who would benefit from each school, but add to it as well. It’s both a dehumanizing and demoralizing experience to be asked at age 17 to sum up your entire life thus far into a 250 word essay.
I was able to visit many of the schools I was interested in, including the ones that mattered the most to me. I was singular in my focus when it came to my major, which made making a list of schools easy, but cutting from that list difficult. Visiting universities made all the difference; my mother still brings up the shoebox dorms at a school we visited, their size alone acting as a deterrent against applying. But even with my focus, even with certain schools getting ruled out after a visit, the campuses began blurring together, one dining hall seeming indistinguishable from the next.
Enter: Campanile College Tours (CCT). Founded by Dr. Elizabeth Stone, CCT works with prospective students and their parents to put together an in-depth, on-the-go customized college tour. Beyond booking hotels and travel, the company sets up meetings with professors, instructors and coaches, all based on the student’s interests.
“We are experts in both educational consulting and are travel professionals,” said Dr. Stone, who had years of experience in education practice and research before she became a California Certified Travel Counselor in order to run CCT. In her work as an educational consultant and college counselor, Dr. Stone found that her students often came back from college tours unable to recall anything specific about the schools they visited. “It wasn’t until a client asked me to arrange her college tour,” Dr. Stone explained, that she realized the benefit of creating a curated college tour that was “related to [the student’s] academic and extracurricular activities.”
The biggest group of college tours I attended was on the East Coast; driving from Boston to New York City, my parents and I saw roughly six universities in five days. The bulk of the planning was on my shoulders, and I had to figure out when tours were available and if it was possible to see multiple schools in one day. Since I was applying to some art schools, I was lucky in that those tours were specific to my academic interests. But even then, I was at the mercy of the tour guide or group; at one art school, everyone in my group was focused on fine art so the tour reflected this, leaving me out to dry as a prospective film major.
“There aren’t many resources for normal people to just reach out to schools,” said Gabe Hoffman, the Tour Manager at CCT. “Our aim is to take one thing off their plate,” he explained. “Parents do not want to deal with planning these tours themselves, and they just don’t have the resources or the experience.”
While it might be jarring to consider, it is true that everyone, a student’s parents included, is out of their depth when it comes to college admissions. In my case, I was almost exclusively applying to film programs as an undergrad. Neither of my parents are in the arts, and neither of them even got their undergraduate degree in the United States. Things turned out fine for me, but it’s not hard to imagine how experiences like the ones CCT curates could be helpful in making a decision about a school.
Founded in 2012, Campanile College Tours works with high school students and their guardians to put together an individualized college tour experience, to help students narrow down their lists. “Most of our tours do not include much interaction with the admissions offices,” said Dr. Stone, instead focusing on working with the pre-existing tours, professors, coaches and the like.
CCT might arrange for a family to go on a university tour, but they’ll also try to get access for a student to sit in on a class they’re interested in, or see arts or sports facilities. On the travel-focused side, they’ll make sure a family is well-located in the area around a college. A common mistake families make when putting a tour together themselves is booking “a generic hotel that doesn’t give them the full feel of the college town or the nightlife around campus,” Dr. Stone explained. “Evenings are also really important to experience on or near campus, and we can recommend restaurants or evening events on campus.”
An idea that ran undercurrent to Dr. Stone’s words, that Hoffman explained in greater detail, is that the specificity of the experiences CCT curates is what sets them apart from the kind of tour I found myself putting together in high school. College is often the first time students get to really choose what they want to do, both academically and socially. “So why should the [college] touring process be like [high school], where it’s kind of one size fits all?” Hoffman posed.
There is an elephant in the room, though, and one I’d be remiss to not address: the cost. CCT currently charges around $500 per school (not including transportation or accommodations), a number that quickly compounds when families visit five to ten schools in one trip. On-campus tours provided by universities are free, but the difference, CCT says, is they also provide none of the in-depth information that their own trips do — the kind of in-depth information that can really sell one of those “why this school” essays that every university asks its applicants to write.
CCT’s planning fee goes entirely to them, and the students they work with rarely meet with admissions teams; there’s no direct line that can be drawn from using CCT’s services to a student getting into a school, beyond that student’s own ability to describe their tour experience on their application. It’s all very above-board, but it is worth contemplating the idea that while CCT’s mere existence as a service is not a contributor, it could be considered evidence of the current wealth disparity between prospective college students.
A student without the financial resources to visit a school they’re interested in doesn’t benefit from the wealth of knowledge that can be gained from that experience. A student who can visit a school for a regular tour but can’t afford CCT’s planning fee doesn’t benefit from the specificity of the service that CCT provides. This isn’t to say that CCT should lower their fee, and they certainly aren’t responsible for wealth disparities at large in the United States. The company works (and is successful, going by the testimonials on their website) because Dr. Stone saw a need for this kind of service to exist.
Additionally, Dr. Stone emphasized that they “work within a family’s travel budget for these trips.” Clients often come to CCT on the recommendation of other educational consultants, international families find the company’s services especially helpful considering how confusing the American college system can be, and they have “also done pro-bono or reduced-fee tours for families who are low income.”
I was lucky to be able to visit the majority of my college list — emphasis on lucky. In a way, I experienced a lite-version of CCT’s services when I visited New York University, my alma mater, in that I had a friend who attended the school at the time, and she was able to show me dorms and classrooms and buildings specific to my major, that were otherwise not accessible through the general college tour. But even in that way, I was still lucky.
Considering the time, effort and money that goes into getting a degree, it makes sense for a service like the one CCT provides to exist. $500 may seem steep, but in the grand scheme of how much a degree costs, if it’s financially viable for you to pay for an in-depth college tour, it could also be a worthwhile investment. Regardless of if a college applicant uses CCT’s services or tries to replicate them on their own, it’s worth considering this: as universities become more selective in their admissions processes, maybe it’s time for students to do the same.