For many seniors at Camas High School, college visits have been a frequent occurrence in the past months. These visits are usually pretty standard looks at the housing, food, and culture of a school; and can be very helpful for students when deciding where to attend college next fall. 

One aspect that I find particularly unhelpful, though, is guided college tours.

While a guided tour of a prospective college can be helpful when attended once or twice, it starts to become more of a boring and tedious process than the helpful, unique experience I believe it should be. In my experience, taking the dreaded college tour weekend excursion exposes the flaws of the group tour system, those being monotony, sameness, and an overall lack of personality. Call me cynical, but I get tired of hearing the same key talking points on every college tour. 

The main issue I have with the group tour system is the aforementioned lack of personality. Tour guides frequently try to create a sense of uniqueness through conversations about their experiences at the school, but I can’t help hearing the same things I’ve heard before. “I LOVED my time here.” “This place changed my life!” Hey, maybe I am cynical, but all that I hear when tour guides say these things are fake positivity and vague compliments about the school. 

I’m sure you’re wondering if I have any proposals to fix this system.

The answer is, yes! I do! I propose that the college tour system focus become more specialized to prospective majors. It seems, at least in my experience, that group tours don’t cover enough specifics regarding people’s academic paths. I think that doing away with the broad group tour system and moving fully to a system comprised of smaller group tours focusing on specific majors/general areas of interests would allow every student touring to get both the broad tour of the college as well as a more specific look into their prospective major’s teaching style and lead to increased interest in the school. After all, colleges are always looking for more students. 

I understand if these proposals are out of reach for many colleges. I just want to help evolve the college tour experience to be more unique, rewarding, and personalized, and I believe that once these goals have been reached, the tour experience will be much better overall.