Campus Videos Help Trim Application Costs

It’s decision time for college-bound high school seniors.

College application deadlines usually hit in the last few weeks of the year, which means that millions of students, and their parents, are grappling with college essays and application fees.

For students such as Jeff Packer of Laguna Niguel, that presents a problem. He’s an A student with dozens of college choices, including a number of East Coast colleges that he’s never visited.

It’s a waste of time and money to apply to schools that won’t suit him -- application fees run from $2 to $250 -- and most schools require long applications and multiple essays too. But winnowing down the list without visiting the college is tough.

“You just can’t get a feel for a college from a Web site,” said Amy Packer, Jeff’s mother.

Enter Cliff and Sami Kramon, independent guidance counselors from New Jersey who counsel students and parents on getting into college. They were frustrated by the same issue when trying to help their own clients choose a school. (Parents hire independent guidance counselors to work with their college-bound kids, helping them choose classes and activities that can get them into top colleges. The counselors also try to help students determine what type of college -- big or small, private or public -- will suit them best, based on their grades, activities and personalities.)

It’s easy to get information about college costs, academic specialties and sports offerings from books and Web sites. But getting a feel for a campus -- whether it’s rural and quiet or urban and active -- is tough without actually going there, Sami Kramon said.

“We know it isn’t always economically feasible to visit all the schools that might be appropriate,” Cliff Kramon said. “Yet this is a huge decision.”

Armed with a video camera, Kramon set out to produce a solution -- videotaped “walking tours” of popular college campuses. Seventeen years later, the Kramons have videos of campus orientation tours at about 360 colleges and universities. Their “Collegiate Choice Walking Tours” tapes sell for $15 each, with one campus per tape.

Amy Packer is a big fan, as is Barbara Barnett, a Villa Park guidance counselor who has purchased about 150 of the tapes to use as a lending library for her clients.

“It’s one of the most popular parts of my program,” Barnett said. “It’s amazing how colleges have personalities. A student gets a great feel for a college with [an on-site] tour. They spend two hours on campus and either say ‘I love it’ or ‘I will never go here.’

“If the child can’t go [to the school], this is the next best thing,” she said. “Some of my families have seen 15 or 20 of them.”

Cliff Kramon, who makes the tapes, says it both helps and hurts that he’s a guidance counselor. He knows which topics are important to students making college decisions and makes sure they’re dealt with by the tour guide.

But his videos aren’t likely to be nominated for best documentary.

There’s no background music, no clever editing. When the guide points out a building to the left, the video camera veers to the left. When there’s lots to see, the video swings around, catching sideways snippets of students, buildings, churches and cars driving down the street.

“Let’s just say it looks like something your dad might have done,” Kramon said.

Collegiate Choice tries not to photograph the college tour guides, who mostly are students volunteering their time. That’s fine when the tours are outside where there’s lots to see, Amy Packer notes with a laugh. But in one college tour that she bought, the guide brought everyone into a classroom to answer questions.

“So when there was some long ramble by the tour guide, the video was looking off into space,” she said. “There just wasn’t anything to see.”

Still, Packer thinks the benefits outweigh the limited production values.

“You see the campus. You see the people. You hear the environment. It gives you an idea of what it would actually feel like to walk across the campus yourself,” she said. “You can’t get a feel for that by reading what they have posted on their Web site.”

Collegiate Choice has walking tours of most of the big, popular private colleges, ranging from Notre Dame and Boston College to Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, USC and Duke, as well as big public schools such as UCLA and UC Berkeley, Cliff Kramon said. It also offers tours of some foreign campuses, such as Oxford in England, Trinity College in Ireland and the University of Seville in Spain.

The videos shouldn’t replace an in-person tour of a college that the student is serious about, Kramon added. But it may help whittle down the choices.

More information about the tours can be found at the company’s Web site at www .collegiatechoice.com.

Times staff writer Kathy M. Kristof, author of “Investing 101” and “Taming the Tuition Tiger,” welcomes your comments and suggestions but regrets that she cannot respond individually to letters or phone calls. Write to Personal Finance, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail kathy.kristof@latimes.com. For past Personal Finance columns, visit The Times’ Web site at latimes.com/perfin.