The Dream Tour
Listen up, high school juniors: Now it’s your turn.
As relieved seniors sort through college acceptances and their parents start sweating in earnest over tuition, the opening gong has sounded for 11th-graders. Spring vacation is the unofficial start of the next application sweepstakes. The first event for those with enough money or good enough grades: the college tour.
That would explain the bewildered-looking teenage girl in the lobby of a Boston hotel last month, lugging her 832-page “Best 357 Colleges.” And the hotel desk clerk checking in a Southern California family: “You must be visiting colleges too, right?”
Admissions officers and student guides insist that their colleges are the coolest place on Earth. “This is where you can follow your passion!” one Brown University tour leader fairly shouted. “Our students do internships on Wall Street!” gushed a New York University administrator. College tours are big on exclamation points.
Little wonder then that parents and students feel like looky-loos at real estate open houses -- in a buyers’ market. The kids gawk at shiny weight machines in the gym, nod at the prospect of “hands-on research” with professors, and drift through dining halls with 24-hour coffee bars and menus catering to vegans, carnivores and even those on peanut-free diets. Moms peer into the dorm bathrooms and size up the closets.
But a buyers’ market this isn’t. Costs for many private universities have rocketed to over $40,000 and even tuition at the University of California has soared in recent years.
No matter, the colleges do a terrific sales job, and who wouldn’t want to spend four years following one’s passion in an ivy-covered retreat? So even with dozens of high schoolers packing each tour over spring break -- and with many colleges running multiple tours daily -- hope still springs eternal, at least in 11th grade. UCLA generated a whopping 42,000 applications for 4,300 spots. Columbia University lured 17,000 applicants last year for 1,300 places in next fall’s class.
Next spring, when their envelopes arrive, this year’s juniors will learn hard adult lessons from those numbers about caprice, luck and the value of realistic expectations. For now though, they can still dream.
