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February 28, 2008
College tours: a worst practice in communication
The baby of the family (6’2”, 180 lbs.) is graduating from high school this June, so we’re in the process of finding Nick a college. Last week he and I visited four institutions of higher learning, and I was reminded once again of how painful these experiences can be.
This is surprising, really, because in other ways colleges communicate very effectively with prospective students and their parents. The direct mail materials they send, for example, tend to be colorful and well-designed, with lots of photos of smiling students and quotes from those students telling why the college is so cool.
Most college web sites are also pretty good (here are two from schools my son is considering Emmanuel College and Temple University), featuring easy navigation, effective search, and lively graphics.
And many universities have enlisted social media in their communication efforts, with programs encouraging prospective students to connect with current students through such venues as AOL Instant Messaging and Facebook.
So if these colleges are good at communicating at a distance, why are they so bad at face-to-face communication? Out of four colleges we visited last week, two of them started their tours with a mind-numbing, worst-practice PowerPoint® presentation, narrated by an Admissions geek. (The third offered a presentation after the campus tour, but we skipped out.)
The presentations were as bad as you’d find at any corporation: a series of slides with bulleted lists, with the presenter reading every word.
After the first three minutes of the first presentation, Nick whispered to me, “This is just for the parents, not for the kids.”
Well, no, because I was as cranky as he was. So, to amuse myself, I began to silently consult on how to run the session better. There were about 15 prospective students (and about 20 parents) in the group. Why not ask a couple of students a warm-up question like, “What is one reason you’re here this morning?” And a student would answer, “Because my mother made me,” and everyone would laugh.
Or run some You Tube-type clips, produced by actual students? Or put out a bunch of facts, then give students a pop quiz, with a prize for the kid who got the most correct answers (and a prize for the one who got the fewest correct answers).
I could have gone on, but luckily the presentation came to an end, and it was time to take the campus tour (which wasn’t that great, either, but at least we were walking around in the fresh air, able to see things for ourselves, with not a single PowerPoint slide in sight).
Posted by Alison Davis at February 28, 2008 03:42 PM