College tours for…tweens?!

By Christina Tynan-Wood

At 15 years old our son, Cole, suddenly lost interest in his future. It was the summer after his freshman year of high school, and our boy, who had been dreaming about going off to college since he was in the fifth grade, started asking if college mattered.

He’s a smart kid, but he wasn’t enjoying high school. And I could see that he was starting to view college as four more years of the same drudgery. My husband and I panicked —and started touring colleges to help re-inspire him. I wasn’t so much interested in helping him choose a college as I was in showing him that life would be different in college, filled with freedom and independence that he would love.

A working vacation

So we decided to work a few university tours into our summer travel plans. We choose campuses not based on how likely he was to attend them, but by how well they suited our vacation plans geographically. It was a solid strategy — in fact, it’s just what college counselors suggest. “I always encourage families to work a casual college tour into a family vacation,” says Marty O'Connell, Executive Director of Colleges that Change Lives “That way you can expose kids to different college environments without putting any pressure on them.”

But along the way, something completely unexpected happened: Cole’s little sister, Ava, devised a detailed life plan based almost entirely on what she learned while tagging along. Sure, these stops were aimed at her brother, but for my daughter – all of 12 years old – it was pure motivation. According to O’Connell, this outcome is not unusual. “Over the years, I have heard over and over from kids who were that younger sibling,” she says. “ ‘My older brother hated that school. But I loved it.’ ”

Tagalong tween

We only brought Ava along because not bringing her was awkward. She came grudgingly and seemed — at least at first — bored. She was in the summer between sixth and seventh grade, caught up in the thrill of being a newly minted middle schooler and barely handling bigger responsibilities and homework. She wasn’t ready to think of herself as a high school student, let alone a college coed.

And, admittedly, the tours — our first was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — started out slowly. We had signed up for the official guided tour. It began with a lecture by the admissions officer, who focused on statistics about how many people get in, what sort of students they look for, and other details that would interest serious applicants — but not my kids. Next, though, came the student-led tour.

In this, a witty, self-deprecating young man who claimed to be a middling student academically (though I doubt this) walked us around and showed us college life from a student's perspective. “I have only one claim to fame,” he told the small crowd, wilting in the southern heat. “I started a secret society.” The teens in the group wanted to know more. But he was mum. “It’s secret,” he insisted.

He had the high schoolers’ attention now, though my middle schooler was still bored. Our tour guide showed us his favorite dorms, the best place to get pizza, and where students go to study and relax. He told us local lore about trees that held good luck for the school, showed us video of flash mobs in the library, pointed out a famous student basketball player he’d lost a girlfriend to, and shared the campus rule about never kissing on a certain bench because of the superstition that it would end in marriage. I enjoyed the tour and so did Cole.