The study looks closely at how 54 colleges and universities plan, develop, implement and evaluate their campus tours. The report looks at how they staff, train and pay their tour guides. It presents detailed data on salaries and budgets, strategies and best practices. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: how many visitors do campuses get? What percentage and types of college pay expenses for some visitors and which expenses? What is included on tours and how have tours changed over the past few years? What level of resources are campuses putting into their campus tours and what are their plans for the future? Had they over the past five years hired a consultant to advise on campus tours? How much did they pay them? How do they train their tour guides? What is the role of the college faculty? What percentage of visitors are freshmen and sophomores? Juniors and seniors? Not high school students at all? What percentage of visitors are overnight visitors?
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
• At research universities in the sample, 28% of prospective students on campus tours were high school juniors.
• Only 3.7% of survey participants said that they were spending less staff time than 2 years ago on campus tours.
• 16.67% of the colleges in the sample had hired a consultant to assist in developing college tours over the past 5 years. 20.59% of private colleges and 10% of public colleges had done so.