Common Sense
College Tour VideosBring On NaptimeFriday, February 15, 2008 By Preston Cornish
Because of the importance of education in today’s information age, employers value college degrees more today than they ever have before. This has led to a boom in the number of college students—to a record 17.6 million in 2006 from 13 million in 1988. Students today have even more options when it comes to their college educations, thanks to cheap transportation and new modes of communication, such as email and cell phones. That means that students are widening their college searches to include schools all across the country. But often, students are left scratching their heads when it comes to where they want to go. With thousands of schools spread across the United States, it can be nearly impossible to figure out which school would make the best fit for the potential undergrad. The college visit has become a quintessential ingredient in deciding on a college, but it’s expensive and time-consuming to visit schools spread across the fifty-states. That’s where Cliff and Sami Kramon come in. For over a decade, the dynamic duo has been trekking across the globe, visiting just about every major college in the US and many abroad. Thankfully, the Kramons, private college counselors from New Jersey, brought their video equipment with them. At each college they visit, they schedule to go on a typical college tour. The videos they film make up the library of that of their company, Collegiate Choice. Each video runs anywhere from a half-hour to two-hours, depending on the school. I sampled their collection, watching the videos from Brown, Dartmouth and Stanford. Collegiate Choice makes it a point to emphasize the fact that their videos are “simple recordings” and that they do not have a video production team. Each tour is filmed with a regular, handheld video-camera, and minimal editing is done. On one hand, this makes the videos seem infinitely more realistic. To lower expectations, each video comes with a lengthy brochure explaining the various shortcomings the videos have; it’s almost like the producers know exactly how to make their videos better, but just don’t care enough to do it. When I e-mailed Mr. Kramon to ask him why there is no online ordering on the Collegiate Choice website and why it looks like a 12-year-old wannabe web designer created the site (okay, I used more subtlety in my questioning), he responded with the obtuse and ridiculously misleading analogy that Google’s website is “basic” and that “it isn’t like we haven’t seen more dynamic sites, but we wanted to keep ours consistent with our DVDs.” The videos themselves are “straight shoot [sic], like war footage,” as Mr. Kramon so eloquently put it. Like war footage, you feel repulsed when you watch the disappointing camera work and boring cinematography of Mr. Kramon. When the tour guide stops to talk at any point on the tour, the video stops with him/her, providing the viewer with a boring static shot of some part of the campus, with other tour group members likely impeding the angle. That brings up another point: the tour guides are not shown in any part of the video. Mr. Kramon says this is because he does not want the image of the guide to help bias viewer opinion of the campus and I might be inclined to agree with him. It does, however, lead to a very boring tour. Overall, Collegiate Choice Walking Tours is a boring, but informative product. If you want to go on a campus tour without actually going to a college, I recommend it highly. If you need help falling asleep, it also works well. Ultimately, it is a product geared more towards parents than kids. DVDs $15, www.collegiatechoice.com |