Originally published at: TikToker satirizes campus tour guides | Boing Boing
…
1 Like
I’m going to assume she’s a hoot, however I’ve got zero clue how to watch the video… is there one? I’m confused.
2 Likes
She’s not.
CollegeHumor did this better.
8 Likes
19 Likes
How are you trying to watch it? In my experience on a computer: In Firefox, TikTok videos play horribly. In Chrome, they play okay, but the audio is out of sync with the video. Generally, I don’t have any issues with other video platforms. TikTok is the worst.
2 Likes
Seems a lot like Millie Kentner.
3 Likes
colleges struggle to provide the tour capacity that prospective students demand.
This is so true. I live near a college campus and the endless tour groups are practically tripping over each other. Sometimes the groups get comingled and kids and their parents end up in different tours, like stars in a collision of galaxies.
3 Likes
They did it differently, not necessarily better.
2 Likes
The bougie college tour is so parents can post photos on social media and tell everyone “Hey look at us! Madison and I are on the East Coast looking at schools — look, we’re at Princeton! NYU! Yale!” when in reality everyone knows the kid is going to go to Boise State or University of Nevada Reno. At least that has been my (somewhat cynical) perception.
Thankfully COVID put the damper on any pressure to do that with me kid, although we did wander around an empty UC Davis one weekend to try to get a feel for it.
3 Likes
What’s a college tour? When I went to college I picked up a course catalog, decided what classes I needed and sent a check to the Community College. There was no tour or fancy application process and the only acceptance letter I got was the canceled check.
My duaghter kept up the great family tradition but at a different Community College.
4 Likes
Yes, there’s a video, the preview still is a young woman in a green shirt. If you see that, hover over it & click. If you don’t see that, then I don’t know.
2 Likes
I love Eleanor Merton’s tour guides, all named Craig of course.
3 Likes
Seems like the video was embedded after I posted. Disappointed, very not funny.
1 Like
tiktok really does generally suck. I’m running a ton of adblockers on FF, and tiktok vids have sporadically worked in the past, but now seem to work fine since I updated the browser. [knocks wood]
youtube vids are horrific when I use chrome. All embedded and linked vids reload over & over at a blinding speed, causing the whole page to reload. Can’t click on anything in it. Does some fuxed up stuff to history, too, filling it with the same page a zillion times after being on it about 30 seconds. Vids’ actual yt pages are fine. Attempting to determine which adblocker is responsible has been unsuccessful, which is really weird. I finally started disabling javascript on pages w/yt vids, so vids are replaced by an “unable to load vid” error msg with a “view this on youtube” link to its page.
…and someone uses that knowledge to burgle their home in their absence.
4 Likes
Yeah neither one really captured the zeitgeist of the college tour leader. But College Humor has a budget–and they’re named COLLEGE humor after all–so I would expect a bit more from their effort than a solo TikTokker.
2 Likes
Ouch. We toured UNR last year in October. She ended up not going there, though they really put the recruiting in high gear.
Is the college tour problematic in the sense that it is the place where all of the things that drive up the cost of college education are advertised as somehow making a particular college attractive? I mean I don’t recall ever seeing in any college literature that a school had a “brand new state-of-the-art gym” but it seems to be an important part of many of these tours, in addition to things like planned trips, years abroad, five-star eating, etc. (but also implying that there is a big party scene?) They are designed to make 17-year-old kids find them attractive insofar as a 17-year-old kid won’t calculate those “perks” into what they are paying additionally in their 30-year indentured-servitude/student loans. I guess parents are probably more convinced by the apparent prestige of the institution and this comes out from neo-classical buildings and manicured grass.
I guess what I am saying is the college tours are one of the areas that make colleges really seem like the capitalist institutions that they actually are.
Aww … now I feel a little bad. Didn’t mean to imply that UNR was bad — was meant as an example of perfectly OK school as opposed to the, uh, “reach schools” people post about on social.
In our case, our student had no idea about any schools. She/We had heard of college visits/tours and the campus “just spoke to you” where you know you were destined to go there, but without visiting, you can’t get a feel. Our student made an observation that all the colleges say the same thing on their websites… they’re the best at this-and-that, they’re diverse, etc, etc. The main benefit of the tour was that we were allowed to go inside some buildings. During lockdown, we either got no tour, or couldn’t go inside anywhere. We hit UNR right before a covid surge, so the tour took us into a few buildings. Speaking of UNR…
No worries at all, although I do wonder a bit what kinds of reputations some of those schools she applied to have. She actually did like UNR, but I think she liked another school or two better. One thing that did turn us off a bit was how hard they tried. I mean, c’mon, you gotta play a little hard-to-get!
1 Like
