Virtual Video Campus Tours - Not Quite Yet

With all the HubBub over YouTube, and Internet video in general, I figured that this could be a pretty slick way to check out a college. That instead of hopping in the car or on a plane for a campus visit, there are probably lots of video tours online -- produced either by students, applicants or the universities themselves.

Wrong.

There is some of this content on YouTube, but it's still pretty hard to find and of marginal value. Maybe it's hidden there somewhere, but in a couple of hours of searching I wasn't able to find much. My prediction: a few years from now this is going to be the way to visually check out a campus or a college -- but we're not quite there yet.

Here's what I did discover:

1) There's a site called theU that features 50 professionally produced, 15 minute video introductions to top colleges. This site was created by a well-connected undergrad at Columbia and the videos are described as:
"...MTV-style college video tour ... Created for students, by students, theU presents college life, uncensored."
If you go to theU site you can watch one free video, one time. Thereafter they cost $4.95 each. Here's the list of the 50 colleges they cover, including 15 of the CollegeAdmissionForum 'Select 25'. I found the video I sampled both entertaining and informative and worth the 5 bucks for a college on your short list.

2) There's not much on YouTube, yet. theU has put a 1-2 minute preview of each of their videos up there but there's not much student, applicant nor university produced material. Here's theU preview for Stanford (so you can see how well-done they are):




Here's a slick university produced piece from Yale. I'm guessing most colleges will post videos like this soon:




And finally, here's the best example I could find of a student-produced video. A series actually. The team of Sarah (the student) and Sheila created and posted 14 separate 30-60 second videos touring the Harvard campus. You can find them on YouTube by searching for 'Harvard Collection' (or clicking this link). Here's the first in the series so you can see what they're like:




(update: RSS subscribers. If you can't see the three embedded videos above, come see them at my blog)

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