A visitor arrives at 9:30 a.m. and tucks a camera into his coat pocket. From the parking lot he studies the still-hushed campus before him. He eyes the brick buildings, the crisscrossing walkways, the frozen grass. For a moment he gazes at a lone tree as if its bare branches dangle clues.
His name is Jeff Kallay, and he has come here to find the soul of York College of Pennsylvania.
A consultant on an endless road trip, Mr. Kallay travels the nation visiting colleges and universities that hire him to conduct a “campus visit audit.” After each tour, he discusses his first impressions with admissions officials. Later he sends them a detailed report, with recommendations covering the logistical aspects of visits, such as parking and signage. He also considers aesthetics, right down to the dust bunnies he finds in stairwells.
But beauty is not Mr. Kallay’s main concern. His business cards identify him as an “experience evangelist,” and wherever he goes he preaches the gospel of good vibrations. He believes that intangibles — like listening and eye contact — do more than any dormitory or library can to make a student’s visit memorable.
In his evaluations, Mr. Kallay rates the experiential qualities of each visit: Do visitors get a warm welcome from security guards and secretaries? Do tour guides ask open-ended questions? Does something fun happen?
The answers have bottom-line implications. Long known as the “golden walk,” the campus visit is a crucial ritual. Research shows that it greatly influences a prospective applicant’s decision to apply to a college — and an accepted student’s decision to enroll. So creating a bang-up tour would behoove any institution.
It’s an open secret, however, that many visits are bland and predictable. Or, as Mr. Kallay puts it, “inauthentic experiences run by PR-spewing tour bots.”
Why? For one thing, he says, many colleges try too hard to promote themselves as places with everything for everyone. Campus visits often seem like careful exercises in sameness, set to a numbing drone of superlatives. That leaves students and parents starved for something real, Mr. Kallay believes. He urges colleges to clearly express what they are — and what they are not.
His growing client list suggests that he has staked out a new frontier in college marketing. “Many places just don’t put energy into it,” he says of visits. “The irony is that here are colleges, places of total experience, that don’t sell themselves as experiences.”
To put it another way, Mr. Kallay thinks colleges could learn a few things from one of the world’s most recognizable hosts: that walking, talking mouse named Mickey.
‘A Human Feeling’
Mr. Kallay figures he has visited Walt Disney World about 150 times. Growing up near Orlando, Fla., he and his brother spent days riding the Space Mountain roller coaster and swimming in the resort’s pools. At a special all-night party for high-school seniors, he and his friends danced into the night as the Pointer Sisters played.
Disney sells memories, and Mr. Kallay would come to believe that colleges do something similar. “What you love is the memory,” he says “There’s a human feeling we have when we’re somewhere with family and friends. Disney is just the stage for it.”
The company also built its reputation on customer service and storytelling. Mr. Kallay practiced both arts as a student tour guide at Lee University, in Cleveland, Tenn. When he showed guests around, he’d relay his personal experiences. He also spoke frankly. “The straight-A students live over here,” he would say, pointing. “The troglodytes live over there.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communications, in 1986, Mr. Kallay worked in Lee’s admissions office as director of recruitment. Later he dabbled in marketing and advertising, steeping himself in consumer psychology. Then, in 1999, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II published The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage. The book expanded on the controversial idea that to keep customers, companies should create experiences for them. The memories of those experiences then become the product, and an emotional bond is formed.
Mr. Kallay had found his sacred text. Soon he joined a higher-education consulting firm in Atlanta, where he first connected the tenets of the “experience economy” to campus tours. In 2006 he left to work for his current employer, TargetX, a Pennsylvania-based company that specializes in student-recruitment strategies.
Since then Mr. Kallay has worked with 70 colleges, and he visits as many as eight campuses a month. His rates range from $2,500 to $20,000, depending on a college’s needs and the number of work days required. Recently, he hired an assistant.
On this Wednesday morning in February, Mr. Kallay arrives at York College just as snow starts to pelt the campus. It’s a powerful reminder that some aspects of any visit are beyond human control.
Inside the administration building, Nancy C. Spataro has high hopes for Mr. Kallay, whom she has heard speak at conferences. The admissions director thinks that York’s tour is good, but not great. “We want to make it a ‘wow,’” she tells him.
First, Mr. Kallay says, the college needs a sign directing visitors from the parking lot to the admissions office, which shares a lobby in the crowded administration building. Ms. Spataro has long wished that her staff had its own building, with much more space to receive the 3,500 annual visitors, give group presentations, and maybe offer some refreshments. After all, a slew of colleges have recently opened plush welcome centers.
Mr. Kallay says York’s lobby does not convey college. With a grin he points to a framed reproduction on the wall. “What the hell does Georgia O’Keeffe have to do with York College?”
More Storytelling
Next Mr. Kallay goes undercover. He joins a half-dozen parents and high-school students on a tour led by Alex Crouse, a junior who earns $7 for each 90-minute outing. In his green York jacket, the student is low-key and likable, canned jokes and all.
Mr. Kallay is here to find flaws, though, and so he does. “It’s always the same,” he whispers after a few minutes. “Walk into a building and talk about it. Blah, blah, blah.”
Sure enough, this tour, like many others, is a trot through and around buildings. The routine confirms that the library has books and computers. That the student center has a cafeteria. That the athletics center has exercise bikes. This could be almost anywhere.
All the while, Mr. Kallay snaps photographs. Around each corner he looks for “cues,” the positive and negative messages he believes campuses send to visitors. When the group enters a dorm lobby, for instance, the young woman at the sign-in desk sends a negative cue by not looking up from her knitting. The sad, blue couches in the hall send one. The just-for-show dorm room, with its weathered throw rug and the cockeyed Green Day poster, sends the wrong signal, too.
Mr. Kallay winces as he surveys the scene. Click goes his camera.
When the tour ends, he has seen a lot of York, including its stunning new performing-arts center. The essence of the place — its Yorkness — eludes him, however.
For much of the afternoon, Mr. Kallay leads a conversation about how to reveal that essence. Brainstorming with Ms. Spataro and her staff, he starts with a question: If York College were a car, a restaurant, or a retailer, what would it be?
“The Olive Garden,” says Ms. Spataro, who says the college offers a good but inexpensive education.
York’s tuition is about $12,000. and many of its 4,600 full-time students are the first in their families to attend college. York tends to compete more with the region’s public universities than with the much pricier private colleges. So, the group agrees, the tour could better distinguish York from larger campuses by emphasizing its intimacy.
To that end, Mr. Kallay says, visitors must encounter more people, particularly faculty members. As it is, visiting students talk with professors only if they have scheduled a meeting in advance. “The tour is too isolated,” the consultant says. “We were in a bubble out there.”
Mr. Kallay mentions the knitting girl. The admissions staff must reach out to students, encourage them to say “hello” to tour groups, he says. Moreover, they must do something about the empty dorm room. “It’s dead,” he tells them, “like a mausoleum up there.”
Two members of the admissions staff grimace. “It’s the best we have,” says one. Mr. Kallay encourages them to let visitors peek into a room where students actually live, clutter and all.
He suggests that York could do many other things as well. Like create a “signature moment,” something visitors can do or touch, perhaps something involving “The Rock,” the big stone that seniors here autograph each spring.
Consider ways to engage all five senses, Mr. Kallay says. He likes that there is a jar of York Peppermint Patties — a local creation — that greets visitors when they sign in, but he says someone should hand the candies to visitors.
Later, Mr. Kallay meets with “the ambassadors,” York’s student tour guides. “You’re the most important people in the admissions process,” he tells them. “Your job is to be master storytellers.”
He delivers a fast-paced talk that explains how iPods and Starbucks have changed consumers’ brains. The students are captivated.
They get various tips: Do not walk backward, because it’s awkward and slows down the tour. Do not tell parents there is no drinking on the campus, because they will not believe you. Do not play dumb when visitors ask about crime.
Mr. Kallay throws them questions: “What’s the teacher-student ratio here?”
“15 to 1,” says one student.
“Blah, blah, blah,” Mr. Kallay says. “Now tell me the story behind those numbers.”
One student says he and a professor send text messages to each other all the time. Another says her favorite professor once noticed that she was very down and invited her to come stay with her family for the night. A third describes how he and a professor have a secret handshake.
Mr. Kallay nods approvingly. He asks if anyone can tell a story about how he or she grew while at York.
One young woman describes how as a freshman she was scared and lonely, crying herself to sleep for weeks. Now a senior, she came to love York, has many friends, and is the student-government president.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Kallay says. “See? That’s a great story.”
‘Sense of Culture’
The evolution of campus visits would seem like a natural progression in the the recruitment of today’s highly coddled students. For better or worse, many applicants carry a sense of entitlement into the college-search process. “We know this generation is different from other generations,” says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. “Once they get to college, they think, ‘We’re entitled to positive experiences because we’ve paid a lot of money to come here.’”
Although Mr. Kallay is the nation’s first full-time campus tourist, he is not the first to advise colleges on their campus-visit strategies. Take the Art & Science Group, a marketing company that works with colleges. The group, has polled students to determine the most important factor in their choices of college. Sixty-five percent cited the campus visit, while only 26 percent cited college Web sites.
Admissions-office budgets, however, do not usually reflect that breakdown, says Richard A. Hesel, a principal with the company. “Colleges will spend thousands on Web sites and mailings, but the most decisive thing is treated way too casually. We invariably give advice about tours, but in most cases things don’t actually change. It’s a difficult thing to train students every year.”
And even a well-trained tour guide cannot please everyone. Mark C. Moody, a director of college counseling at the Colorado Academy, a private school in Denver, has seen students sour on campuses because they did not like something about their tour guides — perhaps how they spoke or how they wore their hair. But students come back buzzing about how many friendly people they met.
“It’s always about people and the sense of culture, not the facilities,” Mr. Moody says. “Seventeen-year-olds are looking for people like them, a sense of the place that’s elusive.”
One challenge for colleges is that campuses, like towns or cities, do not reveal all of their treasures in one afternoon. Another is that campuses, particularly large ones, are a complex mesh of subcultures, whose members may experience the same campus quite differently. That complicates the quest for authenticity.
Mr. Kallay concedes as much. Over dinner after his visit to York College, a discussion of marketing messages leads back to Disney World. “In some ways, I hate Disney,” he says. Then he takes back the verb.
What the man who grew up exploring the Magic Kingdom means is that he understands the downside of its peculiar brand of magic. After all, the place is superficial, unreal, always on message — things he tells colleges not to be. “Disney does some things well,” he says. “But is it authentic? No, it’s so manufactured.”
Just as Mickey Mouse is complicated, so, too, is overhauling a campus tour.
But the next day at York, Mr. Kallay sees progress. He and the admissions officials meet with two senior administrators, who are receptive to many of his suggestions for revamping the tour. By the time he leaves, he expects that the campus will get better signs. Pending the president’s approval, the admissions office would get its own space for welcoming visitors in the student center. The tour would include the new residence halls on the west side of the campus. And one senior admissions official would become full-time director of campus visits.
A week later, Ms. Spataro says her guides are psyched, already having incorporated many of Mr. Kallay’s suggestions.
The experience evangelist is happy. “It’s a very good start,” he says. “I converted ‘em, dude!”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 55, Issue 26, Page A1
