Campus Tour Guide Development Benchmarks

The study presents data from a survey of 59 North American colleges about how they select, train, develop and incentivize their campus tour guides. The page reports helps its readers to answer questions such as: how many tour guides do colleges maintain? How do they train their tour guides? How much are they paid if they are paid? What other tasks do tour guides take on when they are not giving tours? How do colleges build enthusiasm and camaraderie among their tour guides? What percentage of college require exams for tour guides and what is on these exams? How do colleges find tour guides in hard-to-fill roles or with special qualifications? Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • Only 33% of tour guides are male. • Private colleges were more likely than public colleges to have a training programs for new tour guides. 92.31% of private colleges, but only76.19% of public colleges had tour guide training programs. • Community Colleges required their new guides to complete the greatest mean number of shadow tours before leading their own tours, 5.07; the range was 1.5-16 tours. • 57.14% of MA/PHD Granting institutions have Facebook pages for their guides. • Year to year retention rates for campus tour guides for colleges in the sample ranged from 25%-100%. • 51.67% of colleges sampled hold social events for campus tour guides.