Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for an afternoon and you’ll see an endless stream of tourists, all constantly rubbing the same toe of the John Harvard statue (to which drunk students forever do unspeakable things).

So it’s a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they’re all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It’s true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries–the libraries, in fact, don’t require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular ‘incidents’ when people try to sneak in just to take a look… or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it’s not that Yale is special about it, it’s just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus–Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my “in a word” explanation, and skipped to the end, don’t worry! You didn’t miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don’t go inside residential college gates it’s not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction… : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.