Dog eat dog

The Darwinian nature of visit days can be disappointing, embarrassing and, occasionally, life-affirming, finds Tim Birkhead

Of all the varied aspects of my job, one of the more demanding is dealing with prospective students and their parents. I'm proud of our department; we have great staff and spanking- new laboratory facilities, and I am happy to talk about them and our courses till the cows come home.

But what makes visit days hard work is the silence that invariably follows when I ask if anyone has any questions. Parents and offspring are reluctant to ask anything, probably because they are worried about embarrassing themselves or their children by saying something stupid in front of other equally uncomfortable parents.

With three undergraduates of my own, I have had the opportunity to tour more than a dozen UK universities on visit days. I know from my own department that the amount of effort we expend on visit days is considerable, and we justify it by telling ourselves that our jobs depend on it. Almost regardless of the cost, we have to do it... or so I thought.

What quickly became clear from my tour of other establishments is that not all universities consider visit days equally important. Broadly speaking, there is negative correlation between a university's (or a course's) popularity and the quality of the visit. That's fine and to be expected - it is natural selection in action.

But at one university an undergraduate who was clearly incompetent, untrained or both led a campus visit for a group of 30 parents and sixthformers that eventually led to a parental revolt. Getting to this particular university had required an early start and a long drive and, after being subjected to such a dismal and insulting performance, I was momentarily tempted to tell the staff how they might improve things. Then I remembered that this was natural selection. It's dog eat dog out there on the visit-day circuit, and there are no benefits in helping the competition.

While parents can probably tell very quickly whether they have had a good departmental visit or not, it is much more difficult to know what the prospective customers think. There are so many factors that influence a sixthformer's choice: the weather on the day of the visit; what the clubs are like in town; whether they like the feel of the place and so on. But my guess is that with parents having to pay hefty top-up fees, their impressions about where their offspring should go will count more and more.

Disappointed by the reluctance of sixthformers and their parents to ask questions on our open days, I was determined not to be guilty of the same when I visited other universities with my offspring. At the art department of one university, after our undergraduate guide told us how exciting their final-year projects were, I politely asked him what his own project was on. "The visualisation of personal anguish," he replied.

Thinking only what a far cry that was from the sorts of projects our biology students do, I asked why he had chosen such a gloomy topic. I knew immediately that I'd blundered. The student paused and then quietly told us that he had recently been diagnosed with testicular cancer. A hush fell like a concrete block over the little cluster of parents. My daughter crumpled with embarrassment. After what seemed like an age, he added cheerfully: "But I'm OK now." Another pause and then from the back of the group a maternal voice piped up "Bravo! Bravo!" There was spontaneous applause and we moved quickly on to the sculpture department.

Tim Birkhead is professor of behavioural ecology at Sheffield University.