Mr. Imbruce, who graduated last May, has been working to right that wrong over the last two years. With help from actors at the WB Network (where he had an internship), he produced "The U: Uncut," a DVD series of behind-the-scenes tours of 50 popular colleges. Now on sale at theu.com, the DVD's feature 10-minute MTV-style clips gleaned from four-day visits and dozens of interviews at each campus.
"Uncut" is the latest entry in a growing category of college-search resources that let students do the talking about their own campuses. Web logs, online photo galleries and real-time chats with current students are the high-tech descendants of "insider" products like the College Prowler guidebooks and Collegiate Choice Walking Tours, which are basically amateur videotapes of student-led tours at 350 campuses, including shots of the touring crowd and students walking by.
Cliff Kramon, a co-founder of Collegiate Choice, says his customers want those reality visuals and pay close attention to the ethnic makeup of the student body or the way people style their hair.
But the new tools tell a richer tale.
Online chats, often scheduled on college Web sites near acceptance deadlines, give prospective students a chance to ask questions about academic competitiveness, the social climate on campus or the amount of drinking that goes on. Blogs and photo galleries chronicle what it is like to be a freshman, day by day. Bucknell's Web site, for example, has a Year in the Life section, where students talk about their busy extracurricular lives, the pressures of managing their time and, in the case of one young man, how overwhelming it feels to be away from home.
While colleges don't edit the blogs, they do hand-pick the students they want representing them. So don't expect a glimpse inside a student liquor cabinet.
Of course, nothing beats an actual overnight dormitory visit for a candid look. But today's generation, raised on reality TV and sifting through scores of colleges, is looking for an easier way to see real students in their habitat.
Not even on-site tours provide a good sense of place, says Powell Fraser, who as a columnist for The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton, has criticized its college tour.
"You're not just with your parents," he says. "You're with everybody else's parents. And you are with a tour guide who is told to give the party line - the party line on partying." The guides play down the eating clubs that constitute the campus's social hub, if they mention them at all, says Mr. Fraser, a senior.
You can learn about eating clubs, as well as more mundane topics like tuition costs, on "Uncut."
The series flashes glimpses of fraternity parties and interiors of dormitory rooms. Still, the videos do not tell a full story. "Superficial" is how Ryan C. Tuck, a senior at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, describes his campus's representation. And this reporter found that the depiction of the University of Virginia, her alma mater, focused so much on Greek life that it missed the diversity of the student body.
For a true sense of campus life, suggests Barmak Nassirian, an official at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, dig into the Web site's section that is meant for current students. Scan student services and the bulletin boards of student organizations. Read the college newspaper. Lurk on listservs for signs of what students care about.
"In terms of producing an authentic image of a school," he says, a college's site can be "much more telling than any attempt at a reality-TV interview."
