For high school students who have the time and money to travel, visiting college campuses is the best way to get a feel for places where they may spend four years.

But for those who can't visit, or who are just beginning their search, www.youniversitytv.com offers virtual tours of about 400 colleges and universities.

The South Florida-based website offers videos of four-year institutions all over the United States, from the Ivy League's Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., to Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

The quick and breezy videos show campus landmarks, introduce students and faculty members and describe some of the course offerings and local attractions that set each campus apart.

Schools neither pay nor are paid to have their videos included. The tours are filmed and produced by YOUniversityTV itself, said spokeswoman Kathleen Rojas.

One South Florida college counselor downplays the value of online tours.

''Some of our kids will use websites to do virtual tours, but a very large majority of the kids, if they can pay for it, will take college trips,'' said Marcia Hunt, director of college counseling at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, which takes groups of students on a weeklong college tour each year for $1,900.

Real trips do a better job of helping students gauge how well they'll fit into a campus, said Hunt. ''When you're taking a virtual tour you're missing that interaction with everyday students,'' she said.

Still, Hunt acknowledged, ``Virtual tours can be helpful for the kids for whom financially it's difficult to make college trips.''

Joanna Schultz, director of college counseling at the Ellis School in Pittsburgh, said she advises students to use as many sources of information as they can: The institutions' websites, sites like YOUniversityTV and even printed catalogs and brochures.

''It's not the same as being on the campus, but on the other hand you can't get there sometimes, and then you use what you can,'' she said.

All the YOUniversityTV videos are presented in a similar format, which makes school comparisons easy. The site includes a page for student-posted videos of random campus scenes, such as wintertime break-dancers on the street at Monmouth University in New Jersey, that give an unscripted look at student life.

YOUniversityTV chooses its schools based on criteria such as out-of-state enrollment, national ranking, academics, research, athletics, student body size and religious affiliation, said Rojas.

A few big names are missing including Georgetown, Brown, Wellesley, Harvard and Yale. Rojas said YOUniversityTV hopes to add another 100 schools as campus and video-crew schedules permit.

Based in Boynton Beach, the site was founded in 2008 and officially launched three months ago.

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