On vacation -- at a college campus

"I'm really feeling this place," Ryan said.

Ryan and his friend, Dylan White, 17, came with Ryan's grandfather, Cliff Herlth, 59, who teaches at the boys' high school.

"I don't see him much out of school, so it was fun," Ryan said.

Megan Kelly, 17, of Encinitas, another filmmaker-to-be, arrived with her mother, Kris, 45, and pigtailed younger sister, Faith, 9. Faith, wearing sparkly turquoise sunglasses, seemed too young for the guide's explanation of the University of California's labyrinthine admission policies, but she was soon advising her sister.

"I see you sitting under a tree here," Faith told Megan.

Charles Crowder, who is divorced, said he cherished the time with his 16-year-old daughters, whose high test scores and grades should earn them their pick of colleges. The girls brought along Nia Allen-Lee of Sayreville, N.J., whom they met at a summer program for high-achieving students.

Crowder, like other parents on the tour, seemed to be having more fun than many students, who texted or stared vacantly into space as the guide continued to spiel.

His daughters, who spent most of their summers taking classes, volunteering or working, said they didn't begrudge the time away from vacation. But UCLA wasn't their first choice for college, they said.

The family is black, and the girls said they want a campus with a strong African American presence, like Columbia. Columbia's 2008 freshman class was 12.1% black, while this fall UCLA expects 4.7%, or 209, of its 4,459 freshmen to be African American.

Chelsea was turned off by discussion of large class sizes, while Nia, who is working this summer as a page for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), said she preferred the atmosphere of political engagement at UC Berkeley. Nia was not impressed by the guide's description of a 1987 prank in which USC students released thousands of crickets inside the UCLA library.

"That's not even funny; it would mess up the books," Nia said.

By tour's end, however, the university had partly won over Chelsea.

"It's a nice campus," she said.

After a short break, the family was off to a second tour at USC. There, Crowder said, they ran into many of the same families they had seen on the UCLA tour.

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gale.holland@latimes.com