Kansas University’s annual Wheat State Whirlwind Tour fell victim to budget cuts this year, but a group of KU recruiters has another whirlwind tour on the schedule.

The Wheat State tour, which had been an annual event since 1997, was intended to give KU faculty members an up-close experience with the state they serve. Forty to 50 faculty members piled into a bus and spent most of a week traveling to parts of the state most had never seen. It offered only a taste of Kansas, but it provided some new information, and hopefully some new insights, to faculty members. The benefits of the trip seemed well worth the $27,000 from state and KU Endowment funds, and university officials should try to restore the tour next year.

In the meantime, KU has announced a whirlwind trip of another sort called the Rock Chalk Roadshow. The show is a weeklong swing by KU staffers through southern Kansas to meet with high school and community college officials and prospective KU students and their parents. To say the schedule looks ambitious is an understatement. From Sunday through Friday, KU staff members, including representatives from the admissions and scholarships office, will travel 4,000 miles through 37 Kansas counties. They are scheduled to meet with school counselors from 74 high schools and community colleges and hold receptions for prospective students and their parents in Garden City, Great Bend, Hutchinson, Winfield and Pittsburg.

Even though the KU group plans to split up to meet with the school counselors either individually or in groups, that’s a lot of meetings to squeeze into five days.

KU officials are doing the right thing by trying to step up their efforts to recruit students across Kansas. Through the years, many Kansas residents from other parts of the state, not to mention those in Lawrence, have reported a lack of attention from KU recruiters. While Kansas State actively courted those students, even top students said they barely heard from KU.

It’s great that KU officials are making this trip, but the format seems a bit rushed. Cruising into a town and meeting with counselors or prospective students for an hour or two is a nice gesture, but such a hurried approach may not communicate a sincere interest in those students or their needs. Some meaningful follow-up may be planned and certainly would contribute to the effort.

One of the nice things about the Wheat State tour was that it gave people from KU an opportunity to learn more about Kansas. This week’s recruiting tour will give people in Kansas an opportunity to learn more about KU, but it shouldn’t be a one-way street. If KU wants to attract students from across the state, it should listen to the needs and concerns those students, their parents and their counselors have. It’s a little hard to do that when you’re covering 4,000 miles in one week.