My D (a junior) decided to try the Naviance “college match” tool today. (I don’t remember exactly what it was called, but it’s the one that can be accessed through Naviance - it may have been called something like “Super Match.”)
After putting in her stats, the first 20 schools it generated were all reaches. She was using the tool in the first place because she hasn’t come up with a lot of good matches right now, just reaches and safeties.
Are there any online tools that are particularly good for this sort of thing?
My kids have not had much luck with the match websites. It seems like they don’t really adhere to the criteria one puts in or come back with far away places (literally or figuratively). I am wondering if we are just “doing it wrong”. Any advice on the best way to use these websites? Does one just limit it to a handful of criteria?
I have played with Naviance’s and with College Board’s, and get very similar responses no matter what parameters I use. I think there’s no real substitute for going through Fisk’s (or a similar) guide page by page.
We found using the federal site College Navigator (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/), in combination with some school’s common data sets was the best way to get the info we wanted without having to “sign-up” for “retail” sites that are using the same information (and which often generate excessive emails) . College Navigator doesn’t tell you “matches” per se, but lets you enter location, majors, school size ranges, score ranges, etc., and provides a wealth of info on each schools page. The Common Data Sets let you see additional data (some we were particularly interested in was C10 - %in top 10%/25% of their HS class; F1 - % in frats/sororities, %on-campus housing; and of course H2 - how do they meet need, and H2A - how much non-need scholarships. (College Navigator uses the CDS data, but doesn’t include all of it.)
Once you get used to looking at these, you can quickly pull out the info that is important to you. We put it in a spreadsheet so we can sort and compare the schools of interest. Sort by SAT Math score, or by %admitted, for example, and you’ve got a pretty good means of making sure that you’re covering the safety/match/reach spectrum using the schools you’ve added.
use combinations of different sites. Some thoughts:
Use ‘super match’ with just the score range, public or private, and maybe location, to start your list of potential matches. (leave out the majors, gpas, and others - they water down the results).
Then start researching other schools that may be reaches or safeties using what you know about your desired major or other school attributes - use usnwr, findthebest, collegefactual, fisk, princeton review, etc
Once you start coming up with school lists, you can look at potential pricing - findthebest in the past allowed you to look at multiple schools’ net price for income ranges, but now you have to do it school by school. since you can’t do comparisons a better tool to use is tuitiontracker. You must plug in the school, but it shows you the trend over 4-5 years and includes all the income ranges in a single graph. very helpful. collegedata also has data on percent of need met, amount of merit aid, etc. You can do searches for schools based on just that data if you like.
Be sure to run net price calculators on any school you’re interested in. If you’re poor, forget about OOS publics unless they have well defined merit awards. Need-based awards will only include federal aid. But remember that many privates will be your friend.
Once you have a list of 20-30 schools you can plug them into parchment to see your ‘chance’ of admission. this is NOT ACCURATE because it’s only driven by data that participants provide, not the CDS. But in large part the final results were fairly close to what reality was for us. It gives you ‘green’ safeties, ‘yellow’ targets and ‘red’ reaches.
Fall of junior year I took my daughter to our Big State U and a smaller State college.
I saw what she liked.
She told me what area of the country she liked.
She told me she didn’t like urban schools.
She doesn’t want to go to a reach school and be in the bottom 25% nor does she want to be the smartest kid at school.
Then I used Supermatch and also the tool on the College Board site and looked for 1000-10000 student school, less than 2 hours away, where she would be at the 75% of SAT scores to maximize merit aid.
I looked at the Colleges that Change Lives to get more ideas.
For me, I wanted the net cost to be under $30000. So we looked for state schools and private schools that might end up there. We visited a state safety and she asked if she could have another safety so we picked one in the next state.
I discovered the Super Match on a blog after my older D had already selected and was attending a college. But, for fun I let my then-6th grader tell me what SHE wanted in a college and it came up with a list that proved eerily accurate when she actually started looking at colleges a couple of years later (part of her school’s program includes college and career prep from middle school on, starting with “what jobs exist” and ending with actual applications by senior year). The three that have consistently been in the top three based on her parameters didn’t change after we toured many of them, even as she’s added more “must haves” to her searches.
Once we had the names of schools, we would both (separately) look at the schools’ websites and online catalogs for more information.