I really like Niche and read the student reviews, but I find the user experience frustrating and clunky when trying to actually filter by category. They make it easy to filter by star rating, but then you have to search for the specific category (e.g. housing, academics) you are looking for.
I ended up making myself a cheat sheet of the URL segments for the various categories. If you copy and paste this after the school url on Niche, it will filter by the applicable category, then if you want to filter it further by star rating (Excellent → Terrible) you can just click on the rating on the side.
Paste everything from “reviews” to just after the name of the school in the Niche URL. E.g. for Vanderbilt reviews filtered only to show overall experience, after “https://www.niche.[com]/colleges/vanderbilt-university/” add reviews/?category=Overall-Experience (careful not to double up on the forward slash, there should only be one.
Overall: /reviews/?category=Overall-Experience
Academics: /reviews/?category=Academics
Housing: /reviews/?category=Housing
Student life: /reviews/?category=Student-Life
Health & Safety: /reviews/?category=Health-%26-Safety
Value: /reviews/?category=Value
Party Scene: /reviews/?category=Party-Scene
Online Learning: /reviews/?category=Online-Learning
3 Likes
Agree that the Niche user experience is frustrating; I prefer Unigo.
Also, those Niche reviews can be really old.
1 Like
I vastly prefer Niche. I find it very easy to use. I don’t find it clunky at all. In fact, I think it’s very simple. Click on the category and it takes you to it. Niche reviews have dates posted, so if a review is old, you can ignore.
I very much dislike Unigo, which has no review dates at all. If fact, when my D used Unigo years ago, one review mentioned a person who had left the college about five years before. Typically, kids use Unigo to gripe and post a lot of negative stuff. I personally find that Niche reviews are overall more balanced.
I’m a tutor and I work with high schoolers every day. I’d say that most students I work with prefer Niche.
2 Likes
I prefer Niche as well, but they really should add categories to the search function. Sometimes for less frequently reviewed categories, you might need to look through 5-6 pages of reviews to find the category to click on. If they just added it as a field it would improve the functionality so much. That is why I use my list of URL add ons. Rather than spend 10 minutes trying to find a category I can just append it and read what pops up.
When you use these add-ons, do you find any recent reviews? I’ve always found that categories other than Overall Experience and Online Learning appear to fall out of use around 2016 or so - if you finally narrow down to a category, the reviews are all 2016 and earlier. Online Learning continued through 2021, but otherwise everything now seems to be filed under Overall.