<p>I've got a long list of them, so I decided that, instead of grumbling, I'd solicit feedback from others and then post the most common complaints on the National Association for College Admission Counseling listserv so that the folks who have the power to effect change can see how to make their Web sites more user-friendly.</p>
<p>One of my complaints is that information about merit scholarships can be hard to find. It's inconsistently placed on different sites, and once you manage to find it, it's often very vague and gives little sense of who is likely to qualify for the merit awards listed or even how much these awards may be.</p>
<p>Another petty but persistent problem for me is that** pdf documents (e.g., application instructions) are often written in vertical columns which require a lot of inconvenient scrolling up and down to read them.**That format works fine for magazines or other types of hard-copy material but not so fine on a computer screen.</p>
<p>And this may seem like a no-brainer, but some colleges make it hard to figure out where they are.There's no easy-to-find address on the home page. Once I even had to look under "Driving Directions" just to figure out what state the school was in after I'd exhausted all other options!</p>
<p>My own list could go on and on, but I'd like to hear how college Web sites-not the schools themselves or the admissions process in general--bug others, with the hope that at least some of these annoyances can be easily fixed.</p>
<p>When I am going to a college website I am usually going for the up-to-date, fast facts:</p>
<p>tuition/room & board (often very hard to find!!!),
student population,
campus size (500 acres?, 1500?) and as Sally mentions
the address-- so I can mapquest it, this should be on all home pages</p>
<p>When I go to a college website, I am already familiar with the school through various college profile books and through CC so I wish they would just make it easy. BTW I loved how Boston College links you to nearby hotels that offer discounts.</p>
<p>Good point about tuition/rm & board! Sometimes it's possible to find tons of info about scholarships and financial aid without fully knowing what the bottom line is. I often turn to the College Board site for all of those specifics--including the address--but colleges should put those up-to-date fast facts in an obvious and consistent place ... on their OWN sites.</p>
<p>I'm old fashioned but I would love some brochures on each college we're considering. If most of these schools still have them, they make them very hard to find.</p>
<p>I hate having to hunt all over a website for information on visiting.
The same page should include the tour schedule, info session schedule, whether reservations are necessary and the best place to park.</p>
<p>Number of students at the school is often very difficult to find.</p>
<p>Many schools list only their mailing address (e.g. PO Box) and not their street address. Hard to drive to a PO Box. With one site, I had to click on about six different things before I could even tell what city they were in (the "contact us" page led to an email link.)</p>
<p>Almost no school's web site (that I've visited) says whether they look at a weighted vs. an unweighted GPA.</p>
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pdf documents (e.g., application instructions) are often written in vertical columns which require a lot of inconvenient scrolling up and down to read them.
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<p>That's an important Web usability point. In general, .PDF documents are overused by organizations that don't understand the Web. </p>
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some colleges make it hard to figure out where they are. There's no easy-to-find address on the home page.
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the address-- so I can mapquest it, this should be on all home pages
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<p>Fully agreed. This is one of the most frequent items of information I look for when searching a college's website. There should always be body text on the home page of every college website and on the main admissions page of every college website giving a complete postal address (that is, actual street address) for the college that can be copied and pasted into a user's document off-line. (Putting the address into a graphic on the webpage that can't be dragged to copy the text is almost worse than not having the address at all.) </p>
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I always look for a site map.
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<p>It's always a good idea to have a site map on any website. </p>
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I was on a web site looking for a "request more information" link, but couldn't find it.
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<p>Do you mean request more information for prospective students? I agree that that should be an easy to find link from any admissions section of a college website. </p>
<p>I like looking on college websites for lists of the college's admissions visits to other cities. I like to post links to such lists to email lists of other parents and to the College Confidential forums. Every college that has an out-of-town visit schedule should put it up on a webpage as soon as possible after setting the schedule.</p>
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I hate having to hunt all over a website for information on visiting.
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<p>Along those same lines, another key piece of info that often requires a treasure hunt is "Are interviews available?" (And, if so, on campus? With alums only? How do we make an appointment ... do you contact candidates post-application or do candidates contact you?)</p>
<p>I hate those that don't have good easy to use "virtual tours" of the campus. </p>
<p>It is useless to see a picture of a kid looking through a microscope or a teacher peering over a student's shoulder in a classroom or worst of all, a happy group of students (representing every nationality on campus) sitting under a tree on a sunny day. These kinds of pics could be any college in the country.</p>
<p>The websites need to show pictures that really tell the story of the particular school....pictures of the dorms, the cafeterias, the classroom buildings, the student center, pictures of real students around campus (not the posed variety). Pics of the area immediately surrounding the school would be helpful to most also.</p>
<p>I wanted to easily find the information on academic programs, majors, and the required courses within the major. I would have thought that would be a no-brainer, but there were some colleges where I actually could not find that information, and others where it was not easy to find.</p>
<p>I want to website to work quickly between pages. I hated waiting for pages to load.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reminder of another useful feature for ALL college websites: detailed major requirement descriptions and detailed course descriptions (ideally, with an online syllabus for each course) for all courses.</p>
<p>I agree with Post #3 about discounts at nearby hotels. Ursinus College gives a discount code for a Marriott Courtyard in their town that saved us a nice chunck of change.</p>
<p>It is very frustrating when you cannot type into pdf forms at the website --this is true on commonapp site as well!!</p>
<p>Also, it would be nice if there were easily accessible instructions on how to time/coordinate the submission of data: common application, individual school supplements, high school submissions; testing results etc. Does it matter which arrives at the school first, etc. Many of the students in my d's high school are very confused about all of this.</p>
<p>It would be nice if colleges would list the core requirements all in one place, like most schools do for the major requirements. Do you have to take a foreign language? Religion, Lab Science, etc. How many core courses? Usually I have to download and scroll through a 300 page course listing.</p>
<p>Many colleges still have no virtual tour option available online. If so, the tour is hard to find on the web site or it consists of very old, outdated pics.</p>
<p>We visited one campus where you made an appointment for an on-campus interview on the website but then they confirmed the appointment by smail mail. It took us several weeks to receive the confirmation. Why not just email back the confirmation? </p>
<p>I would prefer that colleges be very clear about what supplemental materials they will accept. For instance, is there a limit on extra recommendations or will they accept a creative writing sample. Some colleges are very clear on this but others just don't address the issue at all.</p>
<p>I agree about the merit scholarship information--that was really hard to suss out on a number of websites. I also find that the terminology is confusing: prospective students? future students? freshmen? And schools could REALLY help by listing some sort of guidelines re: admission. "We usually accept students in the top half of their class." "Most students with 2.3 GPA will be considered for admission." Those are close to exact quotes from 2 websites, but that sort of thing is VERY rare. Luckily (I am counseling students now) I have found the GPA proportions on the "CollBoard" (I don't know if I can write it) website "at a glance" and at least that gives some idea--for students who know their GPA. Good question, Moderator--I have thought that for awhile. And PLEASE no animation or other slow-loading stuff!</p>