Does any parent remember a search program when we were kids?

<p>I really want to ask is there something like this now, but do any of the adults remember some sort of application / process where you would indicate the kinds of things you are looking for in a school - size, in / out of a city, majors, dorm / commuter, how selective they are, etc... and you would get a print out of schools that meet that? How did that work, since we didn't have PCs back then (I am thinking 30 years ago now!). was it a form we filled out and the guidance counselors would dial up to a timeshare computer? Or mailed away our criteria?</p>

<p>And again, we're looking for our daughter who wants to go to a good business undergrad school. Is there a website that lets us filter our criteria?</p>

<p>thanks!!!!</p>

<p>I remember using that kind of program on the public library computer, probably in 1989 or 1990.</p>

<p>But you wouldn’t want to use that same program now. Have you looked at SuperMatch, and if so, what are you looking for that SuperMatch didn’t have?</p>

<p>

Yes, this one. Go to the “CC Home” and look at Super Match.</p>

<p>public library PC?! </p>

<p>Use that now? If it was up to date : )</p>

<p>Supermatch - I google searched for a website and found supermatch vs. others. didn’t realize supermatch was part of cc! duh!</p>

<p>But what’s it lack?<br>
In city vs. outside city
% population with certain religion. You can screen for religious affiliation, but if you can’t say more than x% asian, or jewish or some diversity criteria
It lets you filter for party school vs. studious (sp?) but that’s too broad.</p>

<p>etc.</p>

<p>In city vs out of city = campus setting
And you can say “more Asian than typical,” but you’re right, no fine-tuning by percentage.</p>

<p>There are tens of college search engines, each with varying options.</p>

<p>But if I’m remember correctly, with Supermatch you can say how much a certain item matters to you-such as it being “very important” vs. “not important” that the school be religiously affiliated. I can’t get it to come up right now on my computer, but you can set such parameters for any of the obvious things you’d look for, and some you might not have even thought about.</p>

<p>As for me, in high school 35 years ago we had books like Peterson’s and college catalogs to browse through. Nobody visited 20 colleges, nobody APPLIED to 20 colleges. I picked my college application list based on a very specific and uncommon major (pharmacy). I narrowed location down to school my father, a pharmacist, knew were good ones based on the continuing ed he’d taken, word from other pharmacists, etc. I got into all of my choices and attended the one I thought would be the best fit. My parents let me make the choice. I first set foot on campus after I’d chosen it-did my own walking tour.</p>

<p>I ended up switching majors my first year after realizing I was having more fun helping fellow students with their writing than doing my own science homework. I was in the first graduating class of journalism majors for that college. With the death of newspapers, guess I should have stuck out the pharmacy, huh?</p>

<p>my wife wants me to get a book as you talk about, but that seems so old fashioned. I figured there should be website and I am finding them, but each has their own filters and none are all that complete. was hoping for more.</p>

<p>Gosh-what more do you want?? Supermatch alone has 23 main categories to choose from, and dozens of subtopics within them. I can’t imagine what more you want.</p>

<p>% of kids get internship
in / out of city
% get job at graduation
etc. </p>

<p>more than I know - I’d expect them to know more what people would want / should filter on.</p>

<p>If it bothers you that much, use a couple search sites to narrow the list down to a manageable number, then fine-tune in Excel.</p>

<p>I’d like to be able to filter by ABET-accredited engineering programs (as opposed to including any school that offers a degree by that name), but have to satisfy myself with cross-referencing the ABET list once I’ve filtered by the other criteria. Excel does a good job of that.</p>

<p>ETA: I suspect they do know what people want to filter on - it’s just not what you want to filter on. I’m sympathetic to that, because I want to filter on weird stuff, too. But in reality, anything designed by someone else is going to fall short of perfection for most users.</p>

<p>thanks. just didn’t want to reinvent the wheel</p>

<p>Well, I just checked and you CAN list the size city you want, or even if you don’t WANT a city-located college at all. You do have to do some of your own research, though, which is as it should be. I don’t want a random wedsite giving me my kids’ “perfect match”, it’s just a starting point. D has her own list, and about half of them turn up in Supermatch using our best guesses at parameters. She also uses input by students and graduates at schools she’s interested in, small college fairs, and research at the schools’ own websites. We’ll add visits to help narrow it all down.</p>

<p>OP – There was definitely such a program in the Mid 1970’s (I used it and graduated HS in 1975).</p>

<p>The computers in our HS were time-shared terminals (i.e., the computer was somewhere else, and we had to modem in). Programs that we wrote were stored on sprocket tape and there were no monitors – everything was printed on large rolls of paper – and we thought it was cool.</p>

<p>Anyway, the software would ask you a series of questions then spit out a list of colleges that met your criteria.</p>

<p>[College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics)</p>

<p>This lets you download your search results as an Excel file, that you can further manipulate if you like.</p>

<p>To the best of my knowledge, none of the search engines include internship or job data. For that kind of information, you need to contact the institutions (or even the departments) directly.</p>

<p>To make a list for Happykid, I used multiple search engines, lists from websites specific to her career field, and lists from print publications. Each source that I used included some institutions that did not make any of the other lists, and there were only a few institutions that did make all of the lists.</p>