Great advice so far! Just chiming in to echo a previous poster re: OOS publics offering serious $$$ for high stats kids. University of Pittsburgh is one example.
Just remember that some students may genuinely not care about some of these criteria. For example, the urban/suburban/rural distinction is of little importance to some students, who may care more about programs in their major, campus size, or other factors.
Lots of great advice so far.
To sum it all up, the whole process is trying to solve an equation with three variables:
- Fit. What kind of school does your kid want to go to? A spreadsheet with the stuff discussed in #21 above is a good starting point.
- Admissibility. What schools can your kid realistically get into given their test scores and stats? Once you have that data, you can layer this factor onto your fit spreadsheet. Doing the usual safe/match/reach exercise.
- Finances. What is your realistic annual budget for this kid? $10k a year? $30k a year? $70k a year? Once you know your budget, then you'll know how much need aid or merit aid you will need to get to make it work. The amount of aid you will get is driven by the combination of (i) your income/assets and (ii) your kid's academic stats. NPCs are the ticket here. You care about actual/net price for you and your kid. Sticker price may or may not be relevant.
If your kid has high stats, the kid may be able to gain entry into a fancy school that meets full need. So you can get big need bucks if your finances are such that you qualify for aid. If your kid has 75th percentile stats at a particular private school (that is outside the very top tier), then you’re likely to score big merit bucks (independent of your financial situation).
End of the day, your kid will never attend a school they hate. They will never attend a school they can’t get admitted to. And they will never attend a school you can’t pay for. You need all three circles of the Venn diagram to overlap.
Put everything about this process on spreadsheets and documents share-able on the cloud. We used google docs. Very helpful to have the kid and parents able to update, share and access the most current stuff. It is unwise to expect the kid to be fully in charge of this process. Works better to have the kid be CEO, but the parents to serve as COO/CAO of the process.
Good luck!!
Wow!
Thanks so much everyone for your super helpful advice. What an awesome community. I’m amazed at all the different insights and how quickly everyone responded!
My daughter is a freshman at a public school where the counselor to student ratio is about 400:1. Can’t imagine how she can understand and get through this complicated process without some help. Some of her friends are in private schools with 50:1 ratios and probably getting a lot more hand-holding.
I will definitely be exploring all your recommendations…and it sounds like I’m going to be good friends with spreadsheets throughout this process 
Thanks everyone!
My kid’s at a school with only 75 kids in her grade. She’s a junior. We started looking in sophomore year, just visiting a couple of schools for fun, starting the Gatorkid Spreadsheet®, and getting a ballpark idea of what we could afford.
WELL.
Finances winnowed the list immediately, and that criterion has driven everything since then.
She was looked at askance by her classmates until about three months ago, when everyone else suddenly got in gear. Now the kids come to her for guidance … and I’m SO glad we didn’t wait until now. It took several months to come 'round to the idea of so many schools not being affordable, no way, no how.
All that said, being in a small school has not meant extra hand-holding - at least not yet. There are two counselors, which seems like a great ratio, except they are 100% dedicated to the seniors in terms of helping with apps. (They have held several family financial aid nights; we went to the first, and I realized I knew all that and more thanks to CC, so we didn’t go back.)
The counselors have literally no time left for juniors until application season is over. And there are unique things about my kid - scholarships and programs that have application deadlines in the spring – that means if we waited for the counselors to be available in spring junior year, it’d be too late. Thank god we started on our own.
For college visits, we found it helpful to just drive through a bunch of them. There’s no need to go on a tour for each school at first. The idea here is to give the student a chance to start forming an opinion about what type of school he/she likes. It’s like putting faces to names, but for campuses and campus culture.
On a family drive, note 3-4 schools along the way, even schools that you feel are not appropriate for him/her. Then just drive to the campus. Once there we would set the timer on our phone for 10 minutes. Walk out into the campus for 10 minutes and back. That would give us the impression about surprisingly much and we didn’t waste an entire afternoon listening to the sales pitch.
For example, one Saturday afternoon we drove past a nice state campus, and my DD looked in amazement out our car window at the boys in identical shirts, getting out red plastic ups and coolers, and music blaring into the yards of these houses they were standing around. She said, aghast, what are they doing? It’s Saturday! I said Oh that’s a Frat. And explained that partying on Saturday afternoon was one thing they did. She didn’t even want to get out of the car at that school. And decided that a school with that much partying was not for her.
One half hour later, at another school with gothic architecture and students quietly walking around the quad with backpacks and saying hi as they passed, DD said: I love this place. This is the type of place I love.
So you get a feel for the type of school they like. It helps you narrow down the thousands of choices to get close to that feel. The terms in the brochures and online sites start to have meaning for them. Terms like “work hard play hard” or “considered an intellectual campus” or “competitive and stressful” and the like.
The ten minute walk around campus helps them figure out what a large campus would feel like on a busy day compared with a small one.
Our best day we hit 7 campuses–it was a great way just to get a feel for what’s out there and to help them start to have more informed opinions. And it was fun!
I’m all for checking out campuses on your own without tours as some have mentioned, but if the student is in any way interested in smaller schools, that may work against them due to demonstrated interest. If you find that you can’t visit a college that uses interest to help determine admission, then you should find a way to contact them, either by phone or email or by visits at school with the regional admissions officer. You really need to be on their radar because if it comes down to you or the kid who showed a lot of interest, who do you think they’re going to admit?
@megan12 – you go back to the ones they love and demonstrate interest.
The quick-look method gets them acquainted with what’s out there.
I’m just starting this crazy search and am a bit in shock at the complexity and superficiality of how people decide what is a good college, good major, etc. and how schools market themselves as if they were a consumer brand product.
I am looking for a solid counselor or book/materials that can help my son understand the course loads and expectations of a college and the way the student is expected to master learning (ie independent vs strong mentoring) - and apply learning (I am not a fan of paying tuition for kids to do things like “spreadsheets” as credit course - applied should not mean charge for things you can google).
I am not going by the popularity contest on Niche or US World reports. Budget, how successful are they in helping produce people who over time adapted to economic/industry change, and the relationship between student and the school/professors, course loads (majors expectations and weed out criteria/rates) are what matter to me most.
I was really surprised by a very famous state flagship school tour. It was about dorms, food, football, new buildings 90% and about 10% academics (and very superficial at that).
Maybe I’m naïve!
Any guides or advice on how and where to peel back the proverbial onion would be welcome. Son is a strong student, learns well, handles set backs well, definitely likes strong teachers.
He has these range stats: 4.x weighted and >3.75 unweighted with some APs that he thought would be good challenges and likely be somewhere in the 80 to 95 percentile on SAT. Good all around student.
Stronger verbal and critical/analytical thinking than math but thinks he wants to study science - currently in AP chem and is proving to be a B student in AP chem (uncurved, gets a B on most tests, gets some boost from labs and hw that might get him to an A but doesnt’ seem to be the 21st century Marie Curie if you know what I mean - he is great at understanding the concepts deeply but does make mistakes and he learns from them).
You are about to be appalled. But honestly there are far worse standards than dorms, food and football. In sort of a Maslow’s hierarchy, that’s at least are tackling the fundamentals of living away from home, so it’s somewhat productive. Poke around the site and you can find far worse reasons, starting with following a GF/BF, having a cute tour guide and great weather on the tour. Schools know this and spend 10x more on student centers than libraries, just as they have since English majors stopped making the big bucks. 
As mentioned earlier, to narrow down this list to mere dozens you’re going to have to have DS start trying to find some basis for his selection. Anything will work: playing a sport (varsity or club), offering a particular major, if he has an idea of geography, if there’s Greek or not, or maybe a terrible team mascot can eliminate a bunch. Once he’s got a clue then start looking.
And there are good places to start: Colleges The Change Lives can be a good jumping off point. Maybe look at everything within 100 miles of your home. Check out a list of Catholic colleges, or top Greek schools, or pick through a bunch of the lists of Top NN (Whatever) Schools at Princeton Review’s site. Whatever gets a jumble of names into his head can get the notions going about what appeals and what doesn’t.
For D we focused on pharmacy schools that offered merit and then compared length of program, number of prerequisites, early assurance pathways, tuition cost (IS can be significantly lower than OOS), and distance.
Our instate public 2+4 program became the best choice, after she got a scholarship.
For S we looked for schools instate within a 2 hr radius that had music education.
Public with merit is better financially because while the private schools give more aid the first year, when we have two in college, the aid then drastically declines in future years.
Oh and some kids are sure that they want a small LAC and then end up transferring back home to the state U the next year.
Or some want to go far away, only to decide later that they want to be closer to home.
But if they have high stats they must choose wisely because most of the big scholarships are only available to freshmen, not transfer students.
Also take advantage of state programs if you qualify. Often kids stick their nose up at instate schools, but can get state grants, state sponsored scholarships only if attending in their own state.
Some examples are Excelsior in NYS, Bright Futures and NMF scholarships in Florida, Hope scholarship in Georgia.
Just checked out Colleges that Change Lives. Thanks for the tip! This is the kind of stuff I am looking for!
What a gem of an essay giving advice to college students that I think will be a top read for my son as we go out into this world. I cannot agree with him more on statistics. I’m in technology forever now and “big data” (the ability to understand, synthesize and communicate data correctly) is at the center of every known field we might get into. The importance of statistics in a well rounded education and a university that can make this digestible and relevant to students is in my view as fundamental for this coming generation as are writing skills.
I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to comfortably find the granularity you seek, @Duchesslt.
<<" a university that can make [statistics] digestible and relevant to students…">> is going to depend completely on the professor, which is impossible to base a decision on applying.
That said, those are great tips in the article you linked to. But every single one is geared toward influencing a student’s outlook and determination. Not a single one can steer your search.
As superficial as you think the criteria mentioned here are, they will help a great deal in determining “fit” - the amorphous quality that most kids end up using to narrow things down. (After finances, of course.)
Because, let’s face it, most careers can be achieved with great success no matter which college you go to. It’s the kid. It’s not the college. That’s what determines the outcome.
Agree with @StPaulDad, have your kid make a “wish list” of everything he wants in a college and start from that, then look at the major and end job he might like and see where people in that field graduate from and then find schools in that mix that fit your budget.
For my DD her wish list included a top ten meteorology program, ability to continue with her instrument without being a music major (also must like teacher for her instrument), offer German language and study abroad, not a big foot ball school.
When we looked at her wish list and then our budget with likely merit that got us down to two schools pretty quickly and then she ruled one out as ‘geographically undesirable’ so Bingo! it was easy for her, she got everything on her wish list except she has to deal with big time football at a school we could afford.
DS was a little more difficult (for me - not him) he has amazing stats and could get into some tippy top schools but we have three kids and are a doughnut hole family, we make too much to qualify for FA and not enough to actually pay full freight for college. He wanted some place with a great comp sci program, opportunities for research and internships, no football and bonus points for driving distance from home;-) Big surprise to me was that he wanted a sleek modern feel to campus no Gothic brick buildings, seriously I couldn’t see this as a factor but it was a big deal to him.
My husband is in the high tech field and I started getting him to ask around recent new hires to find out where they did their undergrad and why and added this to the list. If money were not a factor he would have looked at MIT, UICU, Northwestern, John Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon Standford, Mudd … After looking at affordability, he had the choice of UT Austin as a commuter and grad school on his own or UT Dallas living on campus with money left over to cover grad school. He’ll be going to UT Dallas and the 3rd scout says he plans to do the same.
I agree with @northwesty in #22. My caution on tours - they all begin to sound the same. Its a sales/marketing pitch. Be selective on tours. We went to some in Los Angeles as part of a vacation - USC, UCLA, Cal Tech and Biola. Everyone played to their strengths. It gave my two sons an initial sense of where they would apply (USC and UCLA) and where they would not (Cal Tech, not a fit & Biola, too small). The admissions counselor at Biola actually said “I’ve never seen a score that high”. We also did an overnight for both to Arizona State because their brother is a senior there. ASU did a great job - 1-on-1 meetings with admissions, a professor and a Dean. I also agree the “drive-by” is great for early clarification on big vs small etc.
Thanks. This is all helpful. I definitely think budget will be the first criteria to narrow down. I’m not sure if that means not even bothering looking at any more 50k a year schools.
@Duchesslt We found the same to be true at our Top Notch State Flagship. The tour was all about the fun stuff, and very little about the academics. My S. who would only attend this school for the academics was very disappointed. We plan to go back and talk to the specific department, and sit in on a class.
@Duchesslt If you start by narrowing by how much it costs, make sure that you’re not looking just at the sticker price. See if you can go deeper.
one place to get a broad idea of how much a school will cost YOU is by using College Navigator, and then it the net price tab. That breaks it down by income level ON AVERAGE. This is a good tool to figure out whether a school is even in the ballpark. You will not know what a school will definitely cost you until you get 1) accepted and then 2) see the FA offer and 3) negotiate that offer further, against your other offers.
Also you may want to use Collegedata website to look up 1) average debt per student and 2) merit opportunities.
Again this is to get a ballpark figure for the school, to weed out whether a school is somewhat within your range.
Then:
- Does the school offer merit for my child’s special talents/circumstances?
- Where does my child place in their GPA/Scores matrix? One rule of thumb is that if your child is probably in the school’s upper 25% of applicants, then your child might be offered merit money.
No matter how much you love a school, remind your child that it might be too costly in the end, when you discover the real cost of the school through the FA offer.
We decided to allow the child in addition to a reach for academics, a reach for finances, knowing that if it was too expensive, it wasn’t going to happen.
By too expensive, our gauge was more than $26-30K total debt over the full 4 years. That keeps the debt below the national average. Any more than that and you need to find a school that costs less.