<p>Brooklyn…we USED the criteria to limit our college search. DD wanted to go to school where it didn’t snow…that cut out a LOT of the country. She wanted schools with 5000 or less students…that cut out another HUGE chunk. She wanted an urban school…that cut out another chunk. She wanted an engineering/science program that was decent but not a tech school…again…cut out a huge chunk. And that orchestra criteria…believe me,that cut out MORE than a huge chunk. </p>
<p>In the end there were about 10 schools that met all of her criteria…and she only applied to 4 after the visits. Yes we visited all ten (some were very close to one another…).</p>
<p>Son 1- had definate preferences as to size, proximity(actually took a compass and scribed a 150 mile circle on a map), and urban/rural. His specific major interest guided his first choices. He removed schools that he felt were similar to each other, decided to have only 1-2 of each sort,(3-4 small LAC, 2 semi urban, 1 safety, 2-3 match, 2-3 reach), went from a list of 25 to a list of 11. He wound up applying to his dream school ED.</p>
<p>Son2- his major was the determing factor. He did not care how large or small or where the school was located. Picked a few reaches, a few matches, 2-3 safeties. He picked the warmer locale of the top 3 schools to which he was accepted. Wound up changing major junior year.</p>
<p>I guess I’m saying, there are many schools and as many individual reasons for choosing or eliminating. Your daughter will find the criteria that work for her.
Best of luck.</p>
<p>We eliminated schools that were low in in the PR Quality of Life rating, and whose graduation rates were low relative to their selectivity peers. In general, schools with higher selectivity had higher graduation rates. Selecting a range of Reach/Match/Safety schools meant applying to schools with a range of selectivities and hence graduation rates, but some schools were outliers relative to their peer schools.</p>
<p>Both my kids used web sites, the school’s guidence department, friends, etc … and they each had a big fat copy of the collegeboard’s guide.</p>
<p>Yes, there are roughly 3000 colleges in the US … however given a geography cut (for my kids northeast and mid-atlantic (essentially down to DC) and a size of school range and a location of school preference (urban, college town) and some sort of academic quality cutoff (using SAT scores mostly) then the list is already down to 100-200 schools … and if you add in possible majors (we suggest looking for schools that keep their options open including all their possible majors) and the list shrinks a lot more. My son literally looked at the description of every school in about a dozen states using the big fat guidebook to make his original superset list of about 100 schools. This really didn’t take that long … tons of schools took a few seconds to dismiss (too big, too small, urban, commuter school, religious connection, etc and it was out). I created a spreadsheet to capture the data of the schools that passed muster … my oldest never looked at the spreadshee; the next one adopted it and changed it a bunch until he liked it. For both my kids their list shrunk down to a reasonable conherent consistent list pretty quickly after researching schools and seeing a few in person.</p>
<p>We all looked at Princeton Review Book The Best Colleges ALOT. Then this past summer I handed D1, H, D2 (rising high school senior) and me each a sheet of paper. Asked each to make their own list for D2 secretly (around 20). Then we compared the list. It actually was really fun! Then we had lively discussions why and why not. The final list was D2’s choice. The university she is about to attend originally came from D1’s list and she happened to be the best predictor of acceptances, too.</p>
<p>During DS’ sophomore year we had a chance to visit some schools on a trip home from vacation, so we traipsed around a few then (not formal tours, just walking around, eating, etc.), just to get the ball rolling. Then, last summer, we hit a couple more. This spring, we started visits in earnest, and have seen 9 more, many with tours. The serious online research didn’t really start until this spring. </p>
<p>We have a file where we compile interesting data on potential schools. One thing I have learned is if we research a school and then end up nixing it is to leave it in the file with a note as to WHY it was nixed. There are so many that sometimes someone says “what about X?” and I can’t remember why we thought it wasn’t a good choice, lol. One of the main resources for eliminating “suggestions” is USNWR, which people love to bash on, but we have used it to eliminate any school not designated as Tier 1 in one category or another.</p>
<p>Another thing we’ve done is to compare schools which have a lot of similarities 2 at a time - Which is better A or B? Often there is some obvious reason why A would be a better choice.</p>
<p>Sticker price and average amount of FA and merit aid chances for son’s stats.</p>
<p>Can one get around without a car or would a car be necessary?</p>
<p>Class and lab sizes</p>
<p>How close is the airport to the school if the school was far away.</p>
<p>religious considerations</p>
<p>We tried to eat in most dining halls. There were a couple of schools that moved to the bottom after tasting the food. Our kids considered that they would need to eat on campus for at least 2 years and for all 4 years at other schools.</p>
<p>Housing-Could one stay on campus for all 4 years, and if they chose off campus housing would this require a car? How much is the average rent?</p>
<p>One school came of the list because my son did not like their housing (ie: Do you want or have a problem with: 4-6 to one large room freshman year, same sex dorm option, suites vs. bathrooms for the entire floor, enough study lounges in each dorm, can a freshman have a car, or whatever is important to your student).</p>
<p>To be honest my kids did not cut their list down to the recommended 8 schools. We had good reasons not to and our GCs respected that.</p>
<p>Another vote for Fiske as a starting point, our copy is dogeared…</p>
<p>D did some narrowing down by geography (to midwest and northeast, so not entirely helpful) </p>
<p>Her test scores and grades helped narrow the list further (knocked off the highest end and lowest end schools).</p>
<p>She had a pretty good idea of her major (and is now a junior with that anticipated major, so for her it was a good factor). Fiske helped her find schools with strength in that area.</p>
<p>She took a few off based on the description of the neighborhood/campus in Fiske, and also nixed some that had strong Greek influences on campus. She also decided a school with very time consuming core requirements was not her preference; she really wanted the freedom to study more in her areas of specific interest. So that knocked a couple off the list.</p>
<p>I took one super-duper expensive school off the list due to cost and the expectation that we would not get any need-based aid.</p>
<p>She got some of the College ******* books from her guidance counselor, and read those.</p>
<p>We had a couple of other college books (Barrons, and maybe the Princeton one?). But Fiske was our go-to source.</p>
<p>Then we visited 20 schools. She applied to six schools (had a 7th planned, but didn’t end up doing the app due to early acceptance to the school she ended up attending).</p>
<p>S wanted large, urban, diverse, and with a decent program for his major. And not too far from home. That did not leave a large group of schools to begin with, since his GPA was not stellar.</p>
<p>The second cut was made by finances. Expensive private schools where he would not qualify for significant merit were taken off the table. Luckily, this was still somewhat early in the process; I was ignorant of EFCs when we started the search the summer before his senior year.</p>
<p>This really left one that was a bit of a reach (for his program) school, one match that was more on the safety side which he would have gone to if he had to. Another slight reach that did not have his program and was more than we wanted to spend, and a safety that did not have his program and he had no wish to attend. </p>
<p>Luckily he got into the first school and is happy about attending.</p>
<p>Our D’s are way down the line, the first will be the hs class of 2017 (is there a thread for that yet? ) I am thinking she will be looking at LACs or even women’s colleges. Though it’s really too early to say.</p>
<p>The little one may be Ivy material, she is scary smart, focused and driven. We’ll see. :)</p>
<p>I started with criteria at first, but eventually I decided to get more comprehensive and methodical. I did put some thought into the top 50 universities and top 100 LACs. Yes, every single one of them; probably 90% at least got a quick visit to the website. I also skimmed every page of the Fiske guide, more detailed skimming on LACs since size was a major criteria for me.</p>
<p>I did start unusually early (mid-sophomore year with serious online research), and thus had the luxury of time.</p>
<p>It was team effort right from 9th grade. DW gave DD her list of HMSPY (LOL)
while DD and I started backward from US News top 50. We used to discuss information about colleges on the list with
respect to engineering and pre-med which of interest to DD.
By the time DD was ending her junior year we have trimmed the list to about 30 colleges. </p>
<p>DD then provided a list of her top 10 and we made them a must visit colleges. These were in order of preference
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, [Caltech | Columbia], UCB, U. Penn, Brown.</p>
<p>Observe the irony that our (DD and I) 3 years of effort culminated in HMPSY as the top 5 which DW provided in the begining of 9th grade.</p>
<p>We took a tour of all of the 10 colleges during the summer after 11th grade.
Based on all the information and a physical visit DD made up her list of colleges to apply during September with a time line:
EA – MIT/Caltech – Oct 20th
USC, Olin, Rice, UCs – Nov. 20th
Harvard, Princeton, Stanford – Dec 1st
Cornell, CMU, Dartmouth – Dec 7th.
With Columbia, Yale, U. Penn, Brown, Duke, JHU, NW, UChicago as stand by with the following criteria.
If “NO” from MIT EA but a “Yes” from Caltech EA then only apply to Columbia, & Yale.
If “NO” from both MIT EA and Caltech EA then apply to all stand by colleges.
Otherwise done.</p>
<p>She was relieved on Dec. 7th with Caltech EA but was done on Dec. 15th with MIT EA.</p>
<p>Did the rest of you use Barrons and look at EVERY school in there (where you had narrow geo range, I could see that could work). Did you use a different guide?</p>
<p>Fiske guide
Kiplinger
Petersons
College Board
We weighted criteria after establishing major rule out factors
No east coast
No womens colleges
no major snow
No huge schools
Yes to city
yes to public transportation
yes to small LACs
yes to strong bio program
& 100% need met.</p>
<p>I have a different resource to recommend. My D used Fiske and websites to narrow the list to thirty according to size, geography, urban feel, decent dance department. She then read the descriptions in the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges which includes student descriptions of what colleges are like. This helped tremendously in narrowing down according to fit. Great resource to get a sense of the community, highly recommend it. She chose 15 to stay on the list which got narrowed down to 8 when she got in EA at a school midway down her preference list.</p>
<p>Just a little warning that I don’t believe the college search can be accomplished by spreadsheet alone. I think you have to resign yourself to a little bit of serendipity being involved in where your child ends up. Seriously considering 25,000 institutions seems. . . hard.</p>
<p>We had a nice starting place with DS#1 because he was interested in playing a particular sport, was probably looking at D-III level, and I felt would do best at a small college anyway. I think we were realistic all along about what was possible academically. It really all began with one recruiting camp, which led to a few interested coaches, which led to exploring similar schools in those geographic regions, which led to visits and re-visits and the eventual decision. He is entering his junior year and is very happy (although no longer playing the sport).</p>
<p>DS#2 is a hs senior this year, and I find myself wishing he had a few more constraints. Has a vague idea of what he <em>might</em> like to study, but is still <unfortunately> all over the map <ha ha!=“”> regarding size, location, . . .</ha></unfortunately></p>
<p>FWIW, I’m a firm believer that, most of the time anyway, it all works out for the best. AND that there is no one right school for anyone. Your kid will likely end up in pretty much the same place as an adult regardless of where he/she goes to undergraduate school.</p>
<p>Over the past year and a half, I’ve made 14 completely separate lists. In hindsight, I’ve spent WAY TOO MUCH time on this.</p>
<p>At first, I really wanted to perfectly quantify my own ranking system from which I could pick the top x schools. This did not work. Despite using 21 quantitative variables from IPEDS and 15 separate cut-points and 9 calculated rankings (all in the same spreadsheet!), I just couldn’t end up with something I was happy to see.</p>
<p>I’m not criticizing the use of objective data or quantitative rankings. In fact, my ultimate solution (which I’ll post in a few minutes) is intensely quantitative. However, attempting to derive general meaning from very specific statistics is IMO a dangerous approach. The tangible impact of a slightly higher graduation rate, for example, cannot be easily isolated.</p>
<p>Let’s see. D had a vague list at the beginning of her junior year, but then when we had concrete test numbers & a good sense that she’d make NMSF, we told her to cast her net wider. She used a combination of the BIG USNWR book (that lists almost all colleges) and the Insiders Guide to Colleges, along with mailings, her own personal knowledge as well as mine & DH’s suggestions to craft her original list: 32 schools.</p>
<p>We sat down & talked about what was important to all of us & I put together a template that included spaces for all those data points: distance, average test scores, % of students OOS, Greek, commuters, etc. Also whether they offered NMF merit aid, if they were a direct flight away, and if they had a football team I then told D she had a month to fill out a sheet for each one of the schools on the list. </p>
<p>As she went through that process, a bunch of schools dropped off the list before she even filled out the sheet (mostly if their website prominently featured snow covered vistas I think at the end of the exercise she had 18 schools on the list. We had visited a few of them already but as visits went on, sometimes multiple schools came off (i.e. when we visited Centre in KY, which she loved academically, D realized that uber rural was not for her. So about 5 schools came off her list.) By the end of junior year, she was down to 10. </p>
<p>She did a summer program that summer and at the end of 3 weeks decided she didn’t want to be so far away that she’d have to fly home. So 4 more schools were cut. 6 schools made the final list although she only applied to 5. She flirted with that 6th app until the final moment.</p>
<p>We started looking for DD3, rising junior, (other kids are older) when she was a freshman in H.S. and realized early on that she didn’t want west coast. She used Barron’s to select about 38 possibilities and then we narrowed them down with the help of Naviance. She wanted a strong pre med program and definitely not a big Greek scene. In the end her 9applications ranged from rural midwest, southern (heavy Greek), instate flagship safety to urban LAC. During her interviews we realized the importance of direct airline flights. Now she is an hour from home by public transportation, has switched from her original major, joined a sorority and is more than happy with her choice.</p>
<p>I was a bit of a rankings snob, which saved time. First I pulled down both US News lists to 35-40, somewhere around there. I looked up websites and Insider’s Guide essays. My major criteria were parent approval, “can I get in?”, and what passes for instinct in a seventeen-year-old. (The major criterion for parent approval was prestige, which complicated the calculations somewhat.) After some fiddling and much more snark about ugly college sites, I had a list which was absolutely horrible and made no sense at all. After a while I realized this.</p>
<p>Back to the drawing board! This time my search was more narrowly focused towards smaller schools with a reputation for being sort of intellectual and intense, with prestige still probably more of a factor than it should have been. I stalked CC posters who sounded sort of informed and read even more Insider’s Guide blurbs. “Does this sound like a place I’d like to be?” I asked myself. The list that came out of this was much, much better, but a lot of reliance on hearsay, and plenty more seventeen-year-old moments, went into it. This school is too ‘pre-professional,’ whatever that means. That one…I don’t know, I just don’t like it. The other one has an ugly website, and it is one in the morning and I am thorougly sick of anything having to do with colleges. But it was more than good enough.</p>
<p>And then of course my mother got a hold of it and we had a very long argument about LACs versus universities, and I came up with some compromise choices which made even less sense. In the end I had eleven schools on my list–but I was trying to balance my mom’s feelings and mine, high hopes and wild fears. And I have always been horribly indecisive.</p>
<p>…the irony of all this is that none of this fiddling and worrying would have changed my eventual destination. Chicago was one of two schools that was on my list from the very beginning.</p>
</p>
) I am thinking she will be looking at LACs or even women’s colleges. Though it’s really too early to say.</p>