<p>I'm doing a search on Collegeboard.com and on Princeton Review of different schools to see what I get. My question is how do I distinguish schools that offer the same major? How do I know which program is better? Is there a site that tells you how likely you are to get a job after graduating from that school's program?</p>
<p>Balmes, this is an excellent question. There are some rankings for specific types of majors out there (US News & World Reports for instance), but you should, as you suspect, dig deeper than that to see if a specific program is what you are looking for. I like to do several things to get a sense of a school's strength in a particular area: </p>
<p>(1) go to the school's website, find the department website, and read it carefully and thoroughly. Look at the course descriptions, read faculty bio's, see what special facilities or resources the department has at its avail. Often, department websites will list some information about what recent graduates are doing in terms of jobs and grad schools. </p>
<p>(2) go to the school's public affairs section. Scroll through press releases listed there to see if the department has recently won awards, received large grants, etc.</p>
<p>(3) do a search on the web site for the school's newspaper. Do a search of the archives using the department name. See what turns up.</p>
<p>(4) Do a general search using google using the school's name and the department. Example: "Harvard political science" This often turns up interesting information.</p>
<p>(5) Find out how programs in that major are accredited by professional societies and accrediting agencies. Start at <a href="http://www.ope.ed/gov/accreditation/index.asp%5B/url%5D">www.ope.ed/gov/accreditation/index.asp</a> for a searchable database of accrediting programs. But don't stop there, do a search on google using the program/career plus the word "association" to find professional organizations and see if they have established standards for professional training. Read the site that describes what professional orgs. see as important in training. </p>
<p>(6) Next, try to visit, sit in on some classes specifically in the area, and meet with some faculty members. If you can't visit, email the head of the department (from the website) and one other faculty member. Whether in person or by email (or both), Ask them specifically what grads do, what they see as the special strengths of their program, and its weaknesses, how many classes the department typically schedules each semester, how rapidly they fill up, class sizes, research opportunities, how many majors are in the department, how many classes are taught by teaching assistants, etc. Sometimes, you may also feel comfortable enough to ask how they view the strengths/weaknesses another school's department. (Of course, keep in mind that this will be subjective) At the very least, ask them if there are any other programs they would recommend. Ask if they can put you in touch, via email, with a student or better yet a few students in the department. Ask them the same questions. </p>
<p>After you've done these preliminaries a few times, you'll start to get a good idea for the various options, how they compare, and which programs seem like the best fit for your goals. Hope this helps - I'm sure other people will have more suggestions, these are just the techniques I've found helpful in evaluating specific departments at hundreds of schools.</p>