Starting my college search, need advice/guidance

for people who need help getting started with the college search process

Some things to consider are cost, financial aid, location, school size, campus culture, climate, etc.

There’s a supermatch tool on this site if you’d like to get some ideas of schools to look at.

If you’re really just beginning, I’d like to share that I made my first college list by going through all of my college mail and picking out any mail that looked interesting. Believe it or not, this is how I learned of the existence of most of the schools I’ve applied to now. It’s probably a little silly, but I figured I wanted to go somewhere that got creative with its mailings.

I’ve been getting a lot of mail - maybe I should start looking through it haha. Thank you so much!

The place to start is with a discussion with your parents. Find out how much they can afford to pay for college. You don’t go car shopping or house shopping without a budget in mind. Same is true of college shopping. Then you ask their advice of what they think would make sense for you, and you find out if they have any constraints (many parents have geographic limits - driving distance, or parts of the country that are out).

Once that conversation has been had (possibly several times), you can start reading through college guides (Fiske, etc…) and trying to develop some selection criteria. Do you know what you want to study? What part of the country you want to live in. The size of the school? (Do a search on Unis vs. LACs here on CC for the pros and cons of big vs. small schools). What kind of vibe/culture/must haves are on your list? Use the college search function on CC to get more ideas. Once you have that list, it’s a lot easier to find schools that ‘fit.’ And the main benefit is that it will require you to articulate to yourself, probably for the first time, what’s important to you in your education, what’s just nice to have and what doesn’t matter to you at all.

For every school you like, go to the Common Data Set (google it) and scroll down to section C to check your stats agains those of the admitted students int he prior year. That’s how you chance yourself.