If you had trouble finding it than I suspect that it’s an even bigger problem!
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I gotta concur. When I, as a long-time user and moderator, have trouble finding categories, there will be issues with new members finding them.
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It’s probably too soon to know if the name change is hurting the category. I’m open to changing it back or finding some way to make it easier to find.
The data bears this out. It’s actually been dropping since 2009:
There are so many more places to find information about financial aid these days. As a parent of a college student, that’s a good thing, of course. But it does mean CC has a lot of competition. The key (and this applies to every other category as well) is to highlight the unique value of having a community of like-minded people.
Right now we have subcategories for scholarships that aren’t active. (The subcategories, I mean, but maybe the scholarships too.) My plan is to consolidate these categories into a Scholarship category. (We’ll be keeping the National Merit Scholarship category separate, of course.) Your guesses seem like a good place to start for subcategories. I think we can test them by interviewing students and parents who are new to the process.
Yep. That’s a big oversight.
Thanks to everyone for raising concerns about this category. It’s really important and we’ll keep working on it.
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Any way you can change “Paying for College” back to “Financial Aid and Scholarships”?
This is THE time when awards are being received and parents have questions about these awards. I’ve seen very very very few inquiries…because the category name really doesn’t address financial aid and scholarships…it is about paying…which really isn’t the same thing at all.
@kelsmom what do you think?
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I agree. I know that historically, views have declined for this category. However, I think it’s important to make sure users know where they can find “financial aid” information.
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I changed it back for the moment.
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Thank you. We can see if that helps.
I recently noticed that the categories for Christian Colleges and Women’s Colleges seem to have disappeared. Is that intentional and what is the rationale behind that? I didn’t follow the Women’s Colleges forum very much but I did follow Christian Colleges. It wasn’t super active but it did have some traffic and some good discussions.
Good question. Yes, this was intentional. We moved those discussion to tags:
The rational is that these categories weren’t active and fell victim to the empty restaurant syndrome.
I’ve seen this phenomena in real life. Our favorite Indian restaurant does a lot of takeout. One time while I was waiting for my order a large family came in. They were clearly planning on sitting at a table, but when they looked around and saw all the tables were empty, they walked right out. The one time we got a table rather than takeout, we were seated at the window to make the place look a little more busy.
When you combine that with an overwhelming category structure, it’s hard for new users to find the right place to post new threads and read existing threads. We believe that removing rarely used categories will increase the usability of the site as a whole.
It’s important to know, however, that we welcome these conversations even though we don’t have a specific category for them. It’s almost certainly better to post them in a more general category such as College Search & Selection or in a school-specific forum. That way posts will be seen by more people or by people who have more specific knowledge. Using tags instead means the topics can be found no matter what category they are posted in.
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Okay thanks. That makes sense. Is there a way for me to “follow” a tag? I used to get a notification is there was a new post in the Christian Colleges forum.
Yep! If you go to the tag page, you can select the bell icon:
Watching First Post should be sufficient. (Tracking will also show a count of new replies and Watching notifies each and every reply too.)
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Thanks