<p>I'm trying to decide if there's a reason to purchase the premium online edition of the US News College Rankings when the new one comes out. I don't put a lot of stock in the ratings, but is there good raw data in there that will save time in combing through various college websites? Has anyone used it? Thoughts?</p>
<p>only unique data that helped me was
% students with merit aid
avg merit awards</p>
<p>The premium edition school comparison tool is nice when comparing schools.</p>
<p>It’s a useful tool & timesaver during the year that your kid is finalizing college choices. The important info can be pulled elsewhere (rankings are irrelevant, you want to be able to compare the underlying data: test score range, student/faculty ratio, graduation rate, etc.)</p>
<p>There are other web sites that will give you the info for free, however … collegedata.com, princetonreview.com, National Center for college statistics at [College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics) – and some of them have tools you can use for comparing data… so you might want to check the free sites first.</p>
<p>For comparing schools, so far CollegeBoard.com and the National Center for Education Statistics together have told me everything I wanted to know. Is there more stuff in US News worth paying for?</p>
<p>EDIT: Whoops, calmom was posting at the same time. I’m off to check out CollegeData.com! PrinceonReview.com hasn’t yielded a lot of fruit for me yet, but maybe I’m not using it right.</p>
<p>I agree that college board is a good ref tool. It has all of my sons stats stored from his SAT regristration so it helps identify good matches. I signed up for the US News and it did not have stats for the smaller LAC’s that I am looking at. They give u 24 hours to cancel.</p>
<p>I subscribe to the Premium Online Edition and Print Edition for only $20, and I think it worth every single penny of it.</p>
<p>Lets put it into perspective, you are about to spend thousands of dollars in tuition fees, hundreds of dollars in test fees (SAT, SAT II, APs etc), and hundreds more in college application fees, any additional info or edge you can get out of it will pay itself off and maybe more. Even a senior prom ticket cost more than that!!!</p>
<p>Mantori.suzuki – in terms of hard data, all the sites draw from the same data – so you are not going to find different statistical information from one to another. Its really a matter of presentation and layout. While my daughter was applying to colleges, my favorite site was the IPEDS Cool site – but they changed their interface since then, and I think it is now more difficult to use & actually provides less information. </p>
<p>Princeton Review also has information from its interviews with students and administrators - that’s subjective, but it provides something more than raw data. Their site has always been free, but they have changed their layout and interface several times over the years, not always for the better. </p>
<p>So I think the main issue is your preferred format to get the info. If you would like to be able to look at a spreadsheet-style layout for lists of college that also lets you easily reorder the data, and if some arbitrary ranking number is valuable to you, then the US News premium site does give you an easy, data-organizing tool. I personally feel that is more valuable in the early stages before you have narrowed down a college list. Its a very quick way to pick up very superficial information about many colleges. But I didn’t find it to be a particularly useful format for getting more specific info (they do have individual pages for each college with more info, but at least at the time I subscribed several years ago, I don’t think there were any tools for comparison of the more detailed info that were particularly useful or easy to navigate).</p>
<p>I recently found a new site called *****.com – it has reviews of colleges posted by students and a ton of articles – I don’t think that was around a few years ago, but it looks like a pretty good resource.</p>
<p>I was on the US News site a <em>lot</em> during my first go-round and always thought I’d buy the premium edition when we had right about a year to go before final decision. I never ended up buying it, though. The information really is all available elsewhere for free. (FWIW, for my second go-round I’m not on Princeton Review so much, but using collegeboard and Petersons a ton.)</p>
<p>Is it any more helpful than Naviance?</p>
<p>well each resource needs to be used in different ways</p>
<p>for stats, use college board, us news, college navigator, petersons
for college reviews, use college prowl(er), princeton review, fiske, studentsrevie(w)</p>
<p>don’t use the princeton review stats and don’t rely on college board to find out everything about a college haha</p>
<p>I don’t find Naviance to be particularly helpful. I have a feeling it varies from school to school, though. For my D’s school, all of the information for the past seven years is averaged together. I don’t find that to be particularly helpful, because the admissions climate today is different from that seven years ago. Also, for many schools, the sample sizes are too small for averages to be useful, especially when a legacy or athlete can seriously skew the average. Scattergrams help with that some, but for schools with few applicants, they’re not available for privacy reasons. I’ll have to check out some of the other sites mentioned, though. Thanks for the replies!</p>
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<p>That is not entirely true. While the content and basic data appear to be similar, the culling of data is not universal. Different organizations and different institutions do ask the colleges to report data on different surveys and forms. This explains why some elements are absent for certain reports. </p>
<p>As far as the Premium US News report, the last edition was a disaster as some genius at USNews decided it was better to offer more gimmicks to the user and abandon one of the greatest tools, namely the ability to reorganize the tabular data and download the tables into an Excel tool (with some difficulty.) </p>
<p>Considering the other sources, USNews remains a bargain for the data seeker, but not as clearly as it used to be.</p>
<p>So for those of you who have the US News Premium edition, how would you rank its usefulness versus any of these: college board, college navigator, mychances, princeton review, and collegedata? Is there any real killer app that they offer that would prompt me to shell out $, or is it literally nothing more than what the other sites have? Has the free stuff gotten to the point where it really is as good as the paid stuff?</p>
<p>I have used nearly all of the sources listed here. IMO, USNWR has historically been the best because it is the most comprehensive. However, xiggi is absolutely right that they screwed up the presentation last year and made it very difficult to get to the data and make comparisons on individual categories. This is important because the best way to use USWNR is not the way it is presented, but rather to identify the datapoint that is important to you and then resort according to this and see how schools shake out. Hopefully, USNWR will revert to its older form and provide this capability again.</p>