My kid is just beginning to explore the universe of colleges out there that she might be interested in. I know that Naviance and some other sites have some interesting search engines to find colleges based on certain criteria that you fill out.
Besides Naviance and CC, what are some good search engines for colleges using pre-defined criteria?
I see my role as a parent of a soon-to-be college applicant to provide her with the tools to find schools of interest to her. And I want her list to be entirely HER list, not her parents, based on the things that matter to her. She will definitely get ideas from her GC and her friends, and her own knowledge, but what are some of these online tools?
Not online/search - but my kids found The Fiske Guide and the Princeton Review Guide books to both be very helpful. Our copies were well used.
We also all liked Daytripper University online to read about campus, restaurants and things to do around each campus. Even if not traveling to the campus, it provided a good overview to start thinking about fit.
College vine is pretty good. They also have a chancing engine (they sort schools for you based on safety/target/reach based on your gpa and stuff) but don’t take their word as law. Still a really good site for finding out info about colleges. Another website that I use is bigfuture.collegeboard.org
I would get a Barrons or similar book - but agree of the websites Niche is best.
If you know your major, just google it and Niche.
Anthropology + Niche
Just beware - some rankings are listed by major. Others are - the top rates colleges that have that major.
Really, the first thing to do is - figure out the type of school you want - small, medium, big; rural or urban or suburban; size; social aspects; big sports or not; weather, etc. and your budget and likelihood of getting need based aid or not…and you can narrow down a lot. If you don’t know if you qualify for aid, go onto a college like Cornell (has a good one) and fill in their Net Price Calculator to see.
We first bought a book - went through every state, college by college. Obviously, many states and colleges are easily eliminated, etc.
Let us know your desires and perhaps we can throw out ideas.
Thanks for these tips (and the same for all the others).
Right now, I want DD to have fun researching schools. It’s her desires that are paramount, and she is just starting the college admissions game this summer as a rising junior. I want her to spend some time just playing around with the various tools that are there for starters as she compiles her initial list of schools that interest her.
She’s just starting, but as she narrows the focus of what she wants and what is realistic based on her excellent work to do (and hope that she continues it!), we will come back to CC to get specifics.
There is SO much information out there that I am looking for something like a search engine to make it more manageable. Someone had mentioned the Fiske book, and even they have a paid online subscription.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, DD is fed up with college admissions-related books at the moment. She has enough books to prep for the standardized tests and doesn’t want anymore (at least for now)!
Is news has something. College board does. It’s easy to narrow a list once u figure desires
You might want to take a mom daughter 3 or 4 day road trip. Walk around large. Medium. Small campuses. Just to see. Get a feel. Intersperse it with whatever u enjoy. Hiking. Shipping food
So it’s a mom daughter fun trip with a little time trying to identify traits u might like
We went to Ohio state. Too big. Dennison and Kenyon. Too small. So knew somewhere in the middle. Tgat type thing.
They are great colleges but obviously a limited set - which is why. If you want smaller, under the radar LACs it’s great - but I think they’re not close to that yet - just starting out the search. Perhaps they’ll end up wanting big schools or Ivy or Mountains or large Greek or sports or who knows.
Of course, as the parent, make sure that you know what your cost constraints are and inform the student about them up front. It won’t be any fun for her or you if you have to tell her later that all of her colleges of interest are too expensive.
Rather than just willy nilly starting to search, it helps to have a couple limiting factors. The first being what you can pay. Do not underestimate this. If you can’t afford $80,000 a year for college (or simply refuse to pay that much), those schools do not need to be considered unless they offer financial aid that puts the cost in your range. Explain the net price calculator to her.
Also area of the country is worth considering (or at determining that it does not matter). And finally as others have stated, touring a large, tiny and medium school is probably worth it, especially if she is kind of excited about college right now. Give her the price parameters up front though.
We did a college tour last fall to get a feel for types of schools and now my kid uses those schools as his reference point in looking at other schools. Also, the stuff they talked about on the tours gave him a better understanding of things he should think about. Before the tours, he always assumed food and dorms would be fine no matter where he went.
As for websites, I liked Niche for basic info about schools that is sometimes hard to find on their websites (like school size and racial breakdown). If you set up an account, you can make a schools list and you will get a scattergram for schools that show your chances of getting in based on test scores and grades. The Princeton Review website (towards the bottom of the landing page) has really good rankings based on tons of factors, but it is limited in which schools it even considers in the rankings.
What it shows is where a person places, relative to accepted and rejected applicants. However, unless somebody can count all of the accepted and all of the rejected among applicants with similar stats, this is not all that informative, beyond the understanding that, the “better” one’s stats are, relative to another accepted students, the more likely they are to be accepted.
However, while being better than 90% of the accepted students for a large public school with a 50% acceptance rate means that your chances of being accepted are pretty good. However for a private college with a 10% acceptance rate, which is really serious about holistic admissions, you are much more likely to be rejected than accepted, even if your stats are better than 99% of the accepted applicants.
Aside from the issues of other factors aside from stats not being included, the scattergram also does not take into consideration the importance a college assigns to GPA versus test score, nor the fact that many colleges, especially smaller private colleges, do not see all GPAs as being equal (also - this is the UW GPA and does not take rigor into consideration).
TL;DR: Niche scattergrams are a very crude tool for figuring out chances of admissions.
BTW, Naviance allows you to display their scattergrams for your own school with weighted GPAs, which does take rigor into consideration.
Thanks again to all that replied here. I went ahead and subscribed to the online version of the Fiske book. I am very impressed with the substance of the reviews of 300+ schools.
That being said, I am not so enamored with the online/tech aspects that don’t seem to work like bookmarking colleges and looking at maps to locate colleges. The latter is relatively minor, but the former more so.
Are there any online subscribers to Fiske here? If so, how has your experience been as to the tech side of the site?