When researching colleges, what statistics or other information have been most useful for you when choosing which ones are (or are not) a good fit?
And is there any information about colleges that you wish you had that you haven’t been able to find easily?
Thank you!
One thing that came into play late in decision-making for my daughter (but should have been considered sooner) was the relative difficulty of getting admitted to a major.
Questions she had:
Related question:
Also, to what extent does that affect admission selectivity? For example, a student may have heard of students in the previous class getting into San Jose State University with 2.6 GPAs, so the student may assume that their 3.5 GPA makes it a safety. But they are likely to get an unpleasant surprise because they want to major in computer science.
Overall admission stats are often not very useful when the school does admission by major. Some schools do admission by division (College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering, etc.), so overall admission stats may only be useful if one division makes up most of the enrollment, and the student is interested in that one division.
The most useful data for both of our kids was visits to the colleges. In both cases, schools they thought they lived dropped right off of consideration after accepted student visits. And the schools where they matriculated rose to the top.
To answer your question, I imagine kids look at primarily
Acceptance rate
GPA
Test Range
To know if they’re fishing in the right pond.
And then population size to know which from above might make an initial list.
Just providing data points as asked.
Seems that the most common omissions from chance / match threads that should really be known early in the process is:
A college cannot fit if it is not affordable.
Actually…the student can’t attend if it’s not affordable.
Some non academic criteria that my kids cared about was the number of students, % OOS, and M/F ratios.
My D looked at the 4 year plan of study, the CDS, read the school newspapers and social media feeds, and then relied heavily on visits. At each school we tried to do the general campus tour, the engineering specific tour, eat in the dining halls, and she tried to meet with professors and sit in on classes. Not all schools allowed the last two things but many did.
To us there was two level of “Fit” - the more global around does the school have the appropriate program, is the school in a geographically desirable area, is it if a size that seems desirable, M/F ratio? Greek life? etc. That helped shaped the application list. Then “Fit” came into play once acceptances were in and it became much more qualitative feel - accepted student visits to the school and specific programs. Visit the cafe, visit the athletic facilities, walk through the dorms and the buildings… etc. Tough to have statistics around those things.
Of course the economic picture played a role throughout the journey. Financials didn’t prevent an application from being submitted but conversation with DS was always that financials would weigh into the equation once we had a full picture.
Some things I have considered for fit:
Number of undergraduate students
% living on campus
% participation in Greek life
% out of state
Core curriculum requirements
Campus traditions
Nearest airport
Nearest major city
Weather
Trees
State/local politics
Some colleges’ social media has been very helpful in figuring out the personality/vibe of campus.
My first response answered your second question. To respond to your first, the information/data my daughter used to make her decision was as follows:
Step One: She identified schools in geographic area of preference.
Step Two: Out of the remaining schools, she identified schools that offered programs and activities of interest. This was problematic because she was a recruited athlete at smaller schools but the academic programs and other activities/organizations she wanted were only available at large schools. She quickly determined she was only interested in playing D3, so all D2 and NAIA schools were eliminated. She was left with a list of D3 liberal arts colleges and a list of large research universities. After soul searching, the small school list was dropped late in the game because the schools didn’t offer enough of the experience she wanted outside of her sport. But that didn’t happen until after the remaining steps:
Step Three: Researched schools to create a short list (or in her case, two lists of schools that would receive applications).
This research consisted of getting answers to the following:
a. Does school offer merit scholarships, especially NMSF or NMF scholarships? How competitive are they and what is the application process?
b. What is the school’s general reputation and reputation of desired programs based on word-of-mouth, Niche grades and reviews, rankings in various publications? It wasn’t important that it be a top 20 school, but it was important that it be a B or better Niche school with B+ or better academics and ranked in roughly the top 200 for national universities/top 100 for SLACs and appear to be fiscally sound.
c. What special programs are available and appealing (Honors College? Leadership cohort? 3-1 program? Direct admission to major?)
d. What desired majors does the school offer, how many faculty for each one, how many students of each gender, and how successful are the students in obtaining internships and employment? [This is where she should have also dug deep into difficulty of getting admitted to major, etc., as I outlined in my first response, but she didn’t do that until after acceptances were in.]
As part of this process, in addition to looking at Niche and published rankings, she looked at school websites and social media, participated in some virtual presentations, conducted some visits.
Step Four: She confirmed that some of her choices were almost certain admits and submitted applications.
Step Five (concurrent with Step Six): After receiving acceptances, she conducted more visits. This helped her eventually rule out both the most urban and the most rural options. She also dropped the ones furthest from home, although they might have survived if they were more perfect in other respects.
Visits also helped her drop the most expensive schools. Most people start with a budget at step one. We didn’t because we are theoretically capable of full pay, but we are very frugal and thought there were better uses for the money unless something special about the fit of the school justified the expense. We wanted our daughter to explore options freely and would accept an expensive choice if she could articulate good reasons. Fortunately for us, it wasn’t an issue with our daughter. She did not fall in love with an expensive dream school and she concluded that the most expensive schools that accepted her were not significantly superior in her mind to more affordable choices — certainly not worth paying twice as much or more.
Step Six: She conducted more in-depth research of her final choices:
a. She contacted students she knew at the schools and asked questions.
b. She learned more about what AP credit she would receive and looked deeper into desired majors (via internet research and department tours, etc.)
c. She did more internet research/reaching out to personal contacts and looking at social media to learn more about activities and organizations she might be interested in pursuing at each school. She learned about opportunities that were unique to each school, how competitive it was to participate, etc.
Step Seven: She did a “vibe check” and asked herself which school made her heart happy and where she felt like she could find her people. One school stood out and that was the winner. It was the last school she visited and it sealed the deal. She was waiting for that feeling.
For fit purposes, I’m a big fan of looking at a college’s version of a “What we look for” admissions page.
Everything else that comes to mind related to fit is really pretty personal.
Like, my S24 might be interested in grad school, and generally is a bit more academicky than pre-professional, although he is fine with a mix as long as the dominant vibe is not too pre-professional. He is not interested in colleges with too much of a “grind” reputation, nor the traditional big-game/Greek-life party scene. We joked at one point that a college which says it is a work-hard/play-hard sort of school is probably about the exact opposite of what he wants. He wants more of a work-smarter/play-friendly sort of college.
So we look for information on Greek life, which is available multiple places. I also like to look at per capita PhD feeder lists, including by subject where available. This gets filtered for him into some sort of general, “yes, this college has been good/very good for grad school placement,” statement. So he is not really looking at the list order in any strict sense, but if it generates some possible leads, or confirms some general reputations, that seems useful.
I note I don’t necessarily believe if a college is high on such a list then choosing it will automatically help you get into a PhD program. It is more that if a college is high on such a list then you know there are likeminded students and at least a well-established departmental effort to this end.
Along the same lines, I do look at the US News peer surveys about the quality of the undergraduate teaching (as usual they divide it up into research universities and LACs). Again, this gets filtered into a more general “good/very good reputation for teaching” sort of statement for his consumption, and it is about leads and such not any sort of strict preferences.
Here I might note I really, really wish there was a serious effort to do a broad, repeat survey of college student satisfaction with the quality of their teachers. Peer reputation surveys are better than nothing, but in my view you are asking the wrong people, and their basis for comparison is pretty dubious.
Anyway, different people would have different things like this they cared about. For us, though, outside of this stuff it is really about visits, learning about what he likes from visits, and then more visits along those lines. In fact, I think he likely barely notices even this stuff I find online, and the visits are pretty dominant for him. But there is definitely a role I am playing in suggesting visits based on what he has liked so far, including making sure it is plausibly the right sort of generally academicky vibe (loosely defined).
Some things not mentioned above include:
Class sizes from the CDS. The CDS gives more detailed info, like # of classes between 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, etc. But I feel a lot differently higher percentages of classes with 25 students than I do about classes with 45 students. But both of those get lumped in the same category in other sources.
The expectation of number of classes/semester (i.e. five 3-credit classes or four 4-credit classes, or something else), or if it’s on a quarter or 1 course/month, or…Alternatively, how many full classes are expected for graduation? 32 (4 classes/semester), 36 (9/year with a J-term or Maymester, or), or 40 (5 classes/semester), or? Also, at one point does one start to be charged fees for extra courses and how much are those fees? (As in some schools allow students to take 12-17 credit hours for one flat fee, but then charge additional fees for each additional credit hour).
On a related note, how many distribution/core requirement classes are there?
Borrowing from @CMA22’s great questions:
However, the number of classes of a give size overestimates the percentage of smaller classes that a student will see, since more students are in large classes. For example, if there is one class of 100 students and nine classes of 10 students, most of the classes are small, and the average class size is 19. However, most of the students will be in the large class, and the average class size as seen by the students is 53.
A more realistic class size measure would be the sum of the squares of class sizes divided by the total number of students enrolled in the classes, in order to weight class sizes by the number of students in them. Have this for the overall, and separately for lower and upper level classes. Perhaps also by subject.
The other thing to be aware of is class size gaming such as by having lots of 19 and 29 student classes, and designating lab and discussion sections that are normally attached to a large lecture as separate classes.
We plotted out the 4-year plans for the same major in every school my son was considering. Seems pretty basic on the face of it, but this exercise was really helpful to see how different these 4-year plans were from one school to another (even schools that initially seemed very similar). He ended up eliminating a number of schools because the 4-year plans did not allow as many free units for him to explore other classes of interest.
Our S did this several years ago. It was a very informative exercise.
Once we narrowed it down to a list of possible colleges, I made a spreadsheet of the cost involved in applying (including transcripts and test scores if required). I also included the number of essays/supplementals required for each application. That helped my children whittle down the list a little more.
Sometimes it was difficult to find the list of essays, supplementals, honors college essays, etc. If you are trying to create a resource, it would be nice to include that.
Early in the process, I searched for the high school requirements that each college suggested or recommended. How many years of foreign language, lab science, etc. do they want? Do they want EHAP or bio, chem and physics?
Data?
Initially:
Then, college visits to whittle-down list.
When composing/preparing “why college x” essays, in-depth research into the college’s academic approaches/policies - and again after acceptances came in.
Accepted-student visits of the top contenders.
Your child is really cool. I hope my daughter magically ends up at the same college so they can be friends! 