Something I did not consider until I started at the University of Michigan was the number of colleges/majors/classes that undergraduate students have access to. Big schools offer undecided students the chance to explore a broad variety classes before picking a major. Some of my friends even transferred between colleges once finding subjects they were more interested in.
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Perhaps not statistics but in the âother informationâ category, there are a few college guides I do recommend. USNWR is the most influential of course. In addition to them, I think Fiske and Princeton Review have been reviewing colleges the longest and are, imo, the most reliable (along with USNWR). The PR detailed descriptions and scores are available for free if you set up an account on their website and I think are more useful than the lists in the public section. Colleges Worth Your Money is a newer book by the folks at College Transitions that has some useful info, although I disagree with the methodology in a few of their feeder lists (eg, too few medical skills or tech companies included in their searches). Fiske, PR, and Colleges Worth Your Money each have long form descriptions of colleges that might give a better sense of the personality of a college than USNWR alone. I also like The College Finder, which contains in book form many of the lists of college counselor recommendations from the website CollegeExpress. If you donât want to purchase the book, the same lists on the website are free. We found CollegeExpress/The College Finder a useful and underrated way to get expert (a panel of counselors) opinions on things that might not be easily found elsewhere. One can manually cross reference across their lists to zero in on schools that stand out for combinations of qualities. For example, interested in colleges that are known for outstanding undergraduate education, balance between academics and non academics, and happy students? Take note of which schools show up on all three. One can quickly see which schools appear on which lists, which is typically in the dozens.
The CX College Express lists are based on subjective opinions. Why not just examine the first year retention rate at any colleges or universities of interest ?
Perhaps my point wasnât clear. They have hundreds (800+) of lists, with any one school typically being on dozens. Some of the lists are designated as being âProduced by the Facts;â Colleges with High Retention Rates is in fact one such example. Some of the lists are designated as âProduced by the Experts,â which comes from a survey of hundreds of college counselors; âThe Happy Collegesâ is a list of that variety. You can get a sense of what the facts and their survey of experts say about a school by viewing the lists for a given school of interest, or you can search for schools by cross referencing lists of interest as I described earlier. If motivated to find additional information above and beyond whatâs been mentioned earlier in this thread, the site offers a convenient and free way to get a sense of what a large pool of counselors plus objective data say. (More can be found in the bookâs preface about the methodology.)
If you are specifically wondering why someone would be interested in, say, their Happy Colleges list instead of just looking at the High Retention Rates list, I think thatâs mainly because the former is likely a function of more than just the latter. Donât get me wrong; I think itâs useful to look at raw retention rates too. But if hundreds of professional college counselors combined their collective experience into a freely available list on student happiness, it seems reasonable some might want to consult that, for the same reason people might want to ask their high schoolâs college counselor if students they know that matriculated at a particular college have been happy there. This logic applies to why one might be interested in any of their expert lists; if one professional counselorâs opinion is valuable, maybe hundreds is considerably more. Not every list will be of interest, but there are hundreds to pick from in that one site/book. One should absolutely weigh any given list against all the other data out there.
Make sense?
Retention rates can be affected by a lot more than student satisfaction. A less selective school that admits a bigger number of lower-income students may have a lower retention rate for reasons that are unrelated to happiness. For instance, some of those students may have struggled with college-level academics or with financing their education.
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A great place for finding data is College Navigator. College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics
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