<p>Like in terms of financial aid, how many people graduate, what other things should I look for that would determine if the school has good value or quality for attending there. Please explain what each thing means. Give a checklist of the things that I should look when searching. </p>
<p>Academic offerings in relation to the student’s interest.</p>
<p>Net price from the net price calculator, and amount and likelihood of merit scholarships, if needed.</p>
<p>First you need to consider YOUR situation.</p>
<p>Home state
intended major or career
GPA
test scores
the amount your family will pay
desire for: large or small school, quiet or rah rah, rural or city, cold weather or warm weather.</p>
<p>Then a list can be made.</p>
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<p>Considering that most people on CC are looking at selective non-profit colleges, this generally a non-issue</p>
<p>I know that;those are preferences. But how I’m talking about the school’s quality. Like what should I look for. Like academics, and people’s satisfactory. </p>
<p>If the school has your major and is accredited (like ABET accreditation for engineering programs). </p>
<p>I think you mean “prospective” students and “people’s satisfaction”. You will want to proofread your essays very carefully…</p>
<p>You can learn about student satisfaction overall by looking at c-o-l-l-e-g-e p-r-o-w-l-e-r 's websites (have to do that or CC stars out the name). </p>
<p>Do you know about the Common Data Set? For a college you are interested in, Google “<college name=”"> Common Data Set". There are sections on the % of students getting financial aid, what types, and average amounts, graduation rates, etc. It is quite a trove of information.</college></p>
<p>For information on outcomes, you can check out the website for the college’s career center. You could try emailing questions if you have specific questions about outcomes for a given major (eg, where did chemistry majors from the last 3 year’s graduating classes get jobs or grad school admissions?).</p>
<p>any good book on college admissions will devote a fair amount to figuring out what colleges are a fit.</p>
<p>I find that a lot of people get stuck looking at rankings and cost, etc. and offer miss out the most important factor: does the school match you? Will you be happy there? Is it the RIGHT FIT?</p>
<p>I know it sounds silly to make your decision based on the weather, but a bunch of research has found that students who are happy get the highest grades. So I guess a big factor is what your life will be like: size of city, weather, international student population (if it is your case), social life… what can you do outside of class: sport, intramurals, clubs, parties, etc.</p>
<p>You’re better off at a lower-ranked school where you’ll be HAPPY than at a top school that you hate. That’s what I think anyway…</p>
<p>thanks, that is actually true. </p>
<p>As far as weather goes, most students start off saying they want to go where it’s warm and in a city with lots to do, until they find out most of the top schools are where it’s cold in the winter and/or in the middle of nowhere… </p>
<p>Personally, I think cold has a way of focusing the mind on studying. Less temptation to go out and do something more fun, at least for very long. It’s also why I think places that don’t have lots of temptations right outside your door are better as well. If everyone else has decided it’s time to study and there’s no one to goof off with, you just might decide to join them. Won’t stop some people, but it makes it easier to focus.</p>
<p>Not that I’d ever advise anyone to turn down Stanford, but I would put up with most winters to go to a better school.</p>
<p>That’s true. Most people will do that, but it also depends on individuals. </p>
<p>On top of the ABET accreditation comment: Don’t worry if a CS program isn’t ABET-accredited. ABET accreditation is essentially irrelevant to CompSci and often hinges on which department controls the CS major or whether the college cares about ABET for CS. Only MIT (out of the Big 4) has an ABET-accredited CS program.</p>
<p>This labeling of “better school” and “top school” has gotten out of hand IMO. “Better” is a relative term, depending on what one actually considers to be better, and “top school” doesn’t necessarily mean “top” in everything. </p>
<p>Heck, I would recommend University of Arizona over MIT to any student looking to get into optical engineering or astronomy. </p>
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<p>Yes, until the students start using dining hall trays to sled down the snowy stairs :D</p>
<p>In all seriousness, I think students in large urban areas use the city - but students in small college towns and rural areas make their own mischief. Put thousands of 18-22-year-olds together and they have no problem manufacturing their own distractions.</p>
<p>I agree with CharlesSA. Most of the colleges that students here on CC consider are pretty comparable in terms of academic quality. I’m not convinced that a sufficiently motivated, intelligent, ambitious student would have wildly different life outcomes at Stanford vs. Smith on the basis of the academic quality of the classes/professors alone. Those places both attract top academic talent wrt professors (albeit with different foci). The difference probably comes in with some club she does that changes her life, or a study abroad experience that gives him new perspective, or a classmate who knows someone influential in her chosen field, or a research experience he has with a great professor. What’s really going to define the difference between Stanford and Smith are those quality of life factors.</p>
<p>So yes, you do want to make sure that your chosen college/university has acceptable graduation rates and student satisfaction (which you can somewhat roughly gauge with the percentage of freshman returning for sophomore year, although that’s not perfect). And you definitely want to be sure you can afford it via good financial aid. But assuming that you are comparing schools that are close to identical or within a certain small range on those factors, the other student life stuff is probably a better and easier way to to decide.</p>
<p>Go through a college search engine and plug in things you are interested in. Some things they will ask you are your college major, how many people you want in the college (do you want a small liberal arts college or a huge 40k people public university), do you want greek life, what setting do you want it in (rural, suburban, urban), what kind of sports teams or club must be at the university, how much diversity must their be? There’s a college search engine on this site, if you go above and click on “college search.” I advise you not to be too picky on this part, as you might rule out a college that barely fits your criteria (i.e. only 19% minorities as opposed to the must have 20% you have on your list) that would otherwise be a perfect fit. I also advise you not to put in anything pertaining to cost unless you’re full pay. If you require financial aid, then don’t filter anything yet. You may say “my parents can only afford 30k in tuition, so I should filter so that schools more than 30k don’t show up” but there are many schools that could give you the financial aid to make the cost feasible, and if you filter based on cost, these schools won’t show up. I also don’t think you should put in your scores yet, because there are colleges below your standard that could offer you good merit and there colleges above your standard that may be worth the reach. Same goes for selectivity. Selectivity means nothing. There are schools with 30% acceptance rates where the average SAT is 1900 and schools with 60% acceptance rates where the average SAT is 2000. The selectivity filter is meaningless.</p>
<p>So now you have your list. It typically varies. I am not very picky at all (e.g. don’t care if a campus is rural, suburban or urban) therefore my initial list came out to be around 150 colleges. If you have this many or more, you should probably add at least another criteria to your list to make it less. If you have 10 or less colleges on your list, you should probably lessen the criteria so you can have more suggested colleges.</p>
<p>After this, I went through every single college (yes all 150, this is why I suggest narrowing it down) on collegeboard and looked through some basics. I checked the retention rate, the graduation rate, the type of college (some colleges will be historically black colleges or all women’s colleges so those can be taken out of your list if you want). Retention rate is how many people come back again sophomore year, as opposed to transferring. Typically, if there’s a low retention rate, that means there’s something wrong with the school that makes everyone want to transfer. If a school had lower than a 80% retention rate, I took it off my list. Graduation rate is how many people graduate within 6 years. If the school had lower than a 70% graduation rate, I took it off my list. This can be different for you. A lot of people don’t care how many graduate in 6 years because that doesn’t affect them. A lot of people care a lot about the retention rate because even an 80% retention rate means that 1/5 of the school transferred, and who wants to lose 1/5 of their friends after the first year of college?</p>
<p>After I narrowed down my list, I had about 50 schools left. I made a few exceptions for retention rate and graduation rate for in-state colleges that I already knew I was considering. Then, I went through each one of these 50 schools again on collegeboard and looked at the average SAT, acceptance rate, % with a GPA higher than 3.75 and % in the top 10th percentile of their class. I used all of these to determine whether the school was a safety, low match, match, high match, low reach, reach or high reach. So let’s say my SAT was above the 75th percentile for each section and the % with a GPA 3.75 and higher was 45%. I would classify that school a safety. Let’s say my SAT was above the 75th percentile for 2 sections, but around the 50th percentile for the third section. 65% had a GPA of 3.75. This would probably be a low match. Now let’s say for a school I was in the middle 50th percentile for each section but the acceptance rate was in the high 20s, I would consider this a high match or low reach. After doing it a couple of times you get used to guestimating how difficult it would be for you to get into a school. </p>
<p>After doing this, I went on the websites of all 50 of the schools and looked around. I mostly went on the page for my major and just read. You can usually get a clear sense of whether what the website says aligns with what you want to do. For example, my intended major is political science and one website I read talked all about structure. The classes focused on the structure of politics and the structure of political philosophies and the structure of other countries’ political systems. I found that so boring. It seemed like the classes were just all about learning what the government is made of, like executive, legislative and judicial branches. I didn’t want to just know about the structure, I wanted to know the causes, outcomes, flaws, strengths. I want to know how we can make the government better, not what an in depth analysis of what the government is. There were a lot of schools that I could rule out just through looking at their website. Besides looking vaguely looking at the website, I also specifically looked at the classes offered. If all the course titles bothered me, I crossed it off my list. I also looked at the professors and typically the school would list the professors’ accomplishments, like whether they have published papers and gotten awards. You can also look at where recent graduates end up. Do the jobs they get align with what you want in the future? Are there any internship opportunities to help you get where you want? I was able to cross off about 10-15 schools by just looking at their website.</p>
<p>The next part is the most important. Run your information through a net price calculator for all the schools. Talk to your parents when it comes to this step. If you don’t want to talk to them directly, find out indirectly how much they make and how much they would be willing to pay for college. The net price calculators are also on collegeboard and some of them are easy to fill out whereas others may take 10-15 minutes each. It will get repetitive, and you will get bored. Don’t. Keep going through with it. After you do this, look through how much need is typically met. Some schools meet 100% of need and some meet 50%. This means that, say 50 kids have demonstrated financial need. If the school meets 50% need, that means that 25 kids will get their full need met. The other 25 will have partial to no need. It’s okay to apply to schools that meet 50% of need only if your stats are well above their 75th percentile. If a school is a reach and only meets 50% aid, why would they choose to give their aid to you? They could give it to the 2400 SAT 4.0 GPA kid because they would rather him attend. If the school is safety, low match or match, google “x school merit scholarships” to see if you qualify for any, whether guaranteed or competitive. Remember that if you qualify for need and get a merit scholarship, the merit scholarship will typically be used to offset loans and workstudy, then will go toward grants. So let’s say the school will give you 20k in grants and 5.5k in loans with 2.5k in work study. Then you get a 10k merit scholarship. Your package will chance and instead you will have 18k in grants and 10k in merit scholarship. Your overall EFC will likely not change, but now you have no loans. It’s not like this for all schools, but it is for most schools. </p>
<p>By now you should have a decent idea of whether the school is affordable. You will probably cross off a lot of schools on your list. I had around 25 schools left at this point. These were schools that were either already affordable because they were in-state or schools where my EFC was at an affordable price. Now that you know they’re affordable, you can spend time being nitty gritty about details. Go on websites like CC and college niche (formerly college prowler) to see if these schools seem like good fits atmosphere-wise. Here are some examples. Since I’m majoring in political science and I’m for the most part liberal, I didn’t want conservative schools. You can find out info like that through online websites. And although I didn’t mind an urban campus, I wanted that campus to actually feel like a campus and not just be in the middle of the street. I wanted small class sizes, I wanted a low amount of graduate students teaching the classes, I wanted more undergraduate students than graduates so that there would be more room for me to grow. I wanted a lenient curriculum instead of many required classes. I wanted the opportunity to minor or double major. There were so many things that I wanted. None of my schools ended up having all of these things, but I learned to compromise and make sacrifices. If there were a lot of graduate student teachers, I would at least make sure that there were specific opportunities only for undergraduate students that I could excel in.</p>
<p>By this time, I had a relatively short list. It was around 15 or so schools. My last step was making it balanced. I had a lot of safeties on my list, so I looked at it very closely and determined, “I’ll get into school x and y, and I would choose x over y any day so why am I even applying to y?” Then I crossed off y. I got my list down to 11 schools this way, 4 safeties (though you should probably have less), 3 matches and 4 reaches. If you have 10-15 schools and want a lot less, like 6-8, you should visit some of the schools. Actually, you should visit even if you have a good amount, just to get a feel for the college. Sometimes you get this idea of the school off its website, but in person, the school is completely different. It may not be as intellectually stimulating or close knit as you thought, and visiting is the only way to find out.</p>
<p>Now look at each school and ask yourself if you would be happy here. If the answer is no, cross it off. Don’t ask questions or second guess yourself, just cross it off. </p>
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<p>Haven’t you heard? Trays are now environmentally incorrect! All the cool schools are now banning them, since they have to be washed.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 I thought that was just foam trays. What are they going to replace the plastic trays with?</p>
<p>I’d be surprised if things come full circle since all the studies favor plastic trays over styrofoam ones.</p>
<p>Cardboard…</p>