<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>