Hey guys, I am entering my junior year of high school, and have started looking into which colleges to attend. In all honesty, I have no clue where to start. I attend a small rural school, and any representatives that come speak to us are from extremely small local schools. The schools at fairs are also more local and smaller. Now I understand that there are many small schools out there that provide lower costing education with just as high of quality, but it simply isn’t what I am looking for. I am hoping to attend a larger out of state college. This makes it somewhat difficult to get a sense of what schools are out there, given that the faculty push for attendance at these schools. My interests are focused towards the STEM fields. At the moment they are focused on engineering, but this may very well change in coming years. I was wondering what schools you may recommend that are strong in the STEM areas? Any suggestions on how to see what is out there and how to start looking at what is best for me is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Click on the “Find a College” tab at the top of this page and put in your stats and any other preferences you might have. Then start looking at the schools. Be sure to run their Net Price Calculator to see if they are affordable for you. If your school or library has any college books (Fiske, etc), then thumb through those too.
I also suggest students start visiting schools near them. They don’t have to want to go to those schools, but they can get an idea of whether they like big/small, urban/rural, secular/religious, etc, and use that info to help target schools further away that they might be interested in. Simply jumping to college visits further away can waste a ton of money when one can figure out many preferences with day trips.
You also ought to consider having your parents run their numbers on an EFC calculator. If the number they receive back is one they can pay, highly consider good “needs met” schools. If they pick themselves up off the floor with a dazed look in their eye, start looking for decent merit aid schools. Couple this information with running Net Price Calculators.
Once you get some feel for what you like overall, then come back on here and post some stats/desires, etc, and consider options others have suggested.