If you’ve been following along with the blog, we’ve been in a series on how to find the best college fit for your student. You can see the first post in the college research series here.
Today we’re going to look at 4 of my favorite tools of the trade for researching colleges. I will present each tool to you and then tell you how I use the tool. I encourage you to check these out and see if you find them helpful as well.
First of all, I just want to remind you that I’ve already mentioned youscience and making an excel/google sheets spreadsheet to compare your data. These two things are my go-to tricks that really help me when determining which avenues my child may be heading down. I highly recommend you check those prior posts out.
Okay, now on to other tools I love and use.
College Factual
The first one is College Factual. I love using their website to research to search how a college ranks for particular majors. Let me walk you through how this can give you helpful information. For example, go to their website and in the top search bar, type a college. I’m using “Kennesaw State University,” (KSU) a popular college near me. It brings up the overview page for KSU. From here, I find out that their best ranked major is Communication and Media Studies. I can also see their in-state tuition price is $22,453. You can then click on the ranking badges and find where KSU ranks nationally, regionally, and within Georgia.
Another way I use College Factual, is by searching for majors. Let’s say your student is interested in Journalism. Type “Journalism” in the search bar at the top. Look at the results, scroll down past the ads, and look for “The Best Journalism Colleges in the United States.” Click on that. Now let’s say you only want colleges in the Southeast or some other region. You can use the filter to select your favorite region. I found 42 colleges in the Southeast that offer Journalism. I can sort this information by best value, top ranked, where it’s the most popular major, etc. I like Most Popular a lot because that tells me how big the class size is for that major. I wouldn’t want to send my student to a college where their major had a very small number of students enrolled.
Now let’s say your student is interested in going to University of Georgia in Journalism. If you have searched for Top Ranked, then you can click “Refine List” and type in University of Georgia and you will find they are ranked 3rd in the Southeast for Journalism. We found this to be really helpful when we realized one of the colleges we were looking at was not ranked in any of the sciences at all and my daughter was considering a science major.
College Board
Another site I love to use is the College Board website. Create an account on the College Board site, and then go to the Big Future website. Here you can have it link to your SAT score and it will suggest colleges to you that are in three categories: Reach Schools, Match Schools, and Safety Schools. I love this feature! Here’s a great article on these 3 types of colleges, if you are unfamiliar with the terms. The College board tells you to put 3 reach colleges, 2 match colleges, and 1 safety college on your list. I personally think you will find more scholarship money if you apply to your Safety and Match Schools, where you are better or equal to their average freshman. But I love the way you can add the schools on your list and it shows you where your SAT score lies and how you line up.
Niche
Niche is an another great website for comparing colleges. Create an account and create your profile. Make sure to put in your exact ACT/SAT scores and High school GPA. This will be important later. Then click on Colleges to start comparing colleges. Add the colleges you are researching to your list. I love several things about the way niche works. Their list is concise and easy to scroll between colleges. They give each college a rating so you can compare those ratings and see how your favorites line up. They also show a comparison of in-state tuition, SAT scores, and acceptance rates. You can learn a lot from this information.
After you have looked through your complete list of colleges and compared them to each other, next pick one college to dive into. Click on the college name and open up their overview page. Scroll down through this page and look at all the info. I love the first section that gives you an overview of how the college ranks from academics to dorm rooms and professors. It will also tell you the most popular majors. You can see where they are ranked nationally. Click on “See all college rankings” to see even more. Go back to that page and scroll down to “Will I get in?” This is my favorite thing on the Niche website. It shows you a scatter plot based on your high school GPA and your test score of how likely you are to get in to the college. I think this can be comforting, motivating, and challenging as you look to see where you fit in and extremely helpful for your college research.
Best Value Lists
My final tip for great tools to use to research colleges is to google Best Value lists. You’ll find lists published by Forbes, Kiplinger, and USNews to name three. Value does not necessarily mean cheap. It means the best reputation /quality of academics for the price you pay. For instance, a degreed person from Georgia Tech will probably have an easier time getting a job (and probably a higher salary as well), than a degreed person from a college the interviewer has never heard of. I love the USNews list, because it has a search bar on the left where you can type in the name of a college and see where they rank on the value list.
I hope these 4 tools are helpful for you in your college research! Post a comment and tell me which one is your favorite! If you enjoyed this post and want to start at the beginning of the series, click here. If you want to go to the next post in the series, click here!
Blessings,
Michelle