The Best Sources for College Information

I wanted to provide some insight into how I process the wealth of information about each particular college to make it manageable, accurate, and most importantly, relevant to my application process.

1. Website - When I first hear about a college by word of mouth or maybe a glace through a ranking or viewbook, my first step is to stop at the college's website. This seems like the logical step, but college websites are often unbelievably convoluted and generally uninformative. Liberal arts colleges especially end up advertising the benefits of a liberal arts education, rather than an education from a particular college. The website visit thus allows for a general gist of what the school has to offer you academically and socially. One thing to take note of is what the colleges choose to occupy the space on their websites. Pay attention to what the college is really advertising - this is what the school prioritizes, even though they will all claim a "holistic undergraduate experience". Such categories to take note of are school spirit, academic rigor, and most popularly a great residential environment (most ivy league schools).

2. View Book - I must first confess, I am a complete sucker for flattery mail sent out by colleges. As soon as I have established a serious interest in a college, I fill out the form on their website to request information. This serves two purposes. First, the content of view books is some of the best information you will get about a school, from student perspectives to admissions preferences, this is the colleges time and place to brag about what makes them unique. Look at a view book the same way as you view a website. Interact with it, read the entire thing, and note what the college chooses to emphasize to see if those things are fitting with your priorities in a college. Second, you will also be added to that school's list of applicants who have "demonstrated interest". This is seen as a way of expressing interest (and thus likelihood to enroll if admitted) a little under the influence of a campus visit, but still seen as a positive initiation of communication between applicant and college.

3. Look the school up in a comprehensive guide - I have used a variety of guide books, but I keep coming back to the same few books because they have truly outstanding and experienced perspectives on schools that parents and students couldn't possibly have gleaned from a view book or even a campus visit or information session. The guide to start with is undoubtedly "Fiske's Guide to the Colleges", a very comprehensive and easy to read guide book that really emphasizes the intangibles of a school, what you might call a school's personality. This is a great opportunity to cross reference what the guidebook says from professional experience with what you thought about the school from exposure to their marketing - perhaps you were sucked in by those autumn campus still shots in the view book. A College Prowler is also a must to capture the overall experience of a college. Skipping the insignificant sections like safety, security, on and off campus housing, computers, etc. and focusing on the meaty sections like academics, local atmosphere, and guys and girls, they take a maximum of twenty minutes to read - an efficient use of time.

4. After you have been interested for a school for a few weeks or months, it's time to get serious about comparing your top choices. Check out the college's yearly course handbook from your guidance office and compare the types of classes offered for the program of interest to you. The types of courses offered speak boldly about what a college values. As a prospective anthropology major myself, I see a lot of schools offering only traditional courses such as Social Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Social Theory of the Individual, which reflects upon that school valuing a more traditional liberal arts education. More progressive schools might offer courses like The Anthropology of Star Wars, Consumerism in Society, or even The Anthropology of Tattoos. Such specialization is key in selecting both an academic program and a comprehensive atmosphere that is fitting with your interests. To further your understanding of a school's academic reputation and offerings, begin to look at the specific department that houses your prospective majors (always more than one program - you will probably change your mind between the time you apply and enroll)and decide what they emphasize through major requirements. The guide book "Choosing the Right College" published biannually by the ISI organization, though terribly elitist and demanding of schools (upholding that a school is essentially worthless if it doesn't require a core curriculum), offers a lot of insight into how the school is doing financially, what resources it has to offer, what departments emphasize, how responsive the administration is, and the general campus atmosphere encompassing the political views and student awareness on campus.

Always remember - it is a process and your opinion of a school at a given time is completely relative to which source you have seen last or what mood you are in. I keep a journal of my interest in schools so that I can compare how I feel currently with how I felt a few months ago. This method has kept me from "obsessing" over certain schools for short periods of time, and has allowed me to find the schools that I consistently recognize as top choices to help establish what I really value in a college for the long term.

Jon's Favorite College Sites

Favorite College Sites

Now that I'm starting to look at colleges and help out friends with their college choices, I have come upon a few sites that are really worth checking out.

Unigo.com

The highlights of this site are that has a ton of content and that all of the content is completely student contributed. The entire premise of the site fascinates me. A few years ago, a Wesleyan University grad got the idea to make a site out of all student generated content to provide a middle ground for prospective high school students and college students to learn and share their perspectives on their college experiences.

Reviews with the pink "recommended" tab are quite thorough and are genuinely helpful in grasping the essence of a college, beyond the level of a guidebook. It really takes guidebook-level raw information and translates it into what it actually means in terms of social and academic atmosphere. Another quick feature is the best and worst aspects of each college, which are short, one sentence responses written by students that tend to be pretty helpful grasping the big-picture of a school.

Unigo also provides a good glimpse of the average student through video clips from around campus and student responses and perspectives. Users should take all content with a grain of salt though, since it is pretty subjective in that students can say whatever they want. It definitely provides a one of a kind view into college life and how students feel about their final college choices.


StateUniversity.com

StateUniversity.com has also been a fantastic resource. Although this sounds like a tacky site for local schools, I assure you that it offers a comprehensive view on colleges of all levels of competitiveness. They also offer their own ranking system based on things like professor salary and test scores - things that tend to suggest career success and student satisfaction. The site also contains information such as demographics and entering class statistics in a way that's easy to understand and allows for easy comparison of schools.

I think that's what I appreciate most about everything on this site: it makes everything easy to compare and to digest. Objective information such as rankings or special honors a college has earned appears in a straightforward way alongside subjective information about general academic programs and the intellectual focus of the college community. Overall, it gives the best overview of a college of any online resource, and is only matched among books by Fiske's Guide to colleges, which I also strongly recommend.


About.com : College Admissions
http://collegeapps.about.com/

Rather than providing profiles of individual colleges (which this site also does for a smaller number of schools), this site is really a road map for common questions that families have about college admissions. Examples of topics include things like "What is Early Decision?" or "ACT or SAT?" The site is extremely helpful with how to begin the application process and with help regarding standardized testing. I also like that the site provides a lot of information about what test scores mean, and where you can go with them. The host of the site also manages a very interesting editorial blog in addition to providing FAQ and basics of admission. Topics go into different things like "Taking a year off," or "How colleges are reacting to the recession." This level of information is very helpful for getting into the minds of college admissions staff and for the advanced intermediate who is interested in learning a little bit more about the admissions process as a whole.