Online search tools for finding the right college

If you are looking for colleges in the twenty-first century the internet is here to help make your life easier, but also potentially more confusing. There are so many resources online offering to help you find the best college. Some of these resources are helpful, some of them are simply collections of paid advertisements, and some of them are scams designed to separate you from your money without offering any real value in return. This section lists some legitimate college search resources that could be a great help to you when you are searching for colleges worth a second look.

Tip: For most of the college search tools, the more selection criteria you include in your search the fewer colleges you will see in your resulting list. So start with only your minimum requirements to get the most inclusive list. If that list is too long to work with then try adding different combinations of your nice-to-have college selection criteria to produce shorter lists. Play with different combinations of these optional criteria and look to see which colleges show up frequently. A college where you would really thrive may not have one of your optional criteria and you wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity to find out more about it because you used an overly restrictive search.

The College Board College Matchmaker: http://www.collegeboard.com/splash

From the folks who bring you the SAT test, here is a very flexible web tool where you can filter by college location, size, activities, diversity of students, religious affiliation, public or private, housing options, student activities, sports programs, majors offered, how hard it is to gain admissions, cost of attendance and types of financial aid offered. This tool is a great way to create a quick list of colleges that you can then look up online or in the college guides to learn a bit more about the educational philosophy and special features of each school.

One amusing limitation is that you can use this tool to find colleges that don’t require an application essay, but you can’t find colleges that don’t require the SAT. Another limitation is that the search is limited to colleges in the College Board database. This includes most but certainly not all two and four year accredited colleges in the U.S. and Canada.

The Princeton Review Counselor-o-matic: http://www.princetonreview.com/home.asp

The Counselor-o-matic does what its name implies; it serves as a virtual guidance counselor. It starts by asking you about your high school academic and extra curricular record and your college admissions test scores. You can indicate up to ten majors that you are interested in studying. You can then indicate features of the college that are important to you, such as religious affiliation, location, size, diversity, class size, whether it is a residential college, cost, which student activities are offered, and which sports teams the college fields.

The Counselor-o-matic then returns a list of suggested schools in three groups based on how hard it is for you to gain admissions given your high school record. It labels these good matches, reach schools and safety schools. It also scores each school based on how well it matches your search criteria.

This tool is a fantastic way to find some schools worth looking into further, but be aware of a few issues with the Counselor-o-matic so you know how to interpret the results. First, there are paid sponsor schools who will be listed first and it is not clear that these schools would have been on your list only based on search criteria fit. If it wasn’t for these paid sponsors you wouldn’t have this free tool to use, but don’t assume that the shaded listings at the top are the most interesting ones for you to consider.

Second, the tool uses fuzzy logic to match you to schools, so unlike most search tools you won’t necessarily filter out schools by putting in more search criteria. This is both a benefit and a drawback. It is a drawback if you have some essential criteria and wouldn’t want to waste any time looking at colleges that doesn’t field a women’s lacrosse but the fuzzy matching tool keeps sending you false leads. It is an advantage if you have a long list of nice to have college features because you can add them all at once and let the fuzzy logic matching surface colleges that have at least some if not most of these features.

The final thing to keep in mind is that the Counselor-o-matic seems to give you a short list of suggested schools even if you give it criteria that should turn up a large number of schools. If you indicate no preferences for school characteristics and say you are interested in being an English major or a math major (at least one of these majors is being offered by almost every four year college in the country) you still get a short list of prospective schools. So you may want to take several passes through the Counselor-o-matic with different criteria just to get a larger selection of prospective colleges.

Thomas Peterson’s College Search: http://www.petersons.com/

Once again Peterson’s comes through with a very exhaustive list of colleges and a complete set of criteria on which to search for matching schools. They should get bonus points for letting you know at the beginning of the search process that the more criteria you include in your search the more colleges you will be eliminating and advising you that you shouldn’t fill in a choice for every question if some of them don’t really matter to you that much. If you don’t put in any criteria you get 4180 matches, so some criteria would obviously be helpful. Finding the right balance is a trial and error process and you will probably benefit from multiple searches using slightly different criteria each time.

Available search criteria include location, size and type of college, cost of the college, diversity of the student body, majors offered, special academic program offered, sports offered, certain student activities offered, how selective the college admissions office is and whether your grades and SAT scores fall in the middle 50% of entering freshman for the college. This last search criterion could be helpful in identifying list of colleges that meet your other selection criteria and where students like you have a good chance of being admitted and where the course work is likely to be challenging but not overwhelmingly difficult for you.

One limitation of the search options is that only a handful of the most common student activities are listed. So if you want to work on the campus newspaper or join the band this will help. If you are interested in debate, hiking, or joining the college Democrats, college Republicans or Campus Life you are on your own. Similarly, if you are interested in colleges with a particular religious affiliation Peterson’s only gives you a general "Christian Colleges and Universities" option. This is not likely to be very helpful if you are looking specifically for Lutheran, Catholic or Mormon affiliated schools, and will be no help at all if you are looking for Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim affiliated schools.

The Peterson’s site also contains directory search tools specifically for nursing, performing arts, culinary arts, career colleges and online degree programs. These tools offer fewer search options, but if you know you have an interest in one of these areas these tools will help you find a good list of prospective programs very quickly, and in most cases they will link you directly to the school or program websites.

U.S. News & World Report College Finder: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm

Along with the annual college ranking issue and the Ultimate College Guidebook U.S. News provides on online search tool. This tool allows you to make choices about college location, size, religious affiliation, admissions selectivity, programs of study, student activities, sports, and tuition cost.

One potentially helpful but also potentially confusing feature is that this search tool allows you to list only colleges which offer certain types of financial aid, including only colleges that offer institutional grants (scholarships) based on academics, alumni affiliation, athletics, minority status, music, ROTC etc. You can also indicate whether you want scholarships that consider financial need as a criterion or scholarships that don’t consider financial need. This could be very helpful if you know your family is going to be expected to pay full cost unless you are offered a merit based scholarship and you want a list of institutions that might make such an offer. It can be confusing because if you only check one or two of these boxes you may restrict your list of colleges much more than you intended.

Once you have made your search criteria selections you will see a list of up to 200 colleges that match those criteria. Clicking on the name of the school will take you to the U.S. News profile for that college. This site will give you some basic information about the college such as when it was founded, enrollment, cost, and how selective it is. You can also click to information about campus life, facilities and a mission statement written by the college. If you want to pay for additional access you can find out more about admissions, financial aid, the student body and the U.S. News ranking information.

College Navigator: http://www.collegewin.com/nces.ed.gov/CollegeNavigator/

They’re with the government and they’re here to help you! Every year colleges and universities complete a set of report for the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System [IPEDS] run by the U.S. Department of Education. College Navigator takes that data and presents it in an easy to search web tool.

The tool first helps you generate a list of colleges meeting your criteria. You can limit your search by selecting the locations of colleges you want to consider by state(s), by region(s) or even a maximum number of miles from home. You can filter by the type of degree you are seeking, can choose to search 2-year, 4-year or all colleges, and you can limit your search to only public or only private colleges if you wish.

Click on "More Search Options" and you can limit the colleges returned in your search by specifying a tuition price range, setting limits on the number of undergraduate students at the school, or only including colleges that offer housing. You can specify urban, rural or suburban campuses only. You can limit your search using selectivity criteria such as the percentage of applicants admitted or the SAT or ACT scores of the most recently enrolled freshmen class. You can choose to only include colleges that field a particular varsity sport, have a particular religious affiliation, are all-male, all-female, historically black or tribal.

When you run a search, you will see a list of colleges that meet your criteria. Click on the name of a college, and you get a wealth of information about that college from the IPEDS database. You will see tuition, room and board, and total cost of attendance for the past three years. The site shows you what percentage of entering freshmen received any financial aid, as well as what percentage received federal, state and institutional grant aid, what percentage received loan aid and the average amount of each type of aid given to recipients. You can find out how many degrees the college awarded in the past year in any given area of study. You can find out what percentage of those applying were admitted, what percent of those admitted chose to enroll and the 25^th and 75^th percentile of test scores for a recent entering freshman class. You can also see how well students fare once they enroll, by looking at the percentage that return for a second year and the percent graduating. You can see the percentage of men and women, ethnic diversity data, and the mix of full-time and part-time students in the undergraduate population. You can find crime statistics to get a sense of campus safety. You can also see a listing of which federally recognized accreditations have been earned by the college.

All of this information is coming from annual reports made by each college to the Department of Education. Even if you have developed a list of prospective colleges using another college search tool, it would be a good idea to check them out on College Navigator, if only to confirm accreditation, to find out how many students are earning degrees in the program you want to pursue, to see what percentage of entering students get a discount in the form of an institutional grant and to find out how large that discount is on average.

The value of checking out a school in College Navigator is even greater if you found it through an online advertisement or marketing material mailed to you by the college. College Navigator lets you check the officially reported facts so that you know what is really behind the claims in college promotional material. If you are considering a college you’ve never heard about before, checking the federal record can also verify that the college is legitimate. If a college claims to be an accredited degree-granting institution in the United States and they don’t exist in this database, then you have good reason to be suspicious.

FastWeb: http://www.fastweb.com

FastWeb is an online search engine created by the online job site Monster.com. FastWeb can help you find potential colleges, and can also help you find possible scholarships for which you can apply. The site makes money by selling contact information to colleges so that they can send targeted marketing materials to prospective students, which might or might not turn up a few interesting schools for your search. You can opt out of having your contact information shared with colleges to avoid this extra mail.

The search tool uses the typical set of search criteria, including location, majors offered, size, religious affiliation, sports offered, etc. It then appears to use very loose criteria and returns a long list of prospective colleges. This makes it an interesting tool to use if you are having trouble coming up with a list of prospective colleges, but it won’t help you if you are trying to narrow your list.

However, there are some other features of FastWeb that make it worth a look. FastWeb has the largest free scholarship search engine on the web. By making selections from several lists of activities, memberships and personal characteristics you can quickly find a list of matching scholarships for which you can apply. They also offer listings of employers offering internship opportunities in your area, though if you are serious about landing an internship in your chosen field you might not want to restrict yourself to only the opportunities close to home.