Great Websites to Evaluate Colleges
How do you become an educated consumer when you're checking out colleges and universities?
With so much at stake, it's a shame that families rarely know how to evaluate colleges. So that's why today I'm sharing with you some wonderful websites that can help you make wiser college choices.
10 Websites for Researching Colleges
In no particular order, here are the websites that I recommend to families:
1. College Navigator
http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator
This is a federal database that includes more statistics on individual colleges and universities than any other site. You can find lots of valuable information on such things as financial aid, merit aid, costs, majors, freshmen retention rates.
One of the coolest features is what the average net price will be for students of various incomes. At Vanderbilt University, for instance, the average price for a student whose family makes between $75,001 and $110,000 is $16,297. In contrast, the average price is $27,620 for families in the same income bracket at the University of Southern California.
2. MeritAid.com
www.meritaid.com
Most families mistakenly believe that private scholarships represent the biggest source of college money. Actually, only 4 percent of scholarships and grants come from private sources such as the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, foundations, and corporations.
Colleges and universities are a much more lucrative source of college cash. While there are many scholarship search sites for private scholarships, MeritAid.com provides a handy directory of in-house scholarships from the schools themselves.
3. College Board
www.collegeboard.org
Gives a quick snapshot of a college including such things as its acceptance rate, the school's size and the gender breakdown of its students. What I particularly like are the Financial Aid & Cost statistics of any school. You can access these stats by typing in the name of an institution in the home page's College Search box.
4. COLLEGEdata
www.collegedata.com
Type in the name of any school in the College Match search box; you will discover the admission factors that a school considers very important, as well as those not considered at all.
5. College InSight
http://college-insight.org
One of the things that I love about College InSight is that you can use the site to compare different schools simultaneously.
6. & 7. Zinch and Cappex
www.Zinch.com and www.Cappex.com
These websites are online matchmakers. On Zinch and Cappex, students create their own profiles that include information about themselves, as well as the type of schools that they'd like to attend. Schools use the sites to promote themselves and to find students who might represent great matches.
8. College Week Live
www.collegeweeklive.com
College Week Live, which bills itself as the world's largest online college fair. You can attend these virtual college fairs and ask admission officers questions just as you would at a traditional college fair.
9. Unigo
www.unigo.com
The site contains more than 50,000 student reviews of colleges and universities. Visit Unigo and you are more likely to get an unvarnished look at an institution.
10. College Results Online
www.collegeresults.org
When families are contemplating college costs, they assume their children will graduate in four years. Most students, however, need five or six years to graduate.
Don't expect schools to share their crummy four-year grad stats with you. You can uncover the rates for any college, however, by visiting College Results Online. You can find the four, five- and six-year grad rates of any individual school. Even better, you can compare the grad rates of individual schools with their peer institutions. The website will generate these peer lists automatically.
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