How to Conduct an Effective College Search

Searching for the right college to attend is an exciting process! The goal is to find a college that is a good academic, social, emotional, and financial fit. Too often, our search begins with looking at the sticker price, not the discounted price. Doing so may eliminate good options. For example, some students could attend Harvard for free if their household income is below $65,000.

How can guidance counselors, college consultants, and parents conduct an effective college search using the Internet? Let’s start looking at some college search solutions for your student.

Some college search engines are available for a fee to the consumer like Naviance, Bridges (Xap), CollegePlannerPro, and others. Students can access these through a high school, state education site, or local independent consultant. Other service based companies may have a proprietary college planning software built specifically for their student client base. Fee-based search engines would be free from outside bias and offer general accountability resources for students.

Some college search engines are available for free to the consumer like Big Future, CollegeView, Princeton Review, and others. While free to use, some features may only be accessed by creating a profile. These free sites are generally marketing tools for colleges and college-data providers so they will have featured college sponsors and/or click-thru ads to generate revenue.

No matter what type of college search engine is used, students who visit the campus and discuss their options with a professional counselor or consultant will make better decisions about where to attend college.

The results of a college search matter! College search engines should allow the student to select multiple options for each search criteria. Limited searches may be leading students to view featured colleges (paid advertisers). While it’s perfectly okay for a college to market themselves, the featured ads may exclude colleges that are better academic or emotional fits. It’s more important for students to search with “or” and “and” rather than “only.” For example, a student may want to search for Southwest Region AND New York, urban OR suburban, physics AND dance, etc. versus only picking three states, one city size, and one major.

Here are some requirements for what I would believe is a good college search engine:

• College Information. Do they allow students to search by degree (bachelor’s, masters)? What type of college (public, private, religious, non-religious)? Can they select a region, state, miles from home, and city size?
• Admissions Difficulty. Students have an idea of how challenging they want their college experience to be. Look for options that allow the student to select most difficult (reach) colleges down to not difficult (safety) colleges.
• Student Body. What is the student population? How diverse is the student body (Hispanic Serving, Historically Black)? As they look for emotional and social fit, they should consider the environment they will live in for at least 4 years. Does the search engine allow them so select extra-curricular activities, safety features, collegiate sports, organizations, Greek life or ROTC preferences?
• Housing. While most initial searches don’t include housing, they need to determine if the colleges have men only, women only, coed, Greek, or living learning communities. What options are available for physically disabled students?
• Career & Major Search. Are the career clusters defined? Are the careers in fast growing fields? Or can you only select majors? As students are searching for academic fit, they should know that although some colleges won’t have you declare your major until your sophomore year, they’ll be more successful if they can narrow down their choices before beginning college.
• Financial Information. While most sites post the cost of attendance, also look for average financial aid and average debt upon graduation, among others. Some may also allow you to input estimated income to give you an idea of your net cost.
• Job Outlook. Does the search engine allow students to consider if the college offers job fairs, career counseling, resume building, etc.?
• Finally, make sure the search criteria is specific so the generated list can be personalized. Having 93-127 college options is better than 2,200, but it is overwhelming to a 15 year old student. The starting list should have no more than 30 options.

Visually appealing layouts are necessary. But they should not take the place of quality search criteria as mentioned above. Since few search engines have all of these necessary criteria, I recommend that you select information from 2-3 students and plug their information into 4-5 college search engines. Some will generate featured results (StudentAdvisor, EduTrek, MyMajors), some will allow you to compare options (Big Future, Peterson’s, Unigo), and some will rank various college options (Princeton Review, Forbes, US News & World Report).

After your research, then you can have fun helping your students make informed, wise decisions. Success!

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