The Journey Starts Here

If you look at college the way colleges do– as a business, not a love story– then you’ll create opportunities for your student to get a great education at a reasonable price.

So many options, where to start

Researching colleges can be stressful and frustrating given the thousands of colleges out there and labor-intensive process of sorting through them. There are dozens of sites focus on choosing schools based a myriad of qualitative and quantitative considerations, but they glance over affordability as being a key driver in researching and choosing a college. So my focus will be biased with a financial lens. Those other sites do provide helpful general insights, so I’m sharing links to a few of those resources on this page as well.

My goal is to set you and our student up for a fun, collaborative process so let’s talk about what you need to know and how best to find it. To helps this process, I’ve created the College Selection Worksheet that’s also included in my College Financial Plan Masterclass. You can either use as-is, or take some of the topic headings and create your own since it is quite massive. But let’s start by talking about how to research colleges.

Get your Free Copy of the College Selection Worksheet here:

College Selection Research Worksheet

College Selection Worksheet

This worksheet will help you and your student centralize all the key information you’ll need to evaluate and choose a great college that fits your budget.

Collaborate, but let your kid lead the process

First and foremost, researching colleges should be a collaborative process with you and your student. They’re probably going to be focused on things like where the college is and whether any of their friends are applying. You might have some additional insights to offer them in determining what’s really a fit for them— things like their learning style, how they make friends, experiences from your own college experience that you want for them, and of course whether the school is likely to fit your budget. Fit is an important piece of the conversation because one of the ways to really blow your college budget is for your student to choose a school that isn’t a good fit and then transfer and end up on a longer-than-four-year college path.

Start with your in-state, public college options

I think every family should start by researching their in-state colleges. Make sure you look up merit awards offered by your in-state schools to see what your student might be eligible for. This is a good starting point because it gives you a baseline cost for four years of college.

You should consider some other items with your in-state school, which will vary by student. For example, is there a dual enrollment program where students can be jointly enrolled at a local community college and the four-year college so that they can take lower-cost classes at the community college? Is there an honors college? What about student engagement through things like academic residential communities, intramural sports and other activities that can help students find a home on a big campus?

Your in-state cost has a few components:

  • The total cost of attendance at the college(s) you're interested in. Be sure to break the published “list price” down from what's included in that cost. For example, many colleges-- especially public ones-- have different price tiers for housing and meal plans, and they get to choose which go into the Cost of Attendance. 

  • Any merit awards you'll be eligible for, including selection criteria. Do you need to apply, or are you considered automatically? Many colleges have both types of awards. Do they use weighted or unweighted GPA? What about test scores?

  • Pathways available in your state such as free community college or dual enrollment, where a student enrolls in both a community college and a four-year college and attends the community college for their first two years while living on campus and having access to other aspects of student life at the four-year college.

You should consider some other items with your in-state school, which will vary by student. For example, is there an honors college? What about student engagement through things like academic residential communities, intramural sports, and other activities that can help students find a home on a big campus? 

Most students also have access to regional tuition exchanges such as the Western Undergraduate Exchange, the Academic Common Market, the Midwest Student Exchange and the New England Regional Student Program. These programs allow students to attend neighboring states' public colleges at in-state or slightly above in-state tuition rates. Each program, and each school participating in one of these programs, has an application process and criteria. You can find current rules by googling any of the above names.

Importance of college visits

Even if your student isn’t close to college age, go visit a college. College visits are a really valuable piece of the research process because numbers aside, finding your fit really matters. Even better: if you have a family trip planned, go visit a college while you’re on your trip. It doesn’t matter if it’s a college you’d never attend. Just go. And do it again on your next family trip. Why? A couple of reasons:

  • It’s eye-opening for students to see the variety of different schools. It’s likely that they don’t see such a range of facilities, settings and campuses among the high schools in their area. Some schools will feel very comfortable, others less so. When the time comes to choose a school, it’s important for students to get a sense of whether they’re a fit for it– if for no other reason than to help them find a school where they will stay for four years and complete their degree. Getting a sense that they like some schools and dislike others can be a huge help in this process.

  • It might broaden, and it might narrow, the list of schools they will consider when they do go to apply. Both of those have pros and cons! A student who believes, based on visits, that he won’t be happy in an urban setting can save himself a great deal of expense by not applying to urban schools. And even greater expense by not attending a school that he’ll end up leaving. Similarly, a student who falls in love with a school she had never heard of until she visited it on her family’s trip to the east coast might find herself the recipient of some aid money targeting out-of-state or other diverse applicants.

Taking the time to visit schools will give your student more insight into their college selection process. Remember the right fit can be the difference between graduating in four years or five or more-- or not finishing college at all. The COVID pandemic has pushed most colleges to now offering fantastic virtual tour options and ways to connect prospective students with students and faculty who can help them in their decision process.

Here are some comments and learnings that we captured from our college tours that informed our college research and application process:

  • Asked about what they didn’t like about their school, one student mentioned that it’s not in a “college town” so although there is a lot going on on campus and in the surrounding community, there isn’t a local off-campus student-oriented gathering place.

  • At schools with D1 sports teams, a significant amount of the social life tends to be oriented around sports.

  • Whatever your sport, whatever your level at that sport, most schools will have a place for you to participate with others at the same level. That may or may not be the case for other activities like performing arts.

  • At a liberal arts college that is working hard to attract a more diverse student body, one of our tour guides who is from a working class family said she struggled initially to fit in because most of her classmates’ families were considerably wealthier than hers and they were accustomed to doing a lot of things in their free time that weren’t affordable to her.

  • A premed student said he chose his school because at all the others he considered, they took great pride in their premed course load being “weeder” classes, whereas the faculty at the school he chose talked more about helping students to succeed in these difficult courses.

  • Schools have a range of very different retention tools, based on the priorities they see for their student bodies. I was pleasantly surprised to see that even elite schools like MIT and Yale care about student success and tailor their programs to what they see as their own institutional challenges. For example, MIT has a number of initiatives addressed at suicide prevention that seem to start from the point of identifying root causes. Other schools focused more on student-run activities or community-building.

  • Different schools place different value on engagement with their surrounding communities. (And as a Berkeley alum, I’d say that different communities place different value on their local university and its students being in the community.)

  • Some schools see housing as a tool for community building; others use it as a pathway to independence; still others see it primarily as living choices. Some do not permit students to have cars, or limit cars to upperclasspersons.

  • Schools have vastly differing policies on alcohol and drug use by students, ranging from “Good Samaritan” policies where students will never be punished for calling for help regardless of their age or state of intoxication, to zero-tolerance zones or policies.

  • What role does the school see for organizations like fraternities and sororities or other social groups? We’ve seen very small schools with large and active Greek communities and others that shun them.

None of these is right or wrong in and of itself, but most of them are things we probably would not have come up with on our own. The best part is, you don’t have to travel cross-country to find out about things like this– chances are you have a few schools in your immediate area that you can visit to see more of the nuances of student life. And much of the above info came from schools neither of my kids are interested in but that we’re grateful to for providing a lens for more thorough evaluation.

The next piece is, how do you visit schools? I know that not everyone can take a week and travel all over. We were fortunate to have people willing to open up their guest rooms for us most places, but it was still an expensive trip. In addition to planned college visits, we found that other experiences helped get them to visit colleges. Here’s how:

  • Family walks—Taking walks with our dog around local colleges

  • Dual-credit courses—Our twins took math classes that included them spending a day or two at a local college

  • Traveling—Visiting colleges while traveling to visit family in the Bay Area, Seattle and Boston

  • Club sports—My son’s soccer team was focused on preparing them to play college soccer, so everywhere outside of Portland that they played games or tournaments, they toured local colleges and usually met with some of the student athletes.

There are lots of other options too. Groups of schools in a single geographical area often offer joint programs during a week of the summer where they’ll do more than just tours for prospective students. Most schools offer some form of summer or after-school program.

The bottom line is, you have opportunities to visit colleges even if you aren’t in a position to travel to see them. And it’s worth visiting some schools you’re not interested in– at a minimum you may learn what it is you’re not interested in so that you can apply that to your college screening.

Parting shot - Remember that Colleges are Businesses

An aspect of college admissions that doesn’t often come up is the concept of Demonstrated Interest. What is Demonstrated Interest and why does it matter?Colleges try to assess a student’s likelihood to accept an admissions offer. This metric has become very important to colleges as they use it to estimate how many students they should extend offers to enroll a target number of students each year.

Two metrics factor into Demonstrated interest:

  1. Selectivity - the percent of applicants who are admitted.

  2. Yield - the percent of admitted applicants accept admission and enroll at the school.

School ranking reports like the US News and World Report Best Colleges view school selectivity as an important factor in ranking top schools. As a result colleges want to encourage applications to make their school’s seem more selective.

So how can you use these metrics to your advantage? Scheduling an interview or campus visit through the college admissions office is an excellent way to boost your demonstrated interest for a college. If a college “strongly encourages” an interview or campus visit, then you know that they’re trying to assess your student’s demonstrated interest. Another way to demonstrate interest is to apply for early decision. If your student is looking to maximize their chances to get into a target school, then ensuring you demonstrate interest is a helpful way to stand out.

Next section: Net Price Calculators

Get insights into why they matter and why you should use them for every college your student is interesting in applying to

 

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