Tips for finding the college that best suits you.

This article will show you how to properly research colleges and build your college list, so that you have lots of amazing affordable options. Most high achieving high school students would think they worked really hard in high school, therefore they deserve to be at a top school. You surely are a very talented student and you deserve a great option for college, however applying to the top ten schools isn’t going to be your best bet and here’s why. First off, just because these schools are all prestigious does not mean that they are similar in any other regard, for example spending four years at Columbia and New York City will be a vastly different experience than spending four years at Dartmouth, in the small town of Hanover, New Hampshire, studying at Cornell with 15,000 other undergraduates, will be a much different experience than working with just 1800 other undergraduates at a place like Amherst. These factors might not seem that important to you right now, but remember that you’ll be living in college, you won’t just be studying there you’ll be living there so you want to find a place that matches a lot of your preferences. Also way more schools than you think have great alumni networks and networking opportunities in general, also consider this. Just because a school is ranked high on the US News college rankings list, does not necessarily mean that they have a great program in the field you want to go into, some schools have excellent business programs but not really great programs for pre-med, that’s because there’s so many factors that go into the best colleges including alumni donation rate, which doesn’t really affect you that much.

So if these rankings lists are not the best way to go about researching colleges, what is? One way is talking to current students at the schools you’re interested in applying. Most college counselors will say the best way to get to know a college is to go on a college visit, however turns out visits can be expensive, very time-consuming and most colleges will give you a very similar presentation anyway, so why not get the inside scoop from students themselves. Another very important college research tip, is to make a list of the five things that make you most excited about each college you’re interested in applying to, now you can look at all those different lists and determine what of those lists makes you most excited and then from there you’ll be able to get a good sense of which school fits you best. Also for every school that you’re considering applying to, it’s important to find at least one downside, something that makes you not want to attend school. Oftentimes, school websites will not really have this information and if you go to an information session or a campus visit they won’t really tell you this either. So we recommend checking out friends or family who have gone to that university and try to figure out what are the pros and cons of being there.

Many college search tools, allow you to filter colleges by things like location setting, average GPA, social life, all sorts of criteria, more than you could probably imagine and especially some of the bigger ones, will allow you to get access to a wide range of schools that you might not have otherwise known about. An example of this is the College Board, big future college search tool. They have over 3,000 colleges in their database and allow you to filter by literally any criteria that you want. Also, for those of you who are going to be looking for a lot of financial aid and scholarships, we highly recommend the college greenlight search tool, because for every college that you look up you’re able to see all of the scholarships that they offer, in addition to how good their financial aid is.