While college visits aren’t always possible, I don’t think the available virtual campus tours are the solution either. Don’t despair, there are useful alternatives to a college tour but it won’t happen with just a click of a mouse. Yes, it’s a do it yourself alternative but it can be just as useful as a campus tour and a lot cheaper.
As high school students get closer to graduation, you’re likely to hear declarations that I could never go to a college that small or I could never go to a college that big. Does college size really matter and, if so, matters for what?
So why would college size matter? Theoretically, you would think because it would influence the type of education opportunities available.
As I work with college data, I learn about different variables and add them to my data sets. I also occasionally create a variable to more accurately capture a concept or value that I think is important when trying to figure out how much college will cost. This is why you’ll see multiple posts on some variation of a list of colleges with the best financial aid. And because of the variation, you’ll always find some colleges on one list and not another. Well, I’m adding another list of colleges to consider for merit aid.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the occupation that is projected to have the second largest number of new jobs between 2014 and 2024 requires only a bachelor’s degree and had a 2015 median pay of $67,490 per year. It’s not engineering or computer programing. It’s nursing.
Students may be accepted at ten colleges but they can only attend one. When they finally decide which school to attend, students become part of the college’s yield rate. The yield rate is the percentage of accepted students who actually end up attending the school. So you figure the yield rate for Harvard would have the highest rate around, right? Wrong. There are eight other schools with rates higher than Harvard’s 81% including the College of the Ozarks.
When you think about research at colleges and universities, you probably picture people in white lab coats measuring something or blackboards whiteboards covered with endless equations. These are the places you go to really understand how things work in the math and sciences.
There are a lot of ways to create a college list. You can use any of the readily available college rankings and just start pulling out the highest ranked colleges you think you can get into. You can use one of the different college search websites to find colleges with specific majors or located in your preferred states. Or you can just pick from those that send you the best view books or has the best YouTube channel.
It’s September so that means we all get to find out the best colleges for the coming year, thanks to US News Best College Rankings. I’m sure all those students who started at Harvard this year wish they had gone to Princeton instead since Princeton is ranked as the best college in the nation. And those at Yale must be heartbroken to be sharing the number three spot with the University of Chicago when as recently as 2010-11, Chicago was barely in the top ten. How the quality of their education and future prospects must suffer trailing Princeton and Harvard!
College is likely the first glimpse into the “real world” that you will see. In this time, you’ll build a foundation for your career, create connections for future jobs, and learn to parent yourself. These years can be great – or another repeat of high school; it all depends on where you spend them. But what if you applied to two great schools and got accepted to both? If you’re having trouble deciding between two universities, consider these points: