If you want to see everything available in the spreadsheet that I use to create the 50-50 list, check out the sample spreadsheet.
When we hear college rankings, we tend to think of a listing of the “best” colleges, especially since US News College Rankings helps us along with its rankings every fall. Yet, even US News recognizes that not everyone can get into the “best” colleges and these less qualified students are just as deserving of a quality education. So it has created its A+ Schools for B Students list.
As I’ve been up dating my 
I don’t know why, but whenever I bring up comparing graduation rates when considering colleges, I get a fairly hostile reaction–at least in online forums. It’s almost as if I suggested using a school’s football rankings as a way to pick the school. So what is wrong with looking at college graduation rates?
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 
If college graduation rates were high school graduation rates, every politician, pundit, and policy wonk would be in the mainstream media talking about the crisis of college dropouts and devising ways to tie faculty evaluation to student graduation. Not that such an approach is necessarily the answer. After all, given the situation with high school graduation rates, I’m not sure that we would actually come up with any solutions but, boy, we sure would be talking about it.
If you have ever taken a look at my explanation of 
Are your chances of becoming president better today than they were in 1990? Given that the population in 1990 was 248,709,873 and increased by 24% to 308,745,538 in 2010, your chances are worse. While the general population has increased, there is still only one president. Despite population growth, we still have 435 members in the House of Representatives, the same number as in 1911. If the proportion of the number of representatives kept pace with the population since then, we would be looking at a House of Representatives approaching 1,500.
College Confidential seems to be a lot like the US News College Rankings. Either people use it blindly as the final word on college admissions or they see it as simply the manifestation of all that is wrong with the college admissions process. The reality is that College Confidential, like