If you’re looking for data for your own Moneyball college admission search, check out the sample spreadsheet in the DIY College Search Spreadsheet class for free.
In Moneyball, Michael Lewis lists five rules that Billy Beane uses when shopping for baseball players just before the trading deadline. It’s important to remember that these aren’t just any players.
Last week I talked about taking a Moneyball approach to the college admissions process. The idea being that as in Major League Baseball, the college admissions market is not operating efficiently resulting in some players/schools being significantly undervalued where others are way over-priced.
(This is part 4 of Comparison of Top 11 College Search Engines)
Most college students attend a school within a four-hour drive of their home. Fifty percent are actually within 100 miles of their home. Location is usually one of the primary factors in the college search. It is the first option for five of the eleven college search websites and a near the top in three more. Seven of the websites offer the option to search by distance from a zip code.
(The following is a guest post by Scott Huntington.)
It’s a new year and a new semester! Your senior year is halfway finished, and graduation is right around the corner. College is so close you can almost grab it, but there’s one final obstacle in your path: your final semester.
Apparently, completing the FAFSA can be detrimental to your college application and chances for financial aid. According to Inside Higher Ed, some unnamed colleges are using the order students enter schools to receive the FAFSA reports as a way of predicting interest in the school. Essentially, this means that some schools are using the FAFSA against students.
The following is a guest post by Tom Bottorf of GetCollegeFunding.org.
I’m not sure exactly when the shift occurred, but sometime in the last 20 years, attending college has become synonymous with student loan debt. It’s pretty much assumed that the student should have some “skin in the game” by borrowing money to achieve their noble dream of getting a college degree.
Thanks to US News College Rankings, we know what are the “Best” 100 universities in the country. If you want to know specifically what they are best at, you can find out here. But how good are they at making sure that attending the “Best” University isn’t limited by economic need?
After all, despite the current economic situation, college graduates still make more money than high school graduates so a college degree is considered a ticket to the American Dream. And if you can get into one of US News College Rankings top 100 Universities–that should be a first class ticket.
The first colleges founded on the North American continent before there even was a United States, were religious institutions designed to train religious leaders. Although they no longer claim any religious affiliation, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all still maintain Divinity/Theological Schools.
The last two college search websites, The Princeton Review and US News College Rankings, take a different approach than the previously reviewed sites. Rather than provide different factors for you to rank and search on, they essentially rank the schools for you. The user is expected to use the rankings to select colleges for consideration and then take a look at location, school size, graduation rates etc. Both sites have multiple rankings to choose from but do allow for a basic search with US News being much functional than the Princeton Review’s.