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.
Evaluating Liberal Arts Colleges by how much graduates make is antithetical to the concept of a liberal arts education in so many ways. But given the fact that 100 Liberal Arts Colleges now cost more than $50,000, I don’t care how much aid the students are receiving, families have every right to know what kind of pay-off the student can expect. This doesn’t mean that families don’t appreciate the value of a liberal arts education. It’s just recognition that there will bills and loans to repay after graduation.
Last September a group of 80 colleges announced a new college application designed to improve access, affordability, and success. They actually call themselves the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success. But for some reason, the counselors who work with high school students, both private and school-based, don’t seem impressed with the new option. Maybe because the Coalition apparently hasn’t even piloted the application yet or listed any committed Community Based Organizations?
I know that not everyone is able to keep up with all of the information I post to the website. For the past six months or so I’ve been creating PDFs for some of the posts, usually those with lists of colleges but not always. In case you’ve missed them, I’m listing the five most popular posts based on their PDF downloads. And no, there isn’t any fee for downloading.
There are so many college admission blogs out there, it’s hard to decide which ones to read. After all, you can’t read them all and you don’t want to waste your time reading posts on the same topics. And how do you know which are any good? If you do a search on “best college blogs” you’ll find things like “50 best college admission blogs,” “Top 25 College Blogs,” and “22 College Blogs You Should be Reading.” Not very helpful.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on books and services to help with the college admissions process. The problem is that families often don’t know enough to know which questions to ask to find the best resources for them. Fortunately, there are a variety of free college guides available that can serve as a place to begin the search.
Anybody trying to figure out how to organize and track their college applications should take a look at ApplyKit.com. The premise is pretty straight forward, select the schools you are going to apply to and the application pulls all of the relevant deadlines onto one easy to use webpage.