Comparison of Top 11 College Search Engines: Does College Size Matter?

(This is part 5 of Comparison of Top 11 College Search Engines)

The fourth element for our fictional high school student’s college search is school size. Without ever having attended college, many high school students have some very definitive ideas about what size school they want to attend. “Big” is associated with endless academic options, social opportunities, and alumni networking. “Small” is about personalized attention, small classes, dinners with professors, and tight-knit social groups.

In other words, when talking about college size, a lot of people are talking about the expected college experience–social and academic. And while these perceptions have some truth in them, size probably shouldn’t be the definitive factor in narrowing down your college list.

This applies especially to those interested in the “big” experience. Why? It comes down to numbers. There are 189 universities nationally with more than 10,000 full-time undergraduates.

Only 44 of them have four-year graduation rates of 50% or more. However, of the 1,372 schools that have 10,000 or fewer full-time undergraduates, 329 have graduation rates of 50% or better.

So does college size matter?

Not exactly. It’s not that small schools are necessarily better choices than large ones, there are just more of them to choose from. Size doesn’t guarantee anything in terms of experience or results. The sizes of the 47 institutions (with 500 or more full-time undergraduates) with an 85% or greater four-year graduation rate range from 507 to 14,928. Given that 24 had admission rates of less than 20% while all but two had accepted less than 40% of applicants, selectivity is likely to be more important for graduation rates than size.

Colleges with a Four-Year Graduation Rate of 85% or Better

Name	State	Full-time Under- graduates	4 yr Grad Rate	% Admitted
The Juilliard School	NY	507	86	7
Scripps College	CA	940	85	32
Haverford College	PA	1205	89	23
Claremont McKenna College	CA	1260	87	14
Centre College	KY	1343	87	68
Swarthmore College	PA	1537	86	14
Pomona College	CA	1589	89	13
Grinnell College	IA	1615	86	32
Kenyon College	OH	1658	87	36
Bates College	ME	1753	85	27
Davidson College	NC	1790	89	25
Amherst College	MA	1817	86	13
Bowdoin College	ME	1831	91	16
Washington and Lee University	VA	1835	88	19
Colby College	ME	1863	86	29
Hamilton College	NY	1868	85	27
Babson College	MA	2015	85	29
Williams College	MA	2031	91	17
Macalester College	MN	2035	86	37
Carleton College	MN	2037	91	26
Lafayette College	PA	2438	89	34
Middlebury College	VT	2493	88	18
Colgate University	NY	2850	85	29
College of the Holy Cross	MA	2891	90	34
Wesleyan University	CT	2932	87	24
Bucknell University	PA	3515	86	27
Brandeis University	MA	3563	86	39
Dartmouth College	NH	4139	88	10
United States Naval Academy	MD	4536	86	7
Tufts University	MA	5167	88	21
Princeton University	NJ	5327	88	8
Yale University	CT	5393	89	8
University of Chicago	IL	5559	86	13
Johns Hopkins University	MD	5866	86	18
Washington University in St Louis	MO	6455	88	18
Villanova University	PA	6584	85	46
Duke University	NC	6631	87	14
Vanderbilt University	TN	6731	87	14
Harvard University	MA	7233	86	6
Columbia University in the City of New York	NY	7236	88	7
Georgetown University	DC	7251	89	18
University of Notre Dame	IN	8462	89	23
Northwestern University	IL	8542	86	18
Boston College	MA	9533	89	29
University of Pennsylvania	PA	10324	87	13
Cornell University	NY	14245	87	17
University of Virginia-Main Campus	VA	14928	87	30

Even if you are absolutely certain of your desired school size, the college search websites may not accommodate that certainty. For some reason, the website designers believe that it’s necessary to provide the user with size categories rather than let the users enter the numbers themselves.

Part 1: Comparison of Top 11 College Search Engines

Part 2: Will Attending a Community College Save You Money?

Part 3: Should You Attend an Out-of-State Public University

Part 4: How Far Away Should You Go To College?

Part 5: Does College Size Matter?

Part 6: Colleges in Large Cities

Part 7: College Acceptance Rates

Part 8: Searching for Colleges by Majors

Part 9: The Results

Why? Are they afraid students won’t enter numbers big enough or small enough to include a significant number of their supporting institutions? I’m pretty sure it’s not because of some well-regarded and widely accepted categorization of colleges and universities by size. If that was the case, you would expect some consistency among the size choices from website to website and there are none.

The one website that does allow users to “enter” their own numbers, College Express, uses a slider bar scaled from 0 to 100,000. Do you know what that means? That means to limit the size to a range of 15,000 students, the end points will have to overlap in about a quarter-inch of space. It’s impossible to get an exact number using the slider bar.

The websites are also vague about what their actually counting. Is it all students, just undergraduate students, or only full-time undergraduate students? Only College View lets users choose whether to use all students or just undergraduate students. None of them address the difference between full-time and part-time students.

The table below shows the number of category choices available for each website and the range I ended up using to capture schools with 5,000 to 10,000 students. This sometimes included more than one category. It also shows the number schools found with the state filters, if available, as discussed in Part 4 of this series. I also included the results for the schools without state filters.

* users can select for minimum and maximum values