DIY College Rankings Blog Post – Page 98 – Do It Yourself College Rankings

How to Find Merit Scholarships: Follow the Money, Part 2

07/26/201601/27/2015 by Michelle Kretzschmar

10 Shares

(Part 1 showed how to identify colleges that are likely sources of merit money.)

Slug following the money to find merit scholarships Now that you know who has the money, you need to target those schools more likely to be giving it away. I do this by looking at information on institutional grants. This is money the school is giving the student and is usually the largest single source of financial aid for an individual student at private schools. Since IPEDS doesn’t require the school to distinguish between need and merit based grants, I also look at the percentage of freshman who receive the institutional grants.

How to Find Merit Scholarships: Follow the Money

07/26/201601/20/2015 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Tweet10

Flip

Pin7

17 Shares

There are 1,586 public and not-for-profit colleges with 500 or more full-time undergraduates. Which of them are likely to give you merit scholarships? Unfortunately, there’s really no one right way to search for such colleges. After all, the college that provides a generous amount of merit scholarship to one student will deny it to another.

Free College Data Workshop

07/26/201601/12/2015 by Michelle Kretzschmar

ShareTweet6FlipEmailPin17 SharesAll Sessions Now Available Workshop sessions will cover data to consider when searching for colleges including college graduation rates and net price. I’ll also demonstrate how to use different websites to access data for your college search. View when convenient for you at no cost! Session 1 Session 2 Session 3

Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Printing in Excel

05/03/202212/18/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Tweet2

Flip

2 Shares

Despite our best attempts to avoid printing information that we can access from our computers or smart devices, there’s going to be a time when you’ll need, or more likely someone else needs, to print out data from your Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, in this lesson I’ll cover the basics of what you need to know to start printing in Excel.

Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Calculating Data in Excel

05/03/202212/11/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Tweet1

Flip

1 Shares

Sooner or later while you’re looking at the data for a specific college, you’re going to wonder if a certain number is a good thing or a bad thing? It’s at this point you realize it would be good to know the average SAT scores for the schools you’re looking at. Or maybe what are the highest and lowest graduation rates. It would help you put an individual school’s number in context. So this week, I’m going to do an introduction to calculating data in Excel.

Guaranteed Tuition and 4 Year Graduation: Part 2

05/03/202212/09/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Two vintage balance scales. The left scale features a small red clock, symbolizing the passage of time until graduation, while the right scale holds stacks of coins, ensuring future guarantees of success.

Tweet2

Flip

Pin1

3 Shares

Guaranteed tuition programs are one way to save money although they probably have a greater effect at public colleges than private ones. The other guarantee program popping up with increasing frequency is a four-year college graduation guarantee. This means that if it takes you more than four years to graduate, the college will pay for the remaining classes needed to graduate. Given that the average four-year graduation rate is less than 50%, this is an appealing offer.

Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Formatting Data in Excel

05/03/202212/04/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Tweet1

Flip

1 Shares

I’m going to take a break from showing you how to copy data so that I can go over some of the ways of formatting data in Excel–including by copying. Excel provides more ways to format data than any one person could ever need. So I want to begin by showing some basic formatting options that I use frequently when creating my college lists.

Guaranteed Tuition and 4 Year Graduation: Part 1

07/26/201612/02/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Tweet3

Flip

Pin3

6 Shares

The University of Wisconsin offers a guarantee to graduate in four years. The University of Illinois guarantees its tuition for four years. Both offers are fairly new to colleges in general and don’t have much of a track record in terms of students enrolling under the programs. So which is a better deal? Or are they both just gimmicks for colleges to sooth the family fear of rising tuition costs?

Creating College Lists 101: Copying Data-Part 2

07/26/201611/20/2014 by Michelle Kretzschmar

Flip

0 Shares

In the last lesson I showed you how to select and copy a column of data from one spreadsheet to another. In this lesson, I’ll go into more ways to copy data in Excel by copying and pasting multiple columns. I also show with how to paste data into a new column of an existing spreadsheet. To complete this lesson, you need to create a work tab as instructed in Part 1.