As students and parents start to wade into the college athletic recruiting process, they’ll soon see all kinds of advertisements, websites, and offers from athletic recruiting services. All promise to help you with getting an athletic scholarship because, they’ll tell you, they have access to people and information that you don’t. And as the wading starts to feel like drowning as parents begin to realize how much college costs and how many colleges are actually out there, paying for a recruiting service doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Is it?
Over half of all college students attend schools less than 
Most college students know that they can study abroad but fewer realize that there are opportunities for off-campus study without ever leaving the country. Why would you want to do that? Because such exchange programs allow you to explore academic subjects not normally available on your campus or to immerse yourself in one area for a semester. Off-campus study programs can help you establish contacts in distant cities for internships or job opportunities. They can provide you the chance to try something different without having to commit to four years at one campus.
Once you get past making sure a college has your potential major, there are all kinds of ways of distinguishing colleges from each other besides college rankings. There are the obvious ones such as cost, rural versus urban, size, and location. But there are some that can significantly affect a student’s college experience that many have never heard of, much less considered. One of them is the 4-1-4 academic calendar.
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.
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