When high school students start looking for colleges to apply to, they rarely consider college graduation rates. Even with the sky-rocketing costs of college, most families still don’t consider graduation rates. They may notice it when a school advertises its four-year graduation guarantee but I suspect most just dismiss it as not applying to “their” situation.
Assume you are buying a car. All other factors are equal. Do you pick the one that costs $15,000 or $30,000? Seems like a no-brainer–go with the cheaper one.
Okay, assume all other factors are equal. Do you pick the red one or the blue one? Now it depends on what colors you happen to like.
As high school students get closer to graduation, you’re likely to hear declarations that I could never go to a college that small or I could never go to a college that big. Does college size really matter and, if so, matters for what?
So why would college size matter? Theoretically, you would think because it would influence the type of education opportunities available.
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.
The College Data Your Online College Advisor website has a variety of interesting features besides its College Match service. Registered users can track college admission results based on test scores and GPA entered by other website users. They can also calculate their chances for admissions at different colleges and estimate net cost.
(You can see an updated review of Big Future here.) 
Big Future is the college search website by the College Board. Since the College Board is the source of all things SAT, you would expect it have a pretty good college search function. It is also a member of the Common Data Set consortium which means it has access to data that isn’t readily available to other websites.