People all over the world are shopping for colleges every single day.
Whether you are a high school student searching for a college to call home for the next few years, a recent college graduate looking for grad schools, an empty-nester wanting to go back to school now that the kids are grown, or someone who just has too much time on their hands and wants to get another degree – you’ve come to the right place!
I have spent weeks combing through every Google search imaginable to find the right college for myself, and I have collected some tips for you to use for your own college search!
I’ve condensed everything into three steps – lets get started!
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STEP ONE
Determine Your Goals
Before you can choose a college, you need to determine three primary goals. This will be what ultimately weeds out the “wrong” schools and points you toward the “right” ones. These goals may be different for everyone and can be based on a number of different factors.
EXAMPLE #1:
When I was graduating high school and looking for a college for my undergraduate degree, I wanted to find a college that was near my job, not too far from home, and offered a lot of scholarships. What I found was my hometown university which was five minutes from work, 35 minutes from home, and offered enough scholarships to allow me to graduate debt free!
EXAMPLE #2:
When I was looking for a school for my master’s degree, I was deployed at the time so I needed something 100% online, self-paced due to the time difference and my workload, and something with lower costs. I found a military-run college that offered my degree completely online and gave me a 50% military discount on tuition!
EXAMPLE #3:
When I decided to get my PhD, I again wanted something online, I wanted a PhD rather than a Doctorate (I never knew there was a difference!), and I wanted a program that wouldn’t take me a million years to complete. I found a college that has a PhD in my chosen field (Criminal Justice) that is 100% online, they have a military discount which is a bonus, and I can finish the entire program in about 2-3 years!
Figuring out what your specific goals are will help you eliminate schools very quickly, but you need to make sure to check all the boxes or this won’t work.
Let’s say your goals are low cost, close to home, and a certain degree program. You find a school that’s only 5 minutes from home, but it’s kind of expensive and has a similar degree program but not the exact one you want – kick it off the list!
Use your goals as a filter during your search. If you are going to devote your time, money, and energy for several years of your life to this, you want to find a school that will fit your needs and that will help you reach your goals. Make college work for you!
STEP TWO
Compare Colleges
Now that you have determined your three non-negotiable goals based on what you’re looking for in a college, you can start your search.
The best way that I found to search for and compare colleges was through certain websites. However, I wanted websites that didn’t require me to put my phone number and email in, unknowingly sign up for all sorts of spam calls and emails, and that gave accurate information in one spot.
The websites I found throughout my search helped me compare colleges in one place without having to look up each individual college website and read through all the information about admission requirements and program details.
These are the two websites that helped me the most:
This website allows you to search both by school and by field of study.
SCHOOL: You can enter a school name and select to add it to your compare list. After you’ve selected several schools, you can click “compare” and it will show the details of each school side by side and in graphs. This lets you very easily see the differences in tuition prices, the average graduation rate, and lots of other information that will help you make a decision.
FIELD OF STUDY: Select the field of study and degree type (bachelor, master…) and it will show you a long list of colleges that offer that degree. You can filter these results by changing the desired salary as an employee after completing the degree and the average debt after completing the degree. Within this list of results, you can select specific colleges that might meet your requirements and add them to your compare list.
This website allows you to filter colleges by location, major, type of college, and campus life.
LOCATION: You can select to search in a specific state, within a certain distance from your zip code, or outside the United States if you are wanting an international program.
MAJOR: This allows you to choose an area of study or a specific major. The list of results shows the average graduation rate of each school, average tuition, and the average SAT score range for admission requirements.
TYPE OF SCHOOL: For this search, there are filter options such as 4-year and 2-year degree programs, public or private schools, certain populations (all-men, tribal, Hispanic…), and religious affiliations.
CAMPUS LIFE: This search lets you find schools with a certain number of students, schools located in the city or in the middle of nowhere, schools with certain sports programs, schools that offer on-campus daycare or disability services, and a number of other choices.
REMEMBER!!! If a school does not check all your boxes – throw it out!
STEP THREE
Contact The School
For each school that checked all my boxes and that I was actually interested in, I went to that school’s website and submitted a “request for information” form. Most colleges have this on a contact page, at the bottom of the program details page, or as a pop-up. You will enter either your phone number, email, or both, and someone will contact you with detailed information about the degree program you selected.
For some colleges, once I got an email with further information, I ended up kicking it off the list because more information proved that it wasn’t the school for me. (They don’t often put the fine print on the website!).
However, if the email was promising, I’d typically agree to a phone conversation. If you have a phone call with anyone, make sure to take notes! I normally had a Word document up during the call so I could take notes quickly. After each call, I then transferred all the information into an Excel spreadsheet so I could compare details myself and determine what would be best for me.
Before you agree to a phone call, make a list of questions you have about that school. Some questions may be answered by the program’s detail page, but that page might also cause you to have even more questions.
Ask about tuition details and what is included/not included. Ask about the distance from campus housing to the main classroom buildings. Ask about work-study programs or the number of available employment positions on campus (if you’re looking to work while going to school). Anything you need more information on, ASK!
This college experience is for you, not them. The college needs to be right for YOU. If you are skeptical about one thing, drop it to the bottom of your list. Once you get down to about 10 colleges, you can still hold on to that skeptical college and save it for later, but just make it #10 instead of #1. Ranking your colleges while you have conversations with admissions departments will help you narrow down your options in the end.
Once you are at the point where all your questions have been answered, you don’t need anymore information, and you feel like you have everything you need to be able to make a decision – go for it!
Look at your #1 college – is there anything about it that you just don’t love? If there is, go to #2. Start eliminating schools that are just hard no’s or that are less appealing than another one on your list.
When you are down to these last ten schools, maybe ask for a second opinion or a second set of eyes. Call your parents, get your best friend to look at your list, or have a teacher or professor look at the schools and give you some feedback. They may notice something you didn’t catch, or they may have a different perspective that could bump one of the schools up or down for you.
Then apply! You could apply for all of your final ten if you can’t decide or if all of them seem like pretty good options. Only apply for schools that you wouldn’t mind going to. If you apply to six great ones and one that you really don’t want and then you end up getting accepted to that one bad school, you aren’t going to get the college experience that you want.
This is your life, your next several years, your education – make it work for YOU!
