There’s a myriad of ways to select colleges for application. Major choice and future careers usually pop into both students’ and their parents’ minds as the first criteria for choosing a college. However, many get stumped, because at seventeen a student may not have identified a specific academic concentration, nor an intended career. And, parents may not want to encourage their teenager to narrow his/her choices, and be locked in to a dissatisfying major or career. So, where to start? Well, there’s a plethora of rankings sources and college guides offering opinions for students and parents to consult. Yet, the abundance of information can be confusing to students and parents, as well as frustrating. Faced with a steep learning curve to realistically weigh an individual student’s competitiveness within the college admissions process, while simultaneously buildng a process to make confident decisions about a student’s future can stymy the most strategic of parents, no matter his/her day job.
“Amazing but Overlooked,” “Best Colleges for Return on Investment”, “Best Colleges for _____ (fill in a major or career name),” Top Universities for Surfers, “Best Public Universities,” “Colleges That Change Lives“…all of these are actual lists that have been compiled based on a variety of criteria as guidance for families. The list a family picks to start their search can indicate the family’s priority criteria a college and its experience must satisfy in order to be considered for admissions. And, the top criteria is determined by the value the family most seeks. Is that value–affordability? Is that value–location? Is that value–how the college approaches the education of students and future citizens? Taking time to consider what’s most valuable to a family, and thinking as broadly as possible about a college experience can help each family enter the college selection process on their own terms, rather than under the pressure of trying to squeeze into a one-size-fits-all idea of how to select colleges for application.
As with any recommendations, college rankings lists are guides to be employed by the families making the decisions. The more an individual family knows about what absolute features a college campus must have in order to make the cut for further consideration, the more the rankings will be useful tools. Any ranked list gives families narrowed bits of information to consider, rather than a Google’s worth of seemingly random searches. In other words, start with what the parents and student knows for himself/herself as a must-have in a college experience, then the rankings can further focus the family’s efforts to find the most fitting colleges before applying.
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