During the last two days on my college blog, I’ve shared ways to generate schools for your college list. Here they are if you missed them:
Finding Hidden Gems for Your College List
Getting Ideas For a College List
Today I’m sharing 8 more ways to search for schools.
1. Use the federal college search engines.
The most massive database of the bunch is the federal College Navigator search engine, which is operated by the U.S. Department of Education. To locate potential schools, you can select criteria such as private and public institutions, costs, majors, admission selectivity, religious affiliation, sports and much more.
Click on the icon of the U.S. map on the home page and you’ll be able to designate the states and/or regions that you’d like to explore. Here are a couple of previous posts that I’ve written about the College Navigator:
What Colleges Have the Right Majors?
Checking a College’s Generosity
2. Or check out these helpful search engines:
3. Take Zinch and Cappex for a spin.
These free online college matchmakers have borrowed features from Facebook that should appeal to teenagers. On both sites, for instance, teens can create their own profiles and showcase their talents, activities, passions and goals to a audience of hundreds of colleges and universities. Colleges use the search function to look for promising applicants whether they are flutists, computer wizards, soccer players or students from distant time zones.
4. Check out Unigo and College Prowler
Unigo provides comments and videos from current students who share their opinions about their schools. The students’ observations are valuable because the schools can’t whitewash them. You can also find student reviews of schools on the website of College Prowler.
5. Use guidebooks.
The annual Fiske Guide to Colleges and The Princeton Review’s Best Colleges guides provide backgrounds on hundreds of schools.
6. Head to College Majors 1011.
This is a wonderful resource to research college majors. For instance, what can you do with an environmental science degree? On this site you can also find schools that offer particular majors, as well as view major-specific videos that schools create. In addition, you can generate ideas by discovering on the site what schools are winning competitions in particular fields of study.
7. Use CollegeWeekLive
This website, which bills itself as the world’s largest college fair, connects hundreds of schools with students through live streaming video presentations. You can find the calendar of events by heading to its website.
8. Visit schools virtually.
Lots of schools provide virtual tours on their websites. You can also check out videos of many schools at YOUniversityTV.com.
One more thing…
On StudentAdvisor.com, I ran across some amusing videos of students receiving their college acceptances from schools ranging from Central Michigan University to MIT. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch.