Where do you find a great college?
I hear that question all the time.
You can pour through the big fat college guides from folks like the Princeton Review and Fiske, but they ignore most schools. For instance, Princeton Review’s latest guide covers 371 schools, but there are more than 2,200 four-year colleges and universities in this country.
What I’m going to quickly share with you today is one valuable resource, America’s Best Colleges from Forbes Magazine, that people can use to find hidden educational gems in their own regions.
The rankings created by Forbes and the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity include many colleges that the guidebooks don’t cover. Below you’ll find links to my past posts about Forbes’ college rankings.
What I find especially helpful for teenagers searching for colleges is that the college rankings are also broken down by four regions– Northeast, Midwest, South and West. A lot parents don’t want their teens going to college too far from home, but often they don’t know what schools exist beyond the public institutions in their own state.
This week, I sent the Midwest college list to my niece who lives in St. Louis and the Western list to my nephew who lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
The Western list includes instantly recognizable schools like Cal Tech and Stanford, but other highly ranked institutions include College of Idaho, George Fox University and St. Mary’s College of California. The latter two were ranked higher than UCLA or Berkeley. The Midwestern list includes such overlooked jewels as Doane College in Nebraska, College of Wooster in Ohio and Earlham College in Indiana.
If a college admission office in Ohio or Michigan is trying to decide who gets a scholarship between two equally talented candidates