What are your chances of getting into your dream college?
I wanted to share with you a great tool that you can use to help assess what your chances are for getting an acceptance letter from any college on your list.
You can find the tool at COLLEGEdata, which is a website shock full of resources for parents and high school students who want to learn more about the college process. (Full disclosure: I have just started writing a financial aid newsletter for the site.)
The COLLEGEdata tool that I want to mention today is called College Admissions Tracker. You can check the admission profiles of thousands of students who have applied to individual colleges and universities across the country.
One of the coolest things about the tool is the use of scattergrams. The scattergrams show acceptances, rejections, deferrals and wait list status of teenage applicants for individual colleges. What’s also neat is that you can look at students who applied early decision/early action or through the standard admission process. You can also see how legacy applicants and athletes fared.
COLLEGEdata’s tracking tool reminds me of the scattergram feature of Naviance’s Family Connection program that many high schools offer.
The downside to COLLEGEdata’s tool is that it only contains data on teenagers who voluntarily submit their data, but if you keep that in mind the tool can be valuable.
Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.