Both online advocates and online haters exist for any college discussed. The truth is rarely as good as some claim or as bad as others claim.

For VA public universities, the State Council on Higher Education in VA (SCHEV), has a remarkable amount of information. Most US states do not have an official authoritative information source as specific as that web site.

- common data set
- your own high school profile
- naviance (etc) data from your high school

for 95% of kids:

- take the 5 year matriculation data from your high school. often on your school profile. This is maybe 120 colleges.

- cross out all schools that are easy omits. you probably already know if your kid has any interest in places like Julliard or West Point or Purdue or Bennington. This should bring it down to 60-80 schools.

- Take out another 20 that are either under matches or overmatches ie Eastern Kentucky and Princeton.

- if you have any other limitations like geography or religion, limit the list further.

You should be able to start junior year with 50 colleges. Next step is do a couple tours locally even if your kid has no interest in staying local. See a big school, a small school, a Jesuit school .. whatever. Try to see a couple of schools in each band of big/small/urban/suburban. This is the biggest cut of all so take your time on this one during junior year. Will you care about sports culture, frats, etc. And also think about major here.

- By spring break junior year, you'll have a list of 20-25 schools. Run the NPCs. Go look at 5 or so that are near each other. and maybe a long weekend to look at a couple more. List is down to 15-20

By end of junior year, with grades and test scores in hand, you'll get realistic about money and odds. The list will be 10-15 and you're good to apply.

I dont like message forums, but I did like podcasts.

Anonymous wrote:Occasionally a small private college won't participate, won't publish it. Imo that's a red flag

Like Chicago, which does not publish its ED info…for obvious reasons.

If it's a small college and they say they have a certain major ... how many students did they graduate in that major during the last year? It might be minuscule. It may not be an accredited program. Percentage of Greek participation, Percentage of OOS, Percentage of students living on campus (dorm availability), Stats of attending students (not just accepted students) Just some of the info

My kids aren't super high stat kids, so I have relied on this forum, college confidential and the AAK group of Facebook.

You really have to be reasonable. This forum, in particular helps with that.

Anonymous wrote:OP, kind of an aside to your question, do you know about The Common Data Set for colleges? Of all resources, I found that the most essential.

+1

Occasionally a small private college won't participate, won't publish it. Imo that's a red flag

It's a document online. Search for it on each college's website. Sometimes it might go by a different name. It might take some work to find. Call the U and ask how to find it if you're having trouble. To start, pull up the document for any college and carefully look it over to see the details - it's too extensive to explain here.

The Common Data Set data is all accessed directly from each school, right? There’s no aggregated source? Would love it if there were a single database. Best I know of is https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ but it just has partial info.

Anonymous wrote:OP, kind of an aside to your question, do you know about The Common Data Set for colleges? Of all resources, I found that the most essential.

Don’t even know what common data set means!

How do you use it?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The college forum here is really toxic and full of misinformation. I'd tread very carefully.

LOL ! Most ironic post of the day.

The above poster fears the open sharing of information and opinions. That poster wants to control the information available to others by making false assertions and stirring up fear.

To the drama queen who wrote the above post, what are you afraid of ? That thoughts & ideas that differ from your opinions might be read by others ?

OP, this is a perfect example of the toxicity and misinformation that I was talking about.

Anonymous wrote:OP, kind of an aside to your question, do you know about The Common Data Set for colleges? Of all resources, I found that the most essential.

100%. This and the Scoir/Naviance data for your own high school. At the beginning, the books Who Gets In and Why and The Price you Pay for College are helpful. The Paying for College 101 Facebook group has a lot of good info although there are also a lot of people who confidently post inaccurate info. This and CC then provide some additional color.

I found better information via podcasts than message boards. The Yale podcast is really good. I like Your College Bound Kid - not everyone does. I don't like the Dartmouth one - other people do.

MIT and Georgia Tech both run blogs on this topic that are great.

And any data data - not anecdata - like from Common Data Set is solid.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The college forum here is really toxic and full of misinformation. I'd tread very carefully.

LOL ! Most ironic post of the day.

The above poster fears the open sharing of information and opinions. That poster wants to control the information available to others by making false assertions and stirring up fear.

To the drama queen who wrote the above post, what are you afraid of ? That thoughts & ideas that differ from your opinions might be read by others ?

These are the kind of weird, flying-off-the-handle responses to a normal comment that you regularly get around here. Makes the whole place less useful.

You mean to make the "whole place less useful" to advance your biased, narrow-minded agenda.

Thanks for showing OP the crazy that is common on college forums. We couldn’t have described it as well as you demonstrate it.