Gather Information About Colleges You’re Considering
After you’ve looked at the types of schools available to you and examined the characteristics to consider when choosing a school, it’s time to begin gathering information to find out which schools meet your personal goals and needs.
- Get an overview of your choices.
- Get more details of the different choices available to you.
- Narrow your focus by identifying schools that have most of the characteristics you selected as important.
- Develop a short list of schools.
- Your first list of schools may be pretty large: 20 – 30.
- By gathering more information and deciding for yourself which school characteristics are most important, you can narrow the list even further to your top four to 10.
- Find out more about the schools on your short list.
- Visit the school’s website or write to their admission offices for applications, catalogs, admission requirements, costs of attendance, financial aid, housing, and any other information they may have.
- Plan to visit the schools, if you can, and ask to meet with an admission counselor.
- Use the school’s net price calculator to help estimate your cost to attend.
- Narrow your list to two to four schools.
Decide which characteristics are most important to you. Maybe it’s important to stay close to home, which will narrow your search. Maybe you have a very specific area of interest and you only want colleges that specialize in that field. Perhaps you want a large school whose strength lies in its diversity.
The choice is yours. Pick the five to ten characteristics you consider very important in your search for a school, and then start gathering information about your options.