Philip Michas and Adrian Gamerello are high-school seniors, classmates at the prestigious Browning School, just off Park Avenue in Manhattan. When it came to picking a college to attend next fall, they had the best help money could buy: a highly regarded guidance counselor and high-end computer hardware and software to aid a senior class of only two dozen.
But for the rest of us, here’s the good news: Both Michas, whose “favorite thing in the world is computer stuff,” and Gamerello, who prints out every paragraph he writes because he’d rather read text on paper, said the most valuable help they found in selecting colleges was available free, 24 hours a day, to anyone with a computer and a modem.
Both students took the advice of Browning’s guidance counselor, Sanford Pelz, and visited colleges on the Web.
Nearly all colleges have Web sites, of course, and those sites have grown increasingly sophisticated over the last two years as admissions offices have realized that a good Web page can translate into more applications and more tuition dollars.
Gamerello combined guidebooks, brochures and Web pages in looking for a school that valued the arts over athletics and was a comfortable size and distance from home. He said Web pages “give you some of what the place is about, of the school’s ideology.”
He mentally adjusted for the pictures “that are airbrushed and edited so they’re, like, perfect,” he said, yet still found them very useful. But there is much, much more available than the sylvan scene of the campus, the majestic shot of the administration building, the perfectly posed pictures of a flawlessly diverse group of students chatting amiably about the joys of calculus, the thrill of Chaucer.
A different kind of information–less well ordered but often more useful–can be found elsewhere. All over the country, individual faculty members have built Web pages of their own, where they post syllabuses, lecture notes, old tests–the nuts and bolts of the classroom.
Additionally, thousands of students have their own Web pages, where they inveigh for and against all manner of details about life at college. “There is a lot of information that has not been cleansed by the admissions office,” Pelz said.
And don’t forget college newspapers. The College Press Network (www. cpnet.com) lists links for more than 300 campus papers, arranged alphabetically by state. The papers are irreverent, outraged and often outrageous–just what a high school student may need to figure out if everything else about a school is as good a fit as the academics.
Visiting a college’s Web site and the college itself are great ways to make final choices about where to apply and enroll, but it’s bewildering and too time-consuming to begin the selection process there. Most professional guidance counselors recommend putting together a list of 10 to 20 schools, then applying to perhaps half that number.
Some of the factors in school selection–where your parents went and where your heartthrob is going–are serious concerns but are not the sort of things computers can help with. But for other considerations, software can be an enormous help, provided you use it the right way.
College Search, found at cbweb1. collegeboard.org/csearch or through a link on www.collegeboard.com, is the College Board’s on-line version of its software packages for consumers and high schools. Peterson’s, a longtime rival to the College Board in the big guidebook field, has a search site at www.petersons.com, which links to its www.collegequest.com site.
College View (www.collegeview. com) is a relative newcomer to the on-line collection. The difference between what it offers free on-line and what is on the CD-ROMs it sells to high-school guidance offices is videos, said the site’s managing director, Tim Loudermilk.
Colleges pay $5,000 to $20,000 and up to be included in the videos, which can be thought of as digital versions of the slick brochures, called view books, that colleges put together to sell themselves. The information on the schools is the same.
The process of looking for a college is largely the same on all three Web sites. On the positive side, the information on the sites is in a database, not a narrative, which makes it easy to generate an endless set of lists sorted by a wide variety of criteria.
If you want a college of more than 10,000 students in a city in the northeast, a school with a Division I-A football team, a student humor magazine and a pep band that accepts only half of its applicants and offers advanced-placement credit for the AP Latin exam, a list of colleges meeting all or most of those criteria–the sites’ options vary a bit–is a few clicks away. It can be sorted for your convenience by cost or by other criteria important to you.
On the negative side, searching a database proves that adage about computers: They do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. If you dream of a small, private, highly selective liberal arts college in New England and search with those terms in the College Board’s database, you will get exactly zero schools that meet the criteria.
Bennington is too small–enrollment of only 450–and admits two-thirds of its applicants, so it is not so selective after all. Wellesley’s 2,200 students make it too big for the “small” category, which ranges from 750 to 2,000. Colgate is not in New England; it is in Hamilton, N.Y.
Bates, Amherst and Williams Colleges are all perfect examples, but those schools do not provide data on the high-school grades of their incoming students, so if that was one of your criteria, a reasonable measure of selectivity, those colleges do not make the list.
You can tinker with the list until you figure out what went wrong, but that’s going at the problem backward. If you already want to go to Amherst, then you do not need to search for it. But if you are not well versed about what schools are out there, you won’t know that you’re missing a potentially interesting college that does not show up on the list.
Don’t plan to come up with this list of finalists in one sitting or to do it without help from the guidance office.
While some college-selection software carries price tags that only a school would be likely to manage, the average consumer can still find CD-ROMs that are affordable and helpful. Like the three reviewed here, they are often packaged with books or other software.
With Peterson’s College Quest Personal Edition (Peterson’s Interactive; $24.95; bundled with “Peterson’s 4-Year Colleges”; Windows 3.1 and higher and NT, and Mac 7.0 and up), students enter their personal selection criteria, then get lists of colleges that meet those requirements. The basic choices, represented by icons on the screen, are made according to criteria like region or state, academic majors and difficulty of entrance standards, or by whether the schools are public or private.
Along the way, icons labeled Tell Me offer good, if standard, advice on the topic at hand. At any point, the user can click on any of the colleges listed to call up a full profile of the campus, the same information that can be found in the pages of the accompanying book.
The software will also generate e-mail letters of inquiry to any of the selected schools.
The College Board’s huge database, packaged with “The College Handbook 1999,” is called College Explorer (College Entrance Examination Board; $25.95; Windows 3.11 and up and NT). The student types in a bit more information than with the Peterson’s version, rather than selecting categories, but the process is the same and the information is very similar.
Higher Score Guaranteed on the SAT, PSAT and ACT Deluxe ($29.99 after a $20 rebate, Windows 3.1 and up, and Mac 7.0 and up) is offered by Kaplan Educational Centers. The test-preparation company packages its search software differently, in a five-CD set that includes its college search database, based on “The Kaplan Newsweek College Catalog 1999” (Simon & Schuster), along with SAT and ACT test-preparation software and a scholarship database.
Like most test-preparation software, this uses a multimedia approach. As perhaps might be expected, the information on the colleges provided by the Kaplan software is not so thorough as that provided by Peterson’s and the College Board.
Kaplan does offer links to college Web pages, and the friendly tour guide recommends that you visit the colleges’ Web sites.
