Welcome to the Best College Guide! This website provides a free and easy way for high school students to construct a list of colleges and
universities to consider. According to the US Department of Education's College Scorecard, there are over 6,500 colleges
and universities in the United States. That is just too many to research, so you need a way to find a more manageable number
to work with.
So why do you want to go to college? To get a good job? Follow a passion? While there are a lot of high school seniors who know what they want to do, most don’t, and hope that they will find something in college that they will want to pursue. So, if you don’t know what you want to do with a degree, how can you go about finding the best college for you?
Most students take their grades and their test scores and try to get into the highest ranked school that will have them. That’s a great idea if you can get into a place like Harvard or Stanford. Companies compete for graduates from those schools, and they have very high graduation rates, so you are very likely to be successful as a graduate from those places. All colleges compete for students though, so the application/recruitment process also includes financial aid and scholarship offers. For the rest of us, the process is much more complex. The school’s curriculum, completion rate, cost, location, and lots of other factors can weigh into the selection process.
This website takes information published by the US Department of Education and processes it using a decision support tool to identify colleges and universities that meet the criteria that you specify. This data includes information on what students in your family's income range are likely to pay, once scholarships and financial aid is taken into account.
If you'd like to play men's soccer at college, this version of the form includes an additional section with questions that can help you find a men's college soccer team that's right for you.
Advice for college applicants
Here are some things to consider before you jump into a search for colleges:
- Government employees and contractors – Lots of the jobs that you will consider as a college graduate are with the various government agencies, including state, local, military, etc. These jobs usually require a college degree, but they don’t usually specify the school or even the major. If you are looking at living in an area post-graduation that is dominated by a military base or some other government employer, why bother taking on a huge amount of debt, when a less expensive college will give you the same credential?
- Graduate School – A large and growing percentage of fields (medicine, law, psychology, academics to name a few) require graduate degrees as a prerequisite. Admissions for most graduate schools are much less competitive than for undergraduate, so if you can get good grades at a less expensive college, you will be better able to afford a prestigious graduate school.
- Your parents’ money – Lots of students leverage their parents’ money to pay for college. That money is not unlimited, of course, so you might want to consider exploring a deal with them where you complete a low cost, community college-level degree, and in exchange, they contribute to your first house, or even buy you a small business upon graduation. The whole point is to set you up in life, so you should consider the big picture.
- Artificial Intelligence – While most AI experts say that AI is more likely to be a tool rather than a replacement for skilled labor, it will likely reduce the number of jobs for folks in certain industries. Software development, for example, is likely to change as a profession dramatically in the next few years. Technical specialties have always had a short shelf life, so this is not a new development. It is best to think of your time learning technical skills as an investment, so use your time in college obtaining skills that will retain their value over time.
- Math majors – If you don’t know what to major in, get a math degree. A math major qualifies you for the widest range of careers, given its use in science, engineering, law, medicine and just about any graduate degree. It has elements of philosophy, requires language skills to describe proofs, and is the foundation for modern medicine and engineering.
- Colleges compete for students, and not just in ways that you might think. College rankings favor colleges that get lots of applicants, and then have lots of students that they accept actually attend. To maximize those numbers, colleges will recruit students from less common demographics, locations and other backgrounds. You may not think of yourself as "exotic", but there are plenty of colleges that do.
What’s wrong with the whole concept of college?
While you are going through this stressful process, at some point you have to wonder if it's even worth the effort.
- It’s too expensive! If you think about what you are getting for the cost of tuition, it’s a terrible deal. According to the Department of Education, the average college student pays $32,000/year in tuition, and if they take 5 classes per semester, they get only about 250 hours of professor time that they have to share with the rest of their class.
- It’s designed to be exclusive. There is no technical reason why Harvard cannot educate 100,000 students instead of the 2,000 (https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics) students they take on each year. The value of a college education from Harvard IS its exclusivity, which means that the value of the Harvard education comes from the admission to the college, not the education itself.
- Expensive, exclusive colleges teach the same topics that the unpretentious colleges do. In fact, large universities often feature introductory level classes with hundreds of students, so it is pretty much up to the student to teach themselves these topics.
- Why is a college degree a requirement in the first place? A college degree certifies that you understood the concepts in 30-45 classes at a point in time well enough to pass those courses. It doesn’t certify that you retained that knowledge, so why is it considered a credential? Why exactly does a degree in Theatre Arts qualify you to work in an office? In thirty years, you are likely to remember precious little about the subjects you studied, and yet it will still be a credential.
In spite of this, the reality is that your economic future depends on having at least an undergraduate degree. But there is no reason why you have to take on huge amounts of debt, study topics you don't care about, and live in a place that makes you miserable. If you are smart about where you go and what you study, college can set you up in life like nothing else. People with college degrees simply have more opportunities, even if their degree isn't related to the opportunity!
This decision aid is designed to help you create a list of colleges that you can use to focus your search on the colleges that meet your priorities. The tool is free; my hope is that the Google Ads pay for the server.