Researching schools
ACAP does not endorse any particular Web tools or guides. Those we cite are the ones most commonly used by students with whom we work.
Web tools & guides
There are a lot of college search resources out there, and it's not always easy to figure out which ones will be the most useful for you. When you're ready to get started, spend a little time in your local bookstore flipping through different guides, or browse a few online search engines—and then trust your gut. You will know which resources are going to work best for you. Below are a few suggestions to get you started, but remember that once you get going you will become very adept at identifying and using additional resources.
For online search help, you could start with one of the college search engines like College Board's MatchMaker or Princeton Review's Counselor-O-matic. To continue your research, here are a few Web sites commonly used by students with whom we have worked:
For Web sites that offer students' viewpoints on various colleges, try:
As with many online resources, some of these sites may charge a fee, and some may sell your e-mail address to other vendors.
The old-fashioned but still remarkably useful way to research colleges is through one or several of the many narrative-type college guidebooks: The Fiske Guide to Colleges, The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, Princeton Review's The Best 361 Colleges, etc. Any of these guides can give you a good start on building your list and getting a feel for the various colleges. Several of them provide overlap lists for each school, which is to say that they give you a number of schools that match the one you’re looking at in terms of feel, attributes, character, etc.
Almost all colleges have their own Web sites, and you can get some good information from them—look at their online course catalogue, check out the most recent Class Profile, connect to the web pages of the departments and programs that interest you. Many colleges will offer virtual tours of their campus, but you can also find a more unbiased view in some of the college tours offered (for a fee) through Collegiate Choice
College Walking Tours Videos
or Campus Tours. Be sure to request information online, over the phone or with a simple request postcard, so that you get on the mailing lists of the schools that interest you.
Visiting
Visiting is an invaluable way to learn about a college and get a feel for the campus and student body. It also lays the groundwork for you to later convey, in a detailed and thoughtful way, your interest in the school. As a start, you might want to visit some colleges that are local to you, to begin to develop a sense of what different campuses feel like.
Ultimately, and assuming it’s possible, you will want to plan some targeted visiting in order to get a deeper sense of right-fit schools for you. Visit a large school, a small school, a rural school and a school in the city, etc. You will find, as with the other aspects of the research process, that you quickly become an expert at taking in information, sizing schools up quickly and accurately, knowing what you want in relation to what they offer, and knowing what questions to ask while you’re there. But remember, the most important piece of information is how it all feels while you're there, because a good fit has an intuitive as well as a fact-based component.
