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College search engines.There are many college search engines you can use to help you find colleges that match your individual preferences. How do you know which one will help you the most? Which are the easiest to use? I think you want to choose a college search engine that is easy to understand, intuitive to get around easily, and that provides you with useful information organized in an efficient way. Here are some that I recommend.
College Finder.http://studentaid2.ed.gov/gotocollege/CollegeFinder/advanced_find.aspThe College Finder is a very good college search engine that can be found at the Student Financial Aid site of the U.S. Department of Education. We like this web site the best because it not only asks you about your preferences, but it also asks you how important each preference is. This allows you to weigh certain things more heavily than others. Just like real life! Clicking on "results" gives you a prioritized list of schools that best match your desires with a percentage ranking of how well each fits the features you listed. By the way, it even lets you look for schools that typically accept students with specific grade point average and test score ranges. This site offers lots of useful information about each institution (hint - you have to click on "campus tour" to get the information and you don't really take a "tour"). Overall, it's a super tool for building your initial consideration list.
College Matchmaker.http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/index.jspThis college search engine (done by the folks that oversee the SAT test) is also a good source of information. It asks you to answer lots of questions about everything from geographic location to campus life preferences. We like this site because it gives you tons of good information, is easy to navigate and has a neat feature called "find similar" that lists schools with similar characteristics to ones that you view. Anycollege.http://www.anycollege.com/This is the easiest of the sites to use. You only answer a few basic questions and then get a list of schools that fit your answers. It's the quickest way to start generating a list to check out. However, you need to know that you get the ones that advertise with Anycollege.com first. Finally, you can get some profile information on the featured schools, but you only get a link to the web site for the others. College Navigator.http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/College Navigator is a search engine tool done by the U.S. Department of the National Center for Education Statistics. This is the office of the government that all colleges have to annually send lots of data on all kinds of areas about their school. So, they have tons of information available and have organized a pretty neat search engine. It's fairly straightforward to use. You start by entering search option preferences in the left hand column of their main page and end up with a list of results whenever you choose. I recommend clicking on the little question marks you'll see right next to the title of each search option to learn more about how to enter your preferences. One of the things I like about this tool is that you can search for colleges based on a low and a high SAT or ACT score. That can help you narrow your consideration set to schools that fit your profile.
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