Favorite College Sites
Now that I'm starting to look at colleges and help out friends with their college choices, I have come upon a few sites that are really worth checking out.
Unigo.com
The highlights of this site are that has a ton of content and that all of the content is completely student contributed. The entire premise of the site fascinates me. A few years ago, a Wesleyan University grad got the idea to make a site out of all student generated content to provide a middle ground for prospective high school students and college students to learn and share their perspectives on their college experiences.
Reviews with the pink "recommended" tab are quite thorough and are genuinely helpful in grasping the essence of a college, beyond the level of a guidebook. It really takes guidebook-level raw information and translates it into what it actually means in terms of social and academic atmosphere. Another quick feature is the best and worst aspects of each college, which are short, one sentence responses written by students that tend to be pretty helpful grasping the big-picture of a school.
Unigo also provides a good glimpse of the average student through video clips from around campus and student responses and perspectives. Users should take all content with a grain of salt though, since it is pretty subjective in that students can say whatever they want. It definitely provides a one of a kind view into college life and how students feel about their final college choices.
StateUniversity.com
StateUniversity.com has also been a fantastic resource. Although this sounds like a tacky site for local schools, I assure you that it offers a comprehensive view on colleges of all levels of competitiveness. They also offer their own ranking system based on things like professor salary and test scores - things that tend to suggest career success and student satisfaction. The site also contains information such as demographics and entering class statistics in a way that's easy to understand and allows for easy comparison of schools.
I think that's what I appreciate most about everything on this site: it makes everything easy to compare and to digest. Objective information such as rankings or special honors a college has earned appears in a straightforward way alongside subjective information about general academic programs and the intellectual focus of the college community. Overall, it gives the best overview of a college of any online resource, and is only matched among books by Fiske's Guide to colleges, which I also strongly recommend.
About.com : College Admissions
http://collegeapps.about.com/
Rather than providing profiles of individual colleges (which this site also does for a smaller number of schools), this site is really a road map for common questions that families have about college admissions. Examples of topics include things like "What is Early Decision?" or "ACT or SAT?" The site is extremely helpful with how to begin the application process and with help regarding standardized testing. I also like that the site provides a lot of information about what test scores mean, and where you can go with them. The host of the site also manages a very interesting editorial blog in addition to providing FAQ and basics of admission. Topics go into different things like "Taking a year off," or "How colleges are reacting to the recession." This level of information is very helpful for getting into the minds of college admissions staff and for the advanced intermediate who is interested in learning a little bit more about the admissions process as a whole.
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