How to Choose a School List

Selecting colleges can be a very difficult task. There are literally hundreds if not thousands to chose from. Making a college list for a high school student can be a daunting task.

Get help from your parents!

A few things can make this a bit easier to do. The first, is to get help from your parents! Yes, we know that parents can be overbearing and sometimes even difficult to deal with during the college admissions process, but they can really help you eliminate some schools quickly or find others you didn’t even know about.

The next tip is to ignore the college rankings, as much as possible. Nowadays, there is a ranking for absolutely everything. Most of these are meant to sell magazines and little else! There are many amazing schools that don’t rank highly on some list for one reason or another. To prove how arbitrary the ranking systems are, you can go back and see huge “jumps” from a particular school because they manipulated a little data here or there (ie they made a big push for alumni donations that year). Basically, these serve as just one of many guides to making a list.

Finally, one thing you should think about is geography. Where do you want to spend 4 years? Are you a big city person or a rural town person? Do you like a campus that is the center of everything in town, or do you like one that is in the middle of a very vibrant city? These are important questions to ask as you prepare your school list!