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It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when trying to decide which colleges you want to apply to.
Here are some things to think about as you make that decision:
- Size of college
- How large do you want your classes to be?
- What resources are important to you to have in a college?
- Do you mind if TAs teach your classes instead of professors?
- Location
- Do you want to stay in-state? Go out of state?
- How far from home do you want to go?
- If you do want to go away from home, be sure to take into consideration how much it will cost you to go home. How far is campus from an airport/train station/bus station? How long would it take if you didn’t have a car?
- Public vs. private
- 2 year vs. 4 year
- How much will it cost (total) to attend? What can you/your family realistically afford? How many loans are you/your family comfortable taking out?
- Know your EFC
- Apply to schools that meet need
- Majors offered? Possible major? Career options?
- If you are applying to a school for a certain program, make sure you REALLY want to do that; otherwise, if you switch majors, you’ll be stuck
- HBCU? Women’s college?
- Be realistic:
- For the top, most highly competitive schools, you probably need a 3.5+ GPA and 1000 SAT
- This is even more important for STEM fields (3.5+ GPA, 1100 SAT)
- This is not to discourage you! You can still get into a great school — just be realistic!
- For the top, most highly competitive schools, you probably need a 3.5+ GPA and 1000 SAT
Other tips:
- If you can, visit the college!
- The only real way to see how the campus feels is to visit it – you might be surprised how different it can be to see a campus online vs. actually be there in person
- Talk to current students/alumni at colleges you’re interested in to get the real scoop on what that college is like
- Contact us if you’re interested – we have Yleana alums at a wide range of colleges all across the country
- Make sure you’re applying to a range of colleges – some reaches, some matches, and some safeties
- Make sure you’re applying to colleges that meet financial need
⇒Start here with Yleana’s curated lists of colleges and programs⇐
Other resources:
- College Board’s Big Future College Search
- You can input characteristics and it will output a list of colleges matching those characteristics
- Can also find the percentage of need met at each school
- College Scorecard
- Shows graduation rate, median salary for students 10 years after college graduation – look up schools you’re considering
- College Simply
- Search for schools by SAT score or GPA
- Tells you how likely you are to be accepted
- College Greenlight
- Lists of fly-in programs, other features
- Similar to Big Future
- College Confidential
- Get a feel of the school
- Niche
- Grades certain aspects of a school (campus safety, location, food)
- Can search by your SAT score
- Cappex
- Will provide a graph showing you where you fit compared to other applicants who were rejected or accepted based on your GPA and SAT scores
- Can search any existing school in the US
- Will recommend schools to you
- ScholarMatcher
- This is an interactive online college search tool. You can browse the list or take a quiz to help narrow down a list of colleges that might be a good fit for you
- All the colleges on this list are specifically chosen because they support students whose families earn less than $50,000 per year