How to Build a Great College List From the Ground Up
It’s that time of the year again.
The challenges of college begin long before you open an account on the Common App website in the first semester of your senior year. The first hurdle often is just finding the right colleges to apply to, and the sheer range of educational institutions in the United States (or heck, around the world if you’re considering universities beyond just the states) can make it really difficult to be aware of the options available.
Your high school counselors can be a wonderful resource. The All-Out team also provides personalized support to students who need help developing a list. But if you have yet to schedule a meeting with your high school counselor and you can’t afford a private counselor, this post will show you the steps for developing a great college list.
Before we jump into it, let’s start with the basics. Why do you need a college list anyway?
College lists are lists of all the schools you plan to apply to. Writing everything down somewhere helps you to:
See if you have a balanced list with wildcards, reaches, maybes, and likelies
Explore schools you might not have originally considered
Keep track of what needs to get done once you start filling out applications
Having a list of schools you are considering will also make it easier to refer back to when you need to do research or have conversations with your counselor or admissions officers.
Okay, but when should you start your college list?
Great question. There is no perfect time — if anything, it’s a good idea to casually research colleges during your freshman year and just keep a list of ones you’re interested in. You should definitely have a finalized list by the end of your junior year. That way, you’ll know exactly where you are applying and only have to worry about applications, not researching schools.
With that said, here are the five steps for developing your college list:
Get to know your interests and preferences
Decide what’s important to you in your college experience
Create an initial list of colleges that match what’s important to you
Research your changes of getting in and organize your list by “wildcard,” “reach,” “maybe,” and “likely”
Narrow down your result into your final list of colleges
Step 1 – What do I want in my college experience?
According to Dr. Steven Antonoff, who lives and breathes colleges and literally wrote the book on finding colleges, the best way is for students to spend an hour discovering their college preferences.
If you don’t know where to start, I recommend using the 80-question “Self Survey for the College Bound” in Steven’s book, College Match. If you can’t buy the book online (because you don’t live in the states or if Amazon doesn’t deliver to wherever you live), you can download the survey from his website, School Buff. For free.
Another way to start is to decide what’s important to you. Some students thrive in a competitive environment. Others prefer a more mind-my-own-business kind of ambience. If you’re short on time, I really like Corsava. It’s a free tool that allows you to figure out what are your must-haves (or non-negotiables) by asking you a series of more than 100 questions on what you’re looking for in a college.
Some other surveys I enjoy are the Authentic Happiness Inventory from UPenn, Knowdell Career Values Card Sort from careerplanner.com, and the Sizing Yourself Up section at the start of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. These aren’t meant to be exhaustive, but are a great place to start that conversation.
Step 2 – Where do I start researching the right schools?
Once you have a better idea of what you want in your college experience, I recommend using collegexpress.com to search for schools for a couple of really compelling reasons.
Because it is really hard to get to know how all the colleges are like in the United States. There are more than 4,500 colleges and universities out there. If there is one person who really knows about colleges, it’s Dr. Antonoff. In his book, The College Finder, Dr. Antonoff developed and published a set of lists based on years of visiting campuses and talking to professionals.
And the best part is, Carnegie, an educational publisher and higher education marketing agency, created collegexpress.com and made those lists searchable. None of the colleges in the lists are ranked. Instead, the colleges are organized by their strengths (or weaknesses, or just their different characteristics). You can search everything from “The Happy Colleges” to “Colleges for Students with Autism Spectrum DIsorder: The Friendly Ones.” Super cool.
And before you ask: What about rankings? Shouldn’t I focus on applying to highly-ranked colleges?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is that choosing schools to apply to based on rankings alone is a pretty bad idea. Because most rankings rank colleges based on a very specific set of factors, and most of those factors have nothing to do with students and the kind of experience you will have in college.
As a cognitive scientist, I know first-hand how hard it is to quantify behaviors of anyone. Imagine quantifying a college, with numerous departments, professors, students, and resources. How do you objectively quantify those? The answer is “you can’t,” and that’s why most of the metrics that rankings use are things like “perceived academic reputation.” That sounds pretty subjective to me, and has nothing to do with helping you figure out whether you’ll thrive at a college.
If you’re still having doubts, I recommend you check out Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of the US News & World Report rankings here – The Order of Things: What college rankings really tell us. It’ll blow your socks off.
Step 3: How do I choose the right colleges for me?
Remember when I said how important it is to have your list down somewhere? No, not in your head. I meant in an actual spreadsheet. Why? Because it’s important to stay organized.
First, open and make a copy of this Google spreadsheet so you can edit it. It’s the College List Tracker from College Essay Guy. They’re awesome!
Next, go to collegexpress.com, and search for lists based on what’s most important to you (or your must-haves from Corsava).
https://www.collegexpress.com/lists/
As you’re researching, you’ll start to notice that some colleges are coming up repeatedly. For example, maybe you’ve never heard of Bard, but you see it on lists for “Colleges where Social Sciences PhDs Received their Undergraduate Degrees,” “Colleges for the Independent Learner,” and “Colleges with Innovative Academic Programs.” If social science is your thing, and you’re interested in innovative programs, maybe you should put Bard on your list and check out their school website.
Finally, type your list of schools into the spreadsheet as you research. Even if you won’t apply to all of them, put it on your list anyway. You may be surprised when you start digging deeper. Aim for 20~25 colleges on this initial list. We’ll trim it down later.
Step 4: How do I know whether I’ll get in (or not)?
It’s hard to predict whether you’ll get into a college or not because colleges have institutional priorities that they have to meet (and you have no control over). One year it could be making sure that there are enough students who excel at debate (because the college’s debate team needs some love). Some other year it could be admitting students from diverse backgrounds or specific geographic areas.
The bottom line is to not stress out about what you can’t control, and focus on what you can control, which is making sure you have a balanced list of colleges. By that I mean aiming for 12~15 colleges, like this:
3 Wildcard (1~10%)
3 Reach (Low chance of acceptance, about 11~25%)
3 Possible (Medium chance of acceptance, about 26~50%)
3 Likely (High chance of acceptance, about 51%+)
To figure out which category to put the colleges in, you can look at these main factors:
The college’s general acceptance rate (if there’s a specific program or major you’re aiming for, dig deeper to see if there’s a reported acceptance rate for that)
Average weighted and unweighted GPA for incoming freshmen
Average SAT and ACT scores for incoming freshmen
For highly selective colleges, however, there are other factors that can impact your chances of acceptance, especially:
Competitiveness of your intended major (i.e., computer science is often an impacted major, and has become more competitive than ever)
Your extracurriculars (i.e., do your activities align with what you intend to study? How long have you been engaged in these activities? Have you taken on a leadership role? Who have you impacted?)
How well-crafted are your personal statement and supplemental essays (i.e., do you stand out among other applicants?)
Whether you decide to apply Early Decision, Early Action, or Regular Decision (i.e., your application strategy)
Step 5: How do I narrow my preliminary college list down?
There is no short-cut for this. It’s just research, research, and more research. The silver-lining is that the more research you do, the more likely you’ll figure out which colleges resonate and are a good fit for you.
I recommend digging deep and keeping a record of everything you love about each college you research. These will come in handy when you’re asked to write the “Why us?” supplemental essay afterwards. You’ll thank me later 🙂
To learn more about how to draft up or upgrade your activities list, check out “How to Upgrade your Activities List in 2 Steps.”