One of my kids is a senior in HS and is going through the college application and decision process. I wanted to provide a high level summary of the criteria that we went through to decide the colleges to apply to. The criteria for deciding is likely to be a refined criteria– more on that in a different post. I am also not going to write about the major choice since that is very personal and cannot be generalized, really depends on going for passions/interests versus opportunity.
The criteria that we went through for deciding the colleges to apply to were (not in a prioritized order)
- Program strength (for the major)
- Large (40K+) versus Medium (15-20K) versus Small (< 10K) in terms of total student population
- Urban versus Suburban versus Rural location
- Connectivity to home (i.e direct flights from Seattle – really a parent preference)
- Public versus Private institution
- Local political views
- Affordability
- Weather
Not all the criteria are equally weighted, we did not weight them explicitly, was more implicit – for example weather was more of a nice to have; we might weight it appropriately for the final decision.
The goal was to shortlist a set of colleges that fell into the 3 categories of Reach, Target and Safeties and get to shortlist of 20-25, with at least 3 Safeties, 4-5 Targets and a little more on the Reach side. In my opinion, considering the crap shoot with college admission these days, having a few safeties in the list is critical.
We ended up short listing 20-25, applied to 15-16– ideally you want to keep the list to 10-12 to manage the workload and the number of things to track.
This was out first time going through the process for our older kid– for the next one (coming up in 2 years), we will be Pros.