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Web sites make the grade:
Choose colleges, search for scholarships with online
help
By Robin Ray/ Kid
Tech
Sunday, February 13, 2005
If we lived
in a perfect world, every high school student who wanted to go to college
would have not only a trust fund but a dedicated college counselor. This
counselor would have time to chat with each student, learn his or her
strengths and weaknesses, ambitions and quirks. Furthermore, this
counselor would be well-informed about colleges across the country and
abroad. He or she would keep abreast of changes in the academic world:
which colleges were getting more selective and which ones were struggling
to attract students, good or otherwise; which colleges made good on their
scholarship promises and which ones practiced bait and switch.
Alas,
this is not the world we live in. Counselors at many public high schools
have upward of 300 students to shepherd through the college process. Some
counselors barely have time to mail transcripts to the right places by the
deadline dates, let alone help scores of students find their ideal
colleges.
Technology
can play a role here. After all, a good college counselor works by
interviewing the student and asking pertinent questions. How big a factor
is financial aid? Do you want a party school or one where most kids crack
a book on a daily basis? How large a school are you looking for? Would you
want or want to avoid a religious component in your higher education? A
computer can ask such questions just as easily as a human being, though it
is far worse at personal networking and intuition.
My
student testers and I have tried out several of the online college-match
options. Some of them are free; others are reasonably priced, especially
if you compare it with the cost of sending a kid to the wrong college, or
hiring a private counselor. These search engines also can shine light on
schools that local counselors might not be familiar with.
The
College Board's College MatchMaker
(apps.collegeboard.com/search/adv-typeofschool.jsp) is free, and its
database contains more than 3,000 colleges and universities.
Unfortunately, its questionnaire is so detailed it is quite possible to
get no matches at all; in other words, every time you answer something
other than ``No preference,'' you can bump dozens of perfectly good
schools off your list. The MatchMaker does not even helpfully point out
that if you just changed, say, your housing desires, you might find a
match.
We had
better luck with Destination-U (www.destination-u.com). This service is
newly launched but well-thought-out. For $79.99, it takes you through a
shorter but more nuanced list of questions and generates a list of about
15 match colleges. These are ranked according to whether they are a reach
for you, a ``target'' (good odds you'll get in, but no guarantees) or a
safety school. Colleges that give good value for your education dollar are
so noted.
FastWeb
(www.fastweb.monster.com) claims to get you in touch with 600,000
scholarships as well as matching you with your ``dream school.'' To get to
these lists, you have to fend off a dozen ``free offers,'' any one of
which will put you in for volumes of junk mail and spam. Though its
scholarship information is the most comprehensive available on the Web,
its college search results were not helpful. Our test case pulled up 276
colleges - not exactly narrowing down the field.
Once
you have some idea where you might be looking, you should visit Campus
Tours.com (www.campustours.com). This handy Web site is a portal to
hundreds of colleges' virtual tours - 29 in Massachusetts alone. It tends
to have only four-year colleges, and its coverage of state schools is
patchy. But it's a good way to view the range of college options with no
expenditure for gas or lodging. It even gives out awards for ``Best
Virtual Tour,'' won most recently by Roger Williams College in Rhode
Island.
Finally,
before you go trolling the Internet for scholarship dollars, be sure to
check out the Federal Trade Commission's Scholarship Scams Web site
(www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/scholarship/index.html). Remember the old
adage: ``If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.''
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