Finding in-depth info on colleges WSJ article

Kids & Money
Finding in-depth info on colleges
By JUNE KRONHOLZ
December 18, 2006; Page R6

The campus green is edged with giant oaks, and the cafeteria serves fresh sushi. But are those reasons to choose a college?

Thanks to a proliferation of data-crammed Web sites, they don't have to be. In return for budget and research support and access to federally backed student loans, state and federal governments are asking for more information than ever from public and private colleges -- and making it available to consumers.

That adds up to far more information than you'll pick up by touring campuses, reading glossy viewbooks or scanning college guides -- which tend to be heavy on social details (major frat scene, for instance) and fairly light on the school budget or how long it takes to graduate.

Some of the government data are probably of interest only to planners or social scientists: The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Web site, for instance, includes a building inventory for every campus. Other information seems of debatable use. The Education Department reports how many professors on each campus hold Ph.D.s, although graduate degrees are now fairly common.

But other data say a lot about a school by describing the kind of students it attracts, how successful it is at retaining and graduating them, what they study, how much aid they receive and whether those graduates find jobs out of college.

When the federal government reports that Vanderbilt University awards 14% of its bachelor's degrees in engineering, that suggests an on-the-ball department that will be aggressive in recruiting teaching talent. When it says 1% of the Nashville, Tenn., school's undergraduates are over 25, it means this isn't a commuter campus for part-time students. And when it says 63% of students receive some financial aid, Vanderbilt's $49,812-a-year price tag for tuition, room and board and fees looks less daunting.

Broad Descriptions

The first place to look for information is on the Education Department's College Opportunities Online Locator, or Cool (nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool3). This site is almost impossible to find if you don't know the address. And though a color map or two have been added in the past year, it's not much to look at.

But the site offers both a broad description of thousands of colleges and a search engine. When I told Cool that I was interested in an electrical-engineering program at a private school with fewer than 5,000 students within 200 miles of my ZIP Code, it proffered 93 choices.

A search for a chemistry program at an Evangelical Lutheran Church-affiliated school within 500 miles produced four results. And a search for a Chinese program in Colorado produced one result: the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The next step is to go to the Education Department's Federal Student Aid Web site (studentaid2.ed.gov4), which goes well beyond scholarships with information on programs, graduation outcomes and even whether the school has a marching band. A search on the site for Rice University in Houston yielded 22 pages of information, including that 173 employers recruited on campus last year and 53% of the graduating class had an offer of a full-time job within six months.

Details From States

Some states offer up still more detail about their public universities on Web sites maintained by their state board of regents.

For instance, in 2005 the University of Florida offered twice as much in work-study grants as Florida State University -- useful news if your child wants to help work his way through school. Such information is available at flbog.org5.

The Texas site (txhighereddata.org6) reports, among other things, that 89% of Texas A&M engineering graduates passed their licensure requirements -- an indication of the rigor of the program -- and that 63% of the University of Texas freshmen placed in the top tenth of their high-school class. That top 10% get automatic entry to the state university of their choice, so that's a clue about how hard it may be to get one of the remaining seats -- and how highly local students rate the Austin campus.

Ohio's Web site (regents.ohio.gov7) lists the grade-point averages of the juniors at 13 public universities (they're all around 3.0).

Making Comparisons

Consumer demands for information also have driven the development of plenty of nongovernment Web sites.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (ncaa.org8) lists graduation data on athletes -- an indication of what each school expects of its sports stars. The Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (ajcunet.edu9) has a search engine. The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (naicu.edu10) provides links to its members' self-assessment studies.

The College Board site (collegeboard.com11) allows you to compare two or three colleges, although the information isn't particularly deep. When I tried to compare Miami University in Ohio and Marquette University in Milwaukee, it offered up each school's admissions scores, tuition, size and acceptance rate -- basically what you would find in any college guide.

But the College Board site does help narrow the choice with another interactive tool that lets you set such criteria as whether the college offers study-abroad programs, wired dorms, freshman housing, an urban setting, lots of or only a few international students, a preadmissions interview or Division I football.

The Princeton Review site (princetonreview.com12) offers much of what's in its paperback guides, but adds two factoids about student loans: whether students borrow directly from the federal government or go through a private lender for government-backed loans, and which lender that will be. The interest rate is the same for students.

Peterson's, a unit of student-loan provider Nelnet Inc., which also publishes college guides, includes a scholarship search engine on its site (petersons.com13), along with the usual data about majors, admissions dates and college life. The tool told me my high-school senior qualified for 247 little-known scholarships, including those offered by the America's Junior Miss foundation, the Koomruian Armenian Education Fund and the Arizona Police Corps. Alas, I have a son, he isn't Armenian and doesn't live in Arizona. A Peterson's spokeswoman says "it is possible" that scholarship groups didn't adequately describe their grants in a questionnaire the search engine scans to determine eligibility. She adds that she had the same problem when she entered her own information.

That brings up a caution about any of these Web sites: They all rely on information provided by the colleges, are subject to computer glitches and aren't always up-to-the-minute.

And however much they tell you about a college, most kids still make their choice based on some vague, indescribable sense that they fit on one campus, but not another. Which is why a stroll across the college green and lunch in the cafeteria aren't a bad idea either.

--Ms. Kronholz is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau