College search engines

Google "college search engines" and you'll turn up several pages of sites purporting to be able to find the best college for you. But, can a computer really do the work of searching for a college? To find out, I tested several of the most popular search engines, using a variety of GPA's and test scores.

The Princeton Review site's CounselorMatic is probably one of the most popular engines out there. It's easy to see the appeal: answer the peppy questions, plug in your GPA and SATs, and Counselor-matic says it will spit out a list of matches, safeties and reaches. But how on target are those suggestions? I submitted three sample searches to the site. I said I was looking for 4 year colleges in New England. On my first search, I said I had a 3.5 GPA and had SAT scores of 500 writing, 500 math, 500 reading. The results? According to CounselorMatic, my match schools included Worchester Polytech, Babson, Boston U and Clark. My safety schools were Northeastern, Bentley and Quinnipiac. Reach schools? Well, how about Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin and Brown?

Therein lies the problem with CounselorMatic. It is often wildly off-base. While it is true that "Amherst, Boston College, Bowdoin and Brown" would be reaches for someone with 1500 SATs and a 3.5, the message it gives by listing them is that these are REALISTIC reaches for someone with those stats! In my opinion, the schools it lists as matches are probably realistic reaches and the safety schools possible matches. There is no school on the list that I would consider a true safety for someone with those scores.

I tried the same search saying using 1800 SAT scores and a GPA of 3.6. Know what my reach schools were now? Try Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth and HARVARD! Come on folks, Harvard is not a realistic reach for someone with those scores. Matches included Babson, Bates, Boston College and Boston U. I'll buy Boston U and Babson as matches but in my opinion, the other two are realistic reaches, not matches. And my safeties?
Northeastern (seems to turn up on CounselorMatic no matter what your stats are!), Bentley, Clark and Hampshire. Again, more like matches than safeties.

How about someone with a 4.0 GPA in the top 10% of the class with SAT scores of 2100?
No reaches at all! Matches included Harvard and MIT as well as Amherst, Dartmouth, and, for some reason, Worcester Polytech. Safety schools? Yep, Northeastern again, as well as Clark, Babson and Connecticut College. The message: if you have cores of 2100 and a 4.0 GPA no college in the northeast is a "reach" for you! I don't buy it and you shouldn't either.

I also tested the College Board's search engine. Unlike the Princeton Review, the College Board's site asks you to specify the level of selectivity you want (i.e., less than 50% accepted, over 50% accepted, all high school grads accepted.) It does not allow you to enter a specific GPA only to specify the percentage of students accepted within a GPA range. It does allow you to enter your specific SAT scores. Ironically, the College Board hasn't quite caught up with its own "new" SAT as the search engine only lets you list your scores for "math and verbal."

I found the College Board's results a little more realistic. First, they don't try to randomly tell you whether a school is a match, reach or saftey; The results only list schools that fit into the specific categories you've chosen. Thus, for our person with 500 verbal and 500 math scores, seeking a school that admits 50 to 75% of applicants, suggested schools were very realistic: Assumption, Keene State, Sacred Heart, Springfield and the University of New Haven. For a student with 600 verbal and 600 math scores, the suggestions included Clark, Fairfiled, Providence College, Stonehill and Smith. Again, very realistic suggestions that are probably good matches or realistic reaches. What about someone with scores of 700 math and 700 verbal? The search engine recommended both Brandeis and Yale but also Boston U, Fairfield and Smith. However, for all three test subjects I could probably come up with many more suggestions than the College Board's search engine returned.

So, the bottomline? Think of college search engines as a START to your search. They're great at generating names of colleges you may not have heard of but not so good at telling you what your chances at those schools are. There's simply no substitution for doing your own homework and research to gage your chances.

Search Engine Links:

Princeton Review CounselorMatic: http://www.princetonreview.com/college/reserach/advsearch/match.asp

The College Board: http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/index.jsp

CollegeNet: http://snsearch.collegenet.com/cgi-bin/CN/index

Peterson's: www.petersons.com/ugchannel/code/searches/srchCritl.asp?sponsor=1