“One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”
Curated Resources
Must Read/Listen To Books
These are the three most important books for parents to read or listen to to help understand and cope with this process.
Who Gets In and Why:
A Year Inside College Admissions
Jeffery Selingo
The Truth about College Admission:
A Family Guide
2nd Edition
Brennan Barnard and Rick Clark
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic - and What We Can Do About It
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
(Especially important for moms)
Aim High Educational Consulting Data Resources
Historical Admissions Rates
Times have changed and the guidance of a consultant is a wise choice. (Dad, this is especially for you. Admissions is not as straightforward as when you went to college. Admission acceptance rates at selective schools have decreased substantially since 1990, and SAT/ACT scores have risen.)
Early Decision (ED) and Early Acceptance (EA) Admission Rates Compared to Overall Admission Rate For Selected Colleges and Universities
This topic is complex and nuanced - there is no simple answer to what your strategy should be.
Best College Rankings
Colleges and universities are complex. Humans are complex. Neither can be summarized well by a single number. Plus, schools change over time.
Pay attention to data and school-student fit on these dimensions: Academics, Social, and Affordability.
To understand our hesitation on any dependence on rankings, consider who is served by rankings. First and foremost, the company or organization providing the rankings. Secondarily, some colleges and universities.
Best College Guidebooks
The Best 389 Colleges by The Princeton Review
Fiske Guide to Colleges by Edward Fiske
Colleges Worth Your Money by Andrew Belasco, Dave Bergman & Michael Trivette
Great overviews, but limited numbers of schools covered. Most high school counseling offices or libraries, along with public libraries will have copies of these.
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Consider this: "Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Retweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it.
And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force (my emphasis added), like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world." from "Value Capture" by C. Thi Nguyen in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2023 (pre-print)
Additional Resources
Government Websites
FAFSA - Governmental portal for financial aid applications for most schools
Federal Student Aid Simulator (Use this to estimate the outcome of FAFSA)
College Navigator (Ugly but lots of data. US Dept. of Education IPEDS database. Lags about 2 years. Many online resources use this data.)
Application Websites
CommonApp.org - Over 1,000 colleges, most used
ApplyTexas.org - Ummm… Texas mostly!
CoalitionApplication.org - Many highly selective schools
CommonBlackCollegeApp.com - Historically black colleges (HBUs)
University of California Application - 9 University of California schools
Financial Application Websites
CSS Profile - College Board’s application used by many highly selective colleges and a few others
FAFSA - Governmental portal for financial aid applications for most schools
College Search Websites
CollegeResults.org - IPEDS data but allows side by side comparisons between colleges
CollegeData.com - Fairly complete data mostly from Common Data Set. For merit aid info, see the Financials section of a college, then scroll down to “Average Award” for FRESHMAN.
Scholarship Search Websites (use caution in scholarship searches - there are scams)
GoingMerry.com
FastWeb.com
FinAid.org
Important Spreadsheets / Data Sources
Return of Investment (ROI) by College - Georgetown University
Common Data Set - At your search engine prompt type in the college name and then “common data set”.
Example: Yale common data set
Important Artificial Intelligence (AI) Resources
Co-Ingelligence: Living and Working with AI (2024) by Ethan Mollick - An important book on AI for anyone nearing their college years. Warning, there are some quoted vulgarities and very brief discussion of sexually related topics. Available both in audio or printed versions.
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (2020) by Brian Christian - A great book on the underpinnings of AI, especially Large Language Models (LLM). Available both in audio or printed versions.