I’m currently in the early stages of applying to universities in the U.S. as an international student, and I’m a bit overwhelmed. There are so many factors — SAT/ACT, scholarships, deadlines, majors, and even culture!
I’ve been using Google to dig through rankings, student reviews, and financial aid options, but it can still be tricky to know what info is legit and updated.
Any suggestions on what platforms, websites, or tips worked best for you during your college search process?
Each college’s website is the best and most accurate place to get information. But if you’re still trying to build a college list, we found niche a good website for comparing different schools. Some like collegevine, but we found their chancing tool to be way too inaccurate.
The interface is clunky and I’m not sure that it will have filters for things like international financial aid (if that’s relevant for you), but College Navigator has, I think, the best “combinable filters” of any university search tool.
For example, if you want to find schools within a particular undergraduate size, with X major, in these 10 states, with a 75th percentile SAT range above Y, you can do that. Then, once you’ve found schools that work, I’d make a spreadsheet and start adding columns that are relevant to you. As you dig in to schools’ websites and Common Data Sets, you can move schools up, down, and off your list.
I also think AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude will be more and more useful, but learning how to write a useful prompt takes a bit of practice.
To the OP, once you find colleges you like, then check their websites for things like admission rates, costs, how they give aid to international students.
On this site, if you do a match me/chance me thread, perhaps you will get some good suggestions.
An important aspect in applying to colleges will be choosing a selectivity zone suitable for your profile. For guidance in identifying and comparing potential matches, this current analysis provides a Student Selectivity Rank column that may helpful:
If you would like to use this site as a general ranking, note that it offers the advantage of including colleges and universities together, which can be helpful to, in particular, international students who are not especially familiar with the American college landscape. In contrast, U.S. News, for example, does not provide a general ranking.
Most importantly, you need a budget - and then you can figure out schools from there. YOu can ask for help here in providing your stats (GPA, SAT, coursework).
Besides the school websites (they’ll all have info for internationals), you can google the school name + Niche. Niche will give you a description but also has survey data and comments from students plus things like top majors. It’s certainly not official and there’s certainly a lot of bias - but it can give you an idea of selectivity, quality of things like housing and dining, and an overall theme.
Some don’t like the website but I do - I think it’s very useful.
Another useful tool is the annually published Common Data Sets or CDS for every university. Using Purdue as an example, googling “purdue cds” allows one to learn that:
When Purdue evaluates an applicant, it considers course rigor, GPA, and essays as very important while considering class rank, talent/ability, and volunteer work as less important.
The distributions of SAT/ACT section and composite scores, class ranks, GPAs of enrolled first-year students, which are more informative than those crude, widely available 25th-75th-percentile intervals.
The acceptance rates of in-state, out-of-state, international students, early decision applicants, regular decision applicants (need to do some math for this one but the raw data are there). Even the percentage of students who get off the waitlist is included, along with a myriad of other potentially useful information.