I created a very elaborate spreadsheet when my kids were searching for engineering colleges. I don’t know how to post an Excel spreadsheet here so I would just list the columns of info that we were tracking. Each family has their own priority on what’s important about the school and how they would make the decision, so the spreadsheet would be different.
For ours, on the left hand columns were all the engineering schools that my kids were interested in. On the top across were the following columns:
School name
City
State
National Rank
Engineering College Rank
Major Rank (the specific major of interest)
Setting (Large City, Small City, Large town, Rural, Suburban, etc)
Size (Very Large, Large, Medium, Small, Very Small)
GPA (average GPA accepted into this school)
SAT (1600) (Top 25% SAT score accepted)
SAT (2400) (Top 25% SAT score accepted)
ACT (Top 25% accepted)
Interest (how interested your child is regarding this school)
CAPPEX chance (% probability of acceptance based on CAPPEX prediction)
Parchment (% probability of acceptance based on Parchment prediction)
Niche (% probability of acceptance based on Niche prediction)
My Change (average of all 3 predictions above)
Acceptance Rate (the actual college acceptance rate)
High School Acceptance Rate (the % applicant from your high school got in based on Naviance data)
ED/RD ratio ((the ratio of acceptance from your high school got in applying ED vs RD based on Naviance data)
Tuition (the cost of attendance per college data)
Financial Aid (the average financial aid given by the college)
Net Price (the expected family contribution based on the college’s net price calculator)
Student Rating (out of 10, based on studentreview.com)
Competitive or Collaborative (out of out of 10, based on various student review websites)
Interview Required (yes, no, or optional, date interviewed)
ED/EA (deadline of early decision or early action)
RD (deadline of regular decision)
Scholarship (deadline if applying school specific scholarships)
Tracking Interests (college needs demonstrated interest or not)
Visited (date visited the campus)
There were other different pages to the spreadsheet. The other pages were tracking the recommendation letters, school reports, essay completion, college application submission dates, scholarship applications, financial and scholarship award, and acceptance results, etc. which my kids were updating themselves.
We started with about 40 schools, visited over two dozens schools after discussed with the high school counselor for input, then narrow down to about 18 schools. With those 18, we filled out the spreadsheets, then took a hard look at the “My Chances” and the “Net Prize” columns, then assign the “interest” ranking, and narrow the list down to about 12 schools.
The dozen of schools were then color coded as “Dream”, “Reach but not impossible”, “Fit & comfortable”, and “Safety”. Further adjustments, perhaps deleting some schools, take some from the “not very interested” pile were necessary until each of the 4 categories has the same amount of schools. This list was shared and discussed with their counselors again to get feedback and suggestions.
Note that both of my kids had completed all their SAT/ACT tests by October of their Junior year so there were final scores to fill out the online chancing websites to derive “My Chances”. They also had very intense but very small number of extra curriculum activities that were a constant for 7 or 8 years, so there were no major changes in the senior year EC. However, some of the chances predicted for the mid-tier schools could still be overly optimistic because college application is such a crab shoot, so make sure do some hard search for the fit and safety schools first. It does take time to enter all the stats and activities to get the online website to spit out some random prediction without considering the essays or passion, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. If the probability is really low, the reality can be only dimer.
The high school stats from Naviance gave a pretty accurate prediction on how one would fare against the rest of the students from the same high school who got accepted over the last 6 years period, and if applying ED have better chances than RD. For example, there were only one or two students got into Brown and Yale from our high school over the years, so even though these are great schools, we put them on the back burner and opt for other Ivies instead.
Also, we made sure that the “Safeties” were schools that my kids would be happy to attend and perhaps can be accepted to the Honors program or get some scholarships. I think we spent more time looking for safeties and fit than the Ivies.
Finally, we look at the scholarship and application deadlines, then arrange the schools in sequence to apply accordingly. My kids put the deadlines onto their Google calendar so they can track it themselves.
For my son who did not want to apply to any ED, he just followed the order and applied to one school a week, with most of the essays drafted by September. He applied to all 12 schools, ended up going to his “safety” because it was the economically sensible choice for him.
For my daughter who wanted to apply ED to her dream school, she cut her list in half, applied to the ones she really liked before the ED decision announcement date (in early-December), figured if she did not get into the ED school, she at least have others in the works, she would hurry up and apply to as many of the second batch as possible. She ended up got into her ED school and proceeded to withdraw all other applications on Christmas Day.
This elaborate spreadsheet sounds crazy, but it did help us track interests with some hard statistics. Kids changes their minds so often that they need different tools to keep them on track.
