When we’ve used College Board/Big Futures, we’ve never inputted GPA or SAT scores as part of the criteria for finding schools.
We put in:
Academic majors the child says are ‘maybes’
Location by state(s) & urban/suburban/rural
Size of college wanted
Type of college (4 year, and if a child wanted specialty like HBCU, or Women’s Colleges, etc)
Activities (if they were particularly important)
Each time we’ve run those searches, those parameters have yielded between 50-300 colleges to glance through (depending on the level of specificity).
Usually once we’ve gotten that list, I remove colleges with a graduation rate of less than 70% (this is a completely arbitrary number I’ve come up with…since graduation rates most often correlate to financial ability/resources of students/family/school - I am comfortable with schools that have graduation rates above 70%).
Personally, I also like seeing Pell Grant recipients above 15% at the very least. I want to make sure the schools my children attend don’t only serve the wealthiest students.
The next thing we look at is the diversity on campus. Some of my children have been adamant that diversity is extremely important, some have found that less important. But again, I (arbitrarily) decided any schools with any race/gender over 65% of the school was removed from contention (barring specific interest in an HBCU, PWI or Women’s College).
At this point, we usually have a manageable list and start looking at the schools we have never heard of before that are on the list.
We go to the college websites and start checking out what can be found there. I was surprised by how strong my children’s reactions were to how websites are designed, what information they deemed most important as they research through the website and what stood out to them or not. Some schools were dropped from the list due to not liking the school colors and thinking the school colors were overly represented in the virtual tours and pictures. Some schools dropped from list because the website was poorly arranged and information difficult to find.
But there were schools (unknown going into the process) where we opened the college website and my child(ren) said, “Ooh. Hmmm”. And proceeded to do a deep dive, saying stuff like, “You know I didn’t think of a sea hawk as a mascot but that tour of the sports center with the mascot lifting weights made me laugh and it looks like the people at the school have a pretty great sense of humor!” And, “I could see myself liking the dining options 70-80% each week - that’s good to know”. And, “Oh my gosh, there’s a professor in X department who is doing super interesting research…this school need to go on my list!”
Still hadn’t looked at GPA/Test Scores at this point. Those are literally the last pieces we look at…after looking at the what type of high school course load is the minimum each schools recommends, and what the acceptance rates are. And we look at the SAT/GPA scores less to see any sort of academic fit…those are used solely to figure out if that child is competitive for the non-need based merit aid that is imperative to college selection and affordability.