Hi everyone,
We’re editors with the San Francisco Chronicle’s California College Guide.
(Why are we posting here? The Chronicle has partnered with College Confidential to bring the information from our California College Guide to this platform. We’re looking to hear more about how people are searching for colleges in California, and what kinds of information and tools are the most important to you.)
We’ve been doing some reporting recently on what counselors say are the most common factors right now guiding families on which colleges to research and visit, how that has changed over time, and which tools are essential to this process.
But we’d like to hear your thoughts (and to be clear, this is just for discussion; we won’t publish any of the commenting here in our articles or guides.)
What are the tools you’re using to research schools and why? Where do they fall short? What kinds of information have been the hardest to find, and how have you dealt with that?
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The two tools I found most helpful were 1) College Navigator and 2) a ton of time with CDS files and Google Sheets.
The thing that would have been most useful would have been a database of all CDS data that I could use to run custom queries, kind of like what College Navigator allows, but with more granular data. For example, if I wanted to filter for all schools with an SAT over X, but only if more than 30% of the students had submitted an SAT score, and only if they have between, say, 4,000 and 9,000 undergrads, there’s not a great way to do that. Google Sheets lets you do that, but currently you have to gather and input all of the data yourself, which is so dumb considering the point of the Common Data Set is that the data is in a structured format.
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Thanks for responding! Curious if you created your own custom sheet or worked off a template or something else — I know some parents may circulate their own spreadsheets among friends or on Facebook etc.
I’m pretty particular about my spreadsheets, lol, so I made my own. It had two kinds of columns — raw data (pulled from the CDS, logging the various data that I cared about), and “derived” columns (used the raw data to create calculations I could use for filtering and sorting). For a pedestrian example of a “derived” value, “Admit %” (using the raw applied count and the raw admitted count). For a more involved derived value, “Schools with a higher women’s draw rate than men’s draw rate” (which used several different columns and, in fact, other derived columns as well).
It was a very useful spreadsheet, but every time I used it I was kind of mad that there wasn’t a more universally accessible dataset that others could benefit from. And, also, the knowledge that my data was incomplete, reflecting just the schools I had entered. And, also, the knowledge that in a year there’d be a whole host of new CDS files, and my dataset would be out of date.
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Both I and my kids used College Data and Niche extensively. A lot of people make their own spreadsheets with their own criteria.
We made spreadsheets unique to each of our sons using the Common Data sets, Princeton Review Gourmand Report of Undergraduate Programs, US News rankings, FIRE ratings (free speech), QS World University Rankings, and Times Higher Education rankings. The categories featured on the spreadsheets include factors most important to our sons and to us as parents. We also rank soecific academic programs/majors within the schools. For us, we like to look at endowment per student, undergrad teaching, ROI rankings, friendliness of students, first year retention rates, student/teacher ratio. Our sons wanted categories like FIRE rating, proximity to city life, study abroad programs, dorm/dining quality, quarters vs semesters, career counseling…
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I grabbed all the CDS info from College Navigator and dumped it all in a big google sheet. That didn’t take very long (although you have to go to several different College Navigator pages to get all the different types of data). Then at least I had data for all colleges for that specific year.
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Would suggest that high school students looking into UCs take a look at Freshman admission by discipline | University of California to get an idea of which campuses and majors are realistic. To recalculate HS GPA for UC purposes, a handy calculator can be found at GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub (the linked UC web page uses the weighted-capped version). For college students looking to transfer to UCs, take a look at Transfers by major | University of California
For CSUs, whether a campus or major is impacted (i.e. competitive admission, rather than admission at the CSU baseline of 2.5 HS GPA for California residents) can be found at Access and Impaction at the CSU | CSU . Where the campus or major is impacted, individual campus web sites may or may not have more information. For example, SJSU shows prior year thresholds at Freshmen Impaction Results | Admissions , but some other CSUs like SDSU and CSULB show much less information. CSU recalculates HS GPA similar to the UC weighted-capped version, except that a semester college course counts as two courses with two grades.