Welcome to admitted-student season, when many of the same high school seniors who worried that they might not get in anywhere are being courted like celebrities by colleges that accepted them. The tables turn in April, when admissions officers are well aware that the students they want probably got into other similar colleges, too.</p>
<p>Which should be a relief. Except for one tiny problem. After my daughter and her friends were warned that acceptance rates are dropping at the top colleges, they all applied to twice as many colleges as they would have back in the days before everyone started worrying about how likely they were to be rejected.</p>
<p>And as a result, they ended up with a nice problem to have. They were accepted to too many colleges, including ones they?ve never seen. In the end, they can pick only one college. From our town in Northern California, Claire is trying to figure out if she would prefer Bard College to Boston University. Would Lucy like New York University?</p>
<p>So how to choose? The ideal way would be to visit the colleges that sent acceptance letters. But not everyone has the time or money to travel to see multiple campuses before the May 1 deadline for sending a deposit to most colleges.</p>
<p>I wondered if the Internet could help. When my daughter and her friends were trying to identify which colleges to apply to, they gathered information from college Web sites, online ratings sites and college discussion forums.</p>
<p>So now that they had to narrow their choices, was there a different way to glean information online?</p>
<p>For advice, I phoned Beatrice Flair, a college counselor at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, a public charter school that encourages students to aim for the top colleges nationwide.</p>
<p>Ms. Flair was familiar with the problem.</p>
<p>?I had a kid one year who applied to 28 schools and got into most of them,? she said. ?With every school that is Tier 1, there is no way to tell ahead of time if you?re going to get in.?</p>
<p>?So how do you narrow it down from 28 to 1?? I asked. ?Start by looking at the schools? Web sites??</p>
<p>?Many kids have already used the information on those sites to the nth degree, and what more can be there that they don?t already know?? Ms. Flair said. ?Unless there?s a section of specific information for admitted students. That would be a place to go. Also, you might find e-mail addresses for admissions reps and professors. Send them questions. Use their answers to compare schools.?</p>
<p>Another well-known source of information is Collegeconfidential.com, where students and parents compare notes about colleges. Less well known is one of the site?s new sections ? called ?campus visits? ? with hundreds of reports (filed anonymously) that describe everything from atmosphere in the dining hall (?the staff in the cafeteria were very unfriendly,? wrote TheVeganActress of Knox College) to the small details (?little or no air conditioning. Dirty bathrooms,? drummerdude_07 wrote of Dartmouth).</p>
<p>But don?t rely too heavily on one opinion. ?It?s good to communicate with people who have had the opportunity to visit, but at the same time, take their comments with a grain of salt,? Ms. Flair said. Similarly, it?s time to stop worrying about ratings. While a college-ranking site like Usnews.com (where the premium online edition of ?America?s Best Colleges 2007? costs $14.95) may be useful if you?re on a waiting list and want to find out if that college admitted any wait-listed students last year, some counselors say it?s time to stop obsessing over a college?s general ranking.</p>
<p>Michele Hernandez, a college consultant and author of ?A Is for Admission,? (Warner Books 1999), said: ?What does it matter if one school is No. 1 and one is No. 3? You can?t split hairs like that when what matters now is to get beneath the surface and find out which school you?ll really like being at the most. Now is the time to look at the social things, and how?s the parking, all the things that you?ll care about when you get there.?..</p>
<p>Ms. Flair, the college counselor, said students shouldn?t agonize over a decision.</p>
<p>?If they?ve made good choices when they were applying, then they have a lot of good places to choose from,? she said.