<p>The college search and financing is soooo overwhelming! How do you narrow and break it down? It just seems like there are a million schools and I don’t know how to tone it all down.</p>
<p>You start by finding out how much money your family has available for your education, whether your parents will pay for any major or any college/university, whether they will pay for an extra semester or year, how much they expect you to make to contribute toward your expenses, and how they feel about you taking on any student loans. </p>
<p>Until you have a handle on the money, everything else is moot.</p>
<p>There aren’t a million colleges in the USA. There are indeed a few thousand, but most students go to college within a couple hundred miles of home. Within your own state, the number of schools that match your qualifications and budget may be in the single digits.</p>
<p>Stateuniversity.com ranks colleges state by state. Start with the top 20 (first page) for your own and maybe a few neighboring states. The exact ranking isn’t important. What’s important is finding an initial set that matches your qualifications, budget, and personal preferences. You can visit a few of those schools to get a clearer idea of what you really want. Then if you want to look farther afield, you can seek out schools that best match those features.</p>
<p>Of course there are other strategies to break it down. You can use the US news lists to identify a range of 20 or 50 schools that match your stats. Within those schools, identify the ones that meet your budget or aid strategy. If your Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is low, you can focus on schools that meet a high percentage of determined need. If your EFC is higher, but you cannot cover it, then you can focus on schools that offer merit aid to many applicants with your stats. Good information about financial aid (the number of students who get it, average package, etc.) is available on the USNWR site or in each school’s Common Data Set file.</p>
<p>poor/rich … smart/dumb</p>
<p>I believe there is a matrix bounded by family income & your academic ability
If you are poor & smart then you get a lot of opportunities & aid.
If you are Rich and not so smart then cost of attendance will probably be very high.</p>
<p>I’m thinking a reasonable approach is to look at your state school as the entry point.
and then depending on your academic potential or unique ability you reach from there.
Princeton & Harvard provide GREAT assistance… some of the other private schools also give very nice scholarships if you have good grades… so many schools that look expensive are very affordable to good students… but if your a marginal/average student then School is very expensive … and you look at other options like community college or the state school.</p>