Website Spotlight: College Admissions Resources

Anxiety runs high during college admissions season and where to apply for college. But have no fear because picking a college is nothing like it was 30 years ago. Today there are many more colleges and universities to choose from– close to 4,700 - and technology is now here to help.

Even though finding a college isn’t an exact science, due to the rise in social media and the ability to analyze the vast amounts of data we put online, the class of 2015 has many more tools at their disposal to use.

While there is no “one size fits all” search tool for college, here five websites that can help you – and your kids – plan and prepare to make a good college impression and decision.

Admittedly

Every family preparing to send their child to college deserves access to the same college prep tools usually reserved for the top-paying clientele. Admittedly has it. It was founded by a former director of an elite test-prep company and Admittedly is the ultimate, free college advisory platform that uses OKCupid-like algorithms to match students to their ideal schools. It also includes an innovative college prep curriculum to help perfect the college application to land a dream school.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has recently launched its “University Finder,” which identifies which colleges are popular with which companies. It pulls data from its 313 million profiles to find out which schools and degrees translate into jobs at certain companies.

Parchment.com

Parchment.com, a company that provides an electronic transcript exchange for students, can also help predict chances of getting admitted into a certain school. Students that agree to share information from their transcript with the site including grades, which colleges they were accepted and where they chose to attend, is used to predict another students chances of getting in to a certain school. Additionally the site suggests other school options and has information about whether most students preferred one college over another.

StatFuse

StatFuse provides students with instant results showing them their chances of admission to colleges across the nation based entirely on data released by 1,200 popular universities. Factors include average grades and test scores of student accepted.

Noodle

Noodle’s College Report Card  is a tool that allows college applicants to compare schools based on metrics that include, educational quality, outcomes, environment, influence, and selectivity.