College shopping is among the biggest challenges that a family can face in education and yet can be the most rewarding. All of those decisions that began with the first child care provider (if one could do that) through the sequence of later schooling is topped off by a decision about college. It may be the last educational decision in which parents participate. That inevitability is another reason to pull in as much information into the college search as possible.
This month, I’m sharing some resources for you to consider in a new series I’m calling “5 Key Takeaways”. This first version of the series will focus on college shopping. The takeaways I’m offering are the following:
- Typical national college ranking leaves out other valuable perspectives
- When looking at other forms of college ranking, one should look at inputs and outputs
- One primary output to look at is one’s return on investment
- A second primary output is the concept of social mobility
- We should not let quantitative rankings overrun or overshadow individual experience
In the Youtube video I run through those takeaways and share the following resources:
- Georgetown’s ranking of colleges based on a return on investment
- Washington Monthly’s ranking of colleges based on social mobility
- The US Department of Education’s online database of colleges called, “College Scorecard”
- Views on the social mobility of HBCUs authored by the United Negro College Fund
The primary goal for providing these resources is to de-emphasize the prestige-based rankings that tend to dominate our searches. I hope these perspectives add to your to family conversations.
