College search 2.0

So my understanding of how teenagers have looked for prospective colleges is rather dated. By about 40 years. But my interest in technology is fairly up to date*. So it came as fascinating but not a total shock how Alice is looking for schools. Among other, more traditional methods, she is using a social media site to look at colleges. The site is called College Prowler, and it’s pretty cool.

She can put in her gradepoint, subject interests, regional choices and other information and get matched with schools. Each profile includes her probability of acceptance, and probability of match to her interests. And stable information like details of the school, a link to their website, contact info, some pictures, and messages from students. And, each page offers grades for about 15 features of each school. So she can quickly see how big athletics, academics and greek life are at a glance.

Fun. And cool.

Sure beats combing through boring text-only guides that we had in the 1970s. Big compendia of schools listed alphabetically, meaning that once you found the U’s you still had to wade through pages to find a specific University of… of interest.

Of course it’s not the only way she’s learning about schools. She’s still going to college fairs, talking to people, has a few early favorites (including Wisconsin and Maryland, and including a few schools whose costs have given me chest pains). But for this early stage, it’s great that she has something fun and interactive to explore.

~ by modelmom on October 8, 2009.