I subscribe to a list serve that is popular with high school and independent college counselors. I’m always amused when a counselor posts a plea for help in assembling a list of great colleges and universities for students who often possess eclectic taste.
I’ve seen requests like this: I am helping a student, who is interested in architectural engineering and blacksmithing and the school must be in an urban area in the Northeast. He also wants to attend a college that has an excellent choral group and serves vegan food in the cafeteria.
Okay, most of the requests aren’t that odd, but kids can be pretty particular about what they want — or what they think they want.
One of the things that I’ve discovered since I’ve begun blogging about college is that students aren’t sure where to look for colleges beyond the most obvious name brands or their own state institutions. And that’s why I’m sharing a wonderful tool that can direct teenagers to colleges that might be worthy candidates regardless of where they are located. I’d suggest that teenagers and parents try using the federal College Navigator.
With the College Navigator, you can search for schools with such criteria as state, region, colleges major and public and private institutions. You can also hunt for schools by directing the search engine to find colleges within so many miles from your home.
To demonstrate what the College Navigator can do, I instructed it to find all the private and public colleges and universities in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and the other Southern states that offer education degrees. The search engine instantly produced a list of 379 schools — 230 private and 149 public institutions. I could have clicked on the link to any of these schools and discovered a load of information about each of them.
If you want to expand your college list or just get started, I’d suggest beginning at College Navigator.