CollegeBoard.com, Part I

It's more challenging than ever to get into a good college these days. The good news (and the bad news) is that there's a wealth of information, advice, tools and services just a few clicks away on the Internet. The difficulty with the Internet is that there is sooo much stuff that it's hard to quickly find good, trusted information. Hopefully that's what this blog is all about... pointing you to the good -- and saving you from the bad and the ugly.

I thought I'd start my Internet research by looking at the handful of large, multi-purpose college admission sites. These are the one-stop shops that have information and tools that cut across the whole admissions process, from researching colleges through to financial aid.

One of the biggest and most polished is the College Board site. As you may know the College Board is the company that brings us the SAT (& other) standardized tests, so it's not surprising that this site is skewed toward information and services related to the SAT. But in my initial use of the site the SAT-related content doesn't get in the way of a bunch of other valuable features. As you can see from the title of this post (...Part 1) I'm only going to scratch it's surface today.

CollegeBoard.com has separate areas for students, parents and educators. Within each there are tabs for
- College Board Tests (listed first, of course)
- Plan for College (what to do while in High School)
- Find a College (powerful search features and a deep college data database)
- Apply to College (on line application tools)
- Pay for College (Scholarship search, loan info, aid calculators)

One cool feature is called 'My Organizer' (see part of this screen above). This is a personalized online space where you can keep everything related to your college admission activities. After a quick registration (I signed up in my son's name to get a feel for the student experience -- you can also sign up as a parent), I dove right in and picked 4 schools for my personalized College list. Little does my son know that he's interested in Duke, MIT, Princeton and Stanford ;-). This will be a great starting place for college research when the time comes.

Other things you can accomplish on CollegeBoard.com include:
- Register for the SAT
- Take a free SAT practice test
- Subscribe to the 'official' SAT online prep course
- Get and send your test scores to colleges
- Apply online
- Complete and submit the CSS/Financial aid profile

As promised I'll dig deeper into this site in the future. In the mean time I recommend you check it out if you're actively involved in the college admissions process.

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Why is it so difficult to get into college these days?

Why is it so difficult? Why is it so stressful and does it take so much effort? Why do high schoolers need to start positioning themselves for college as freshmen, or before? It wasn't this hard when I applied to college a hundred years ago. These are things I wondered as I started helping my high school sophomore get prepared for his college application push.

Here's a great article I found in the Washington Post that documents how difficult it has become to get into selective colleges these days. The article describes how many selective schools set records last year for the proportion of applicants they accepted. For example:
- Yale (the most selective): just 8.6%, down from 9.7% last year
- Johns Hopkins: 27%, down from 35%
- Columbia, 9.6%
- Stanford, 11%

Why? As usual, it's the baby boomers' fault (so it turns out I'm partly to blame!). For one, we're all interested in getting our kids into the best schools possible. This means everyone is aiming higher than in the past. And there are a bunch more high school grads (the baby boom echo) that are competing for a relatively fixed number of openings. Here's a study (graph above) by WICHE that shows the dramatic growth in HS grads over the past decade and how demand for college will remain high into the future for as long as you and I are concerned.

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