Nico is locked inside an unfamiliar high school, taking the ACT cold for five to six hours, so this is as good a time as any for me to share the college planning spreadsheet he teased me about on Instagram a while back. I occasionally get questions about applying to colleges and doing it in an organized manner from parents at school and online whenever I talk about college. While I am happy to help, I want to clarify from the outset that I am not an expert on this. I am, however, pretty great at finding experts, sifting through resources, crowdsourcing, and putting it all together in a mostly helpful pile. I’m good at aggregating data, in other words, and I am happy to share what I have found.
History of the Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet was inspired by devouring Reddit, reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, and reading an obscene number of books on the subject back when Mikey was getting ready to apply to college (he’s a junior in college as of October 2024). This spreadsheet is not my creation (remember, I’m an excellent data aggregator), so I don’t feel good about selling it as many suggested. College planning is expensive enough as it is! Instead, I will share my spreadsheet and all my resources, briefly explaining each. But first, if you are new to college planning or unfamiliar with the culture surrounding college planning and recruitment, let’s talk about setting expectations.
College Planning Coach (a warning)
My husband works for a global company, and part of his benefits include college planning services with a large, respected college coaching organization. We signed up excited to hear what we already knew: our firstborn son was incredible. The best! The brightest! The most talented! The whitest, purest snowflake!
Then, our expectations were set for us with our son on the call. Despite being ranked 3rd in the class with a 4.6+ GPA, a 1480 SAT/34 ACT, 4-year participation in varsity sports, and 4-year involvement in a college symphony, Mikey was told he was an “ordinary, uninspiring applicant” who should consider “mid-tier colleges for his reach schools.” It was agonizing to watch our son (one who already struggled with confidence) slowly deflate over a long, painful phone call.
But you know what? They were right: he was not a top-tier applicant. Spend a minute on A2C Reddit and see what kids need to do these days to stand out on an application. If that is a game you and your child are willing to play, have at it. I pass. It goes against our parenting ethos and has a free-market ick factor that feels dystopian. I will be forever grateful for that phone call with those lousy people! It exposed me to the game I didn’t know we were playing and completely changed the trajectory of our college planning and search. We are more focused on getting our kids to Heaven than Harvard.
Resources: Books
I read around ten books on college planning, college tuition and scholarships, and college success. There are only three that I recommend regularly, and one has a website solid enough that you could skip the book.
- Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges
This is a great place to start if you want a college that offers more than football, Greek life, prestige, and lazy rivers. You could skip the book altogether and use the website. I own the book because I prefer to have a rat’s nest of data surround me in towering piles as I obsessively overthink. - The College Conversation: A Practical Companion for Parents to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher Education
This is the book you want to buy!!! I have bought it more than once because I keep giving away my copies. It inspired my spreadsheet the most and was instrumental in finding the right fit college for my eldest. The book walks you through 13 activities to do with your child as you research colleges, and the spreadsheet is a blend of several of those activities. Do the activities as outlined in the book–they are great! Do not rely solely on the spreadsheet! - The Stressed Years of Their Lives: Helping Your Kid Survive and Thrive During Their College Years
This book is part guide, part memoir, focusing on college student mental health. It was one of the excellent books referenced in The College Conversation (the book I said you have to buy). The internet isn’t big enough to hold all my thoughts on the demands we put on young adults to perform at levels that were not expected of us a short twenty years ago.
Resources: Websites
These are the websites I use most often.
- r/A2C Reddit
This link should have a mental health warning, but it is helpful overall. Most of the kids on this forum want to get into T20 schools and will do anything to achieve that goal. - r/SAT Reddit and r/ACT Reddit
Redditors are intense! Yet again, another mental health warning, but so helpful! Just filter out the intensity and take the tips on study plans, programs, and other resources. - College Data
What I love most about this website is the College Search feature. I use it for the information provided on each college, particularly under the Admissions tab. It gives me all the data I need for my spreadsheet plus a selection factor scale for admission. For some colleges, class rank is everything (Very Important). For others, it’s not (Not Considered). Here is a link to UCLA’s Admission Criteria to see what I mean. Scroll down to “Selection of Students.”- A note about the Admission Rates colleges publish. The Admission Rate of a college usually pops up when you google the college’s name. You will find it on College Data under the Overview tab. Use math sense when you consider that number, please. The lower a college’s admission rate is, the higher in rank they are on lists like US News and World Report, Forbes, and other well known publications. It is in the best interest of a college to get that number as low as possible. Admission rate numbers are a bit of a trap and can be misleading. A school with an 84% acceptance rate is not always easier to get into that a school with a 35% acceptance rate.
- The Newman Guide
This is a niche resource, but if you are looking to send your child to an authentically Catholic college, you need to reference this list. There are over 200 Catholic colleges in the US, but only 12 made this list. - Campus Safety
The Clery Act requires all colleges and universities participating in aid programs to publish campus crime statistics and security policies. The easiest way to access this information is to type out the name of the college followed by “Clery Act.” (example: USC Clery Act) Look for the crime and fire log. Sometimes, it’s right there; sometimes, it’s buried in an infinite scroll of policies and procedures.
Resources: The Spreadsheet
Here is a link to the spreadsheet. It is free for you to enjoy, but if you feel inclined, you can buy me a coffee! You will only have viewer access; in order to use it you first need to make a copy of it. Once you do that, it is yours to use for personal use only. Do not be the person who takes someone’s work product, runs it through Canva, and then sells it as their own.
I hope this helps! If you have any questions, I am happy to answer them or direct you to a source who can!
Thanks for sharing all these resources in one place! We are beginning the process for the third time, but every kid is (wildly) different and every college search reflects that. I have one at a top tier school, one at a lazy river state school with Greek life and football, and the last now looking at schools with niche music programs. I too have a spreadsheet, and I may add some of your columns to mine. A few things I included (and maybe these could be considered preliminary) are the possible majors/programs this school has that my kid would be interested in, and what extracurriculars they might be looking for. For a while my eldest was seriously considering auditioning for marching band in college, but he ended up choosing a school with no marching band at all (he did find a student karate club, though). Non-academic factors are really important to the college experience, too. Good luck to all!
Yes, every kid is so different! My boys are so different, but one thing they have in common is that they can not attend a large, lazy river school with Greek life. They both admit it! Nico says he would get caught up in the social scene and Mikey would be off doing introverted things on his own. Mikey said it best, “You put me in a large school where I am just a number and I will gladly do my own thing and show up on test days.” They are self-aware enough to know that they aren’t ready to jump into that pond as undergrads!
That is why I added the major column on the spreadsheet. The majors they applied under varied on the school. Not every college/university has the major they would like (or maybe that major is impacted), so adjustments had to be made. Nonacademic factors are so important! Culture (which isn’t academic, really) is what tipped both boys in choosing the colleges they did! Nico has yet to be accepted, so we’re praying his first pick happens for him!
What a great resource you put together! While I don’t have children, I have a mentee through Big Brothers Big Sisters, and they’ll be college bound in a couple of years. Their parent doesn’t have any experience navigating the college evaluation, application, and selection process, so this will come in handy to help facilitate the discussion.
I’ll likely add a few columns of criteria (% of student body receiving finaid and % of students doing work study, availability of study abroad programs, student-to-instructor ratio for their chosen program/major, tenured vs adjunct instructor ratio, whether night classes are available).