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April 15, 2001

College Prep Sites: Your Online Guidance Counselors

By Lisa Lebduska

From virtual campus tours to crash courses on the SAT, college prep sites offer a range of search tools and advice for students, parents, and counselors.

When disco was king, choosing a college meant flipping through a Peterson's guide to appraise your SAT scores, having a brief chat with an older sibling or guidance counselor, and packing an army trunk. Since then, the dance floor has grown complicated, college offerings have mushroomed, and the financial investment for higher education is infinitely greater.

College prep sites have both added to and simplified the complexities of researching college. The sites reviewed here offer a range of information about selecting, applying to, and financing college. All speak directly to students and their concerns, with a few also targeting parents and guidance counselors. Nearly all sites include universities, four-year colleges, and community colleges in their searches. These sites are especially valuable as aids to coach students through the application process-from declaring a "first choice," to finding scholarship information, to how to write a personal statement. Some go beyond college and provide insights into choosing majors and careers, as well.

Just under 30 percent of college-bound students take advantage of online applications, a key feature of many of these sites. College admissions officers encourage online applications because of their efficiency, and 75 percent of U.S. colleges and universities accept them-with a few even making them a requirement. Admissions officers already anticipate a future where all applications will come through the Web.

Online application is only one of many helpful features of these sites. Whether students take advantage of that option now or in the future, college prep sites are valuable information resources. Taken together, these sites model the questions students need to ask of the colleges to which they apply and of themselves.

Protecting Your Privacy Online

College-bound students are indeed a marketing niche-which is apparent at most of these sites, from articles with advice on buying a cell phone to the schools themselves vying for student attention. Though most sites have clearly worded privacy statements, be aware that data submitted when registering for special site features may be available to affiliates or vendors. Some sites, as indicated on the chart on page 14, belong to TRUSTe, a privacy protection organization committed to protecting visitors' personal information.

The Subject of Difference

Although our primary focus here is on what these sites offer for college-bound seniors, we also looked at how these sites address the subject of difference-learning differences, physical differences, or cultural ones. Some sites offer information and advice to international students, while others allow "disabilities" as a search criterion to identify desirable schools. We hope that sites continue to expand their search criteria to meet the diverse student populations investigating which colleges are right for them.