Resources

For Students and Families

Tools

Activities Worksheet
Sheet: Tracking applications
Sheet: College costs
- Add instructions on a separate tab
- Change data so it’s not Anson’s
- Add a few more schools
- Can we connect that data in the list to that in the individual breakdowns so you only input once?

Posts

Financial Aid Overview
How to Read a Financial Aid Award Letter
SAT Overview
Post: Using AI to organize supplemental essays
Missing: Merit aid
Teacher recommendation guide

College Counselors & High Schools

Books

College Counseling for School Counselors

Websites

College Surveys from schoolbuff.com

Tools

Collecting Merit Aid/Scholarship Awards from Seniors

Survey: Merit Aid/Scholarship Awards (Google Sheet)
Merit Aid Survey Request Letter to SHS Families (Google Doc)

The Google Sheet and Doc above were created to solicit merit aid/scholarship outcomes from seniors at Salem High School. Counselors, feel free to leverage these at your own high school, just be sure to customize the copy and contact info accordingly.

Deploying the survey involves sending the spreadsheet to families of college applicants prefaced with the message in the doc to explain why merit aid data is being requested. (Answer: To make future applicants aware of merit aid award opportunities and help them strategize where they might apply based on what they might expect to receive in aid.) Each student/family who receives the survey makes a copy of the sheet, enters their merit aid scholarships, and sends a link to their sheet back. The aid information returned must then be compiled into a single sheet (or other datastore of your choosing) for aggregation and analysis.

Note: I considered using a Google Form for this effort, but the user experience for students and families with a google sheet seemed more streamlined. If you create a form for this task that proves me wrong, please share it!

Publications

Traditional Outlets

Blogs/Newsletters

Data Sets

Common Data Set Repository - College Transitions
Interactive Tables - Big J Educational Consulting

Researching Colleges

Books

The Fiske Guide to Colleges, Edward Fiske, 2025
A compilation of 3-4 page profiles of the top 400+ colleges. My favorite qualitative guide.
Colleges Worth Your Money, Andrew Belasco, 2026
Another set of college profiles emphasizing return on investment and featuring lists of employers and locations where students land after graduation.
Dream School, Jeffrey Selingo, 2025
A guide for finding colleges that advises families to “widen the aperture” of their college search beyond the top 25 and focus instead on institutions that provide better value and fit.

Websites

College Navigator
Run by the federal government. Not the prettiest site and no subjective analysis, but offers good search and filtering tools. (Note that most of the data is from 2023-2024.) If you navigate to the page for a particular school, they have good breakdowns of financial aid and average net price by income bracket which may be of use.
College Scorecard
View U.S. Department of Education data about costs, student debt, graduation rates, admissions test scores and acceptance rates, student body diversity, post-college earnings, and more.
Niche
Another resource with rankings and lots of info. Perhaps most useful is the Reviews section for each school. Take the reviews with a grain of salt (you will definitely find complainers here), but if you read enough of them, you start to see patterns as to what students perceive the strengths and weaknesses of a school to be.
US News & World Report College Rankings
Controversial, take the rankings with a grain of salt, and it can be argued that these rankings are ruining the college industry. BUT they give you a sense of how schools stack up in terms of prestige/difficulty to get into/strength of student population and there’s lots of good info in the school profiles.
College Confidential Forum
Perhaps the biggest online forum for college talk. More parents talking than students and sometimes more noise than you’d like, but there is useful stuff here if you look hard enough for it. Probably easiest to search for particular schools and look for threads relevant to what you’re trying to learn.
Reddit
Search for the Reddit for a particular school. For example, here’s the Reddit for my alma mater: r/williamandmary. It’s usually students talking here (or students answering questions for interested high schoolers), so you can potentially get some inside scoop in these threads. The quality of the conversations varies widely and some school Reddits are much more active than others.
Big Future
Similar info as that found at other sites but with a different / lighter-weight look (the US News site can grind to a halt with their ads and infinite scrolling) and without the rankings. Run by College Board.
Forbes Top Colleges
Another set of college rankings and profiles, this one is more financially oriented (weighs salaries of graduates v. cost of attendance more heavily). Compact profile format with stats up front on average aid, cost, and salaries can be useful.