useful college admissions website

If you don't already know about www.collegedata.com, it is worth checking out. It offers good basic information about college admissions and financial aid but has also added a new section called the College Admissions Tracker which is not something you'll find on other college admission information websites.

The College Admissions Tracker lets you look up admissions statistics on various colleges around the country in order to help a student gauge his/her chances of admission to a particular institution. Looking at charts of GPAs and test scores, you can see whether a student has been admitted, denied or wait-listed.

Students are always longing to know if their grades and test scores are "good enough" to get in somewhere, and unfortunately guidebooks and websites don't usually offer enough clear info to guide a student well. Of course no resource can give the complete, true picture since the admissions process is a complex one, and at many institutions there are a number of other factors besides grades and test scores that bear on the decision. However, with the significant lack of resources that students have in trying to make even a rough assessment of their chances, the College Admissions Tracker might be helpful to some.

But I also just want everyone to be aware of the limitations of this resource. First, not all colleges are in the system. Second, there are different amounts of information on the institutions that do exist - some have very little to offer. From my limited use of the resource, it seems like the more competitive the institution, the more information exists. Third, the admissions data that does exist is sometimes incomplete. Lastly, there is no oversight to the information that is presented: various students who have been using this website to track their application process have entered this data - not the colleges - so do not trust everything you see. Still, despite these caveats, this resource might still prove useful to some students.