Choosing a college is a big decision. Your college choice determines the friends you’ll make and influences where you will live and work afterwards. In order to make the right decision, conduct an honest self-assessment of your interests and goals. Include your non-academic interests in addition to your academic interests.

Begin by ordering catalogs from a wide array of schools. Don’t limit yourself to your top choices. Comparing catalogs from schools you haven’t heard from can help you determine needs and preferences you hadn’t considered in your college selection. You’ll want to consider a number of factors in your search.

First of all, you are not just choosing a college, you are choosing a hometown for four years. Thus, consider the location, climate, and distance from home. Second the size of the school will affect how and with whom you make friends. You may think you’d meet more people at a university compared to a small college, but find that you end up spending time with just the people in your dorm, fraternity, or classes. Certain factors can limit your ability to make friends. For instance, if you choose a school in order to be close to high school friends or a boyfriend or girlfriend, you may fall back on these relationships instead of branching out to meet new friends. Finally, there are the practical considerations of housing, money, faculty, course offerings, technological facilities and the library holdings.

Use the following needs assessment check-list to help you narrow down your college selections

SELECTIVITY

• Mega-selective (you’re an A-student taking tough courses, have an SAT score over 2200 or an ACT score over 30, and a solid extracurricular record)
• Highly selective (you’re in the top 20% of your high school class, and scored above 2000 on the SAT or above 21 on the ACT, and have participated in some extracurriculars)
• Selective (you’re a pretty good student, probably in the top half of your class, looking for a college whose students also did well in high school.

SIZE

• Small (up to 4,000 undergraduate students)
• Medium (4,000 – 10,000 undergraduate students)
• Large (10,000+ undergraduate students)

LIVING SITUATION

• On-campus housing
• Off-campus housing
• Commute from home

ENVIRONMENT

• Rural (includes small towns)
• Suburban
• Urban (includes cities)

REGION OF THE COUNTRY

• New England
• Mid-Atlantic
• Midwest
• South
• Southwest
• West

COST

• Moderate (under $15,000)
• Expensive ($15,000 - $35,000)
• Very expensive ($35,000+)

SPORTS

• NAIA
• Division III
• Division II
• Division I

OTHER FACTORS TO CONSIDER

• Majors available
• Student/faculty ration
• Technological facilities
• Library holdings
• Special programs (i.e. study abroad, internships)
• Academic extracurricular activities
• Non-academic extracurricular activities
• Career office follow-up and initiative
• Job placement percentage
• Public school or private school
• 2-year degree or 4-year degree