Applying to college can often feel like talking to your spouse.
Why can’t you just tell me what you want? I’m not a mind-reader and I don’t really want to guess what you are thinking.
If that exchange sounds familiar, you’re in luck. Well, at least you are in luck with respect to your college application. See, colleges self-report all kinds of interesting data, including the characteristics of target students on the Common Data Set. The Common Data Set represents a collaborative effort among the CollegeBoard, Peterson’s and US News and World Report (didn’t you wonder how they gather all that information they use in rankings?) to accumulate and present information systematically and uniformly.
Although you can pay a fee and access the publishers’ rankings, you can often get the data for free without doing much work. Simply enter “Common Data Set” and the school’s name in your search engine. Sometimes you’ll also need to include the school’s “institutional assessment” or “institutional research” department as search terms. Once you find the school’s Common Data Set, you will learn what the school’s admission department deems important.
Not every school posts its Common Data Set online. However, after you look at a few of the schools that do, you will soon realize that each school reports the exact same information in the exact same format.
For example, you could quickly learn that Virginia Tech doesn’t even consider class rank during admissions while its in-state rival University of Virginia thinks class rank is very important. If your prospective collegiate is a good student, but not at the top of her class, the Common Data Set suggests that she has a better admissions chance at Virginia Tech than University of Virginia.
Use this information to establish your pool of potential schools. Now if they’d only create a Common Data Set for your spouse you would never have to mind-read again.
