College and Career Info

There are number of interesting web sites designed to help students who are in the early exploratory stages of the college search process. Many of them offer articles, career inventories, and useful links to college home pages.

One to visit is Schools in the USA. This site offers a career assessment center, testimonials from students about their choices, and links to over 1,500 colleges.

CollegeData is a comprehensive planning site affiliated with 1st Financial Bank USA that provides articles, a college match service, college profiles, a scholarship finder, links to the Common Application, and other interactive services.

The forty colleges highlighted in Colleges That Change Lives have mounted a web site.

The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) College Opportunities On-Line (COOL) affords a direct link to nearly 7,000 colleges and universities; the site provides information on enrollments, degrees conferred, costs, financial aid, accreditation, and campus crime statistics.

CampusTours.com works with over 800 colleges and universities to promote virtual tours and school materials such as campus maps and college videos; this site has won a number of national awards, including SmartMoney Magazine's "Top Fifty Web Resources."

Campus Visit, Inc., is another organization devoted to making actual-as opposed to virtual-college visits a worthwhile experience. This company publishes books and posts web sites that are essentially guides to selected cities. At present three city guides are available: Philadelphia , Pittsburgh, and Boston .

The College Profiles site offers brief descriptions of thousands of colleges with a variety of classification approaches; an interactive map is a useful feature of the site.

The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) has a very comprehensive web site. This interactive site offers interest survey links, career information, and connections with many colleges and universities. Go to Education Planner to explore.

The Pennsylvania Association of Private School Administrators also has a web site. "Discover Colleges" provides a free information service for private colleges and financial aid information. Visit Discover Colleges .

You might also want to explore careers on the BLS Career Information Page which provides information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor.

Also online is the Occupational Outlook Handbook .

Moreover, the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Education have recently launched a new web site; Career Voyages searchers will find information on high growth, high demand occupations as well as skills and education needed to hold such positions. Career Key is connected with these information sources.

Students interested in engineering should explore the web site of the Junior Engineering Technical Society , JETS.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created an interactive web site, LifeWorks , which enables visitors to the site to explore more than 100 careers.

One more resource is the Military Career Guide ; this site is provided as a public service by combined efforts of all branches of the military and provides "a preservice introduction to the professional opportunities in the U.S. Armed Forces," according to its description.

Peterson's has also developed an interesting site; it asks students to answer some questions about themselves, and then the site's developers send the information to colleges. When a college is interested in a particular candidate, Peterson's will first contact the student to see whether the student wants to hear from that college. The premise is that the decision about which college to attend might be easier if the college came to the student, hence the site's title: CollegesWantYou . Peterson's is attempting to streamline the college search process. Peterson's hosts BestCollegePicks as well; when you reach the site, jump to that category.

Careers and Colleges, a publication periodically received in the College Guidance Office, has a helpful site.

Four other helpful sites are The Princeton Review , CollegeNET , CollegeSurfing , and US News & World Report , which gives access to the Fiske guides as well as the magazine's famous lists of schools.

BrainTrack has compiled a college and career guide that provides career profiles, degree statistics, and wage information for many occupations that require a college degree.

College Admission Profiles enables students and parents to compare schools using online data.

Another interesting way to discover information about colleges is to explore the Common Data Set.  In the words of the creators of the site,  "The Common Data Set (CDS) initiative is a collaborative effort among data providers in the higher education community and publishers as represented by the College Board, Peterson's, and U.S. News & World Report. The combined goal of this collaboration is to improve the quality and accuracy of information provided to all involved in a student's transition into higher education, as well as to reduce the reporting burden on data providers."  Here is an example of the statistics reported by the College of William and Mary. You can find other reports by typing the name of the university, followed by the words "common data set," into the search engine.