The college tour goes online
New websites paint a portrait of college and university life, providing one-stop shopping for prospective students.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 27, 2007 edition
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For those parents and students whose New Year's resolution is to start the search for the right college, some new – and free – tools are coming online to make that task a little bit easier.
The websites – College Portrait (www.voluntarysystem.org) and U-CAN (www.ucan-network.org) – offer essential information to make it easy to compare participating schools. Interested in the professor-student ratio? The racial breakdown on campus? A detailed picture of costs and financial aid? Here's where you can get a glimpse or follow the links to dig deeper.
These sites are one answer to the mounting pressure to make the often-frustrating system of admissions and financial aid easier for families to navigate. Some education advocates hope they will prove to be the first step toward building an even more comprehensive website that would include guidance-counseling components. Students should be empowered to choose for themselves what matters most, they say. And they hope these nonprofit alternatives will help reverse the brand-name frenzy fed by popular rankings such as the annual guide by U.S. News & World Report.
Just over a year ago, the report of the Education Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education sounded the call for more accountability and transparency. College and university groups moved quickly to make the information they already gather more available to the public, aiming to head off potential federal mandates.
"Parents and students ... are trying to make some big, difficult decisions, so the more transparent we are about our business and the outcome of our business, the better it is for everyone," says Charles Reed, chancellor of the California State University system.
All 23 Cal State campuses will be represented on College Portrait, the joint venture of two public university associations, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). "It's important for all of higher education to participate so that we can continue to gain the public's confidence about how we use the public's resources to educate America's future workforce," Mr. Reed says.
College Portrait will offer some innovative features – such as an interactive cost calculator. People have a hard time figuring out the true cost of college, and low-income families often believe college is out of reach, says David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at NASULGC. "We put the calculator in so that by entering a dozen pieces of data, you can [get] a reasonable estimate of what the net cost will be of attending a specific university."
Visitors to the site, which is still in its pilot stages, can see a breakdown of academic progress and graduation rates at each school – not only the percentage that graduate in four years and six years, but also the percentage that are still enrolled in higher education or have graduated from another institution.
Debate over access
Schools that want to be listed on College Portrait also have to agree to post "learning outcomes" data. Various assessments already exist to measure how much students gain in broad areas such as problem-solving and writing skills. But whether those results should be reported publicly is a matter of heated debate in higher education.
Because of the learning-outcomes requirement, the University of California, another public system in the state, has declined to participate.
Only about 300 out of more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the United States use such assessments so far, Mr. Shulenburger says. Schools that sign on to College Portrait will have the next four years to begin tracking the learning-outcomes results before being required to post them.
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