5 Crucial Items Missing from Your College Comparison Spreadsheet

female using college comparison spreadsheet on a laptop

female using college comparison spreadsheet on a laptopA college comparison spreadsheet is really the most effective way to narrow your list of colleges you want to actually apply to. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s pretty useful when trying to make the final decision on which to attend as well. It’s just that I think that by putting in a little spreadsheet grease at the beginning of the process will provide you with much more affordable choices at the end of the process. The key is to make sure that your college comparison spreadsheet contains these 5 often overlooked pieces of information that will give you some idea of how much you’ll pay for college.

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Why My Spreadsheets Don’t Include the Coaches’ Email Addresses

cat looking at laptop to find college coaches email addresses

cat looking at laptop to find college coaches email addressesMy College Athletic Spreadsheets do not include any coaches’ information. No email addresses for baseball coaches or phone numbers for softball coaches. I occasionally get requests to include the coaches’ email addresses but I have no intention of doing so. Why? Because athletes serious about getting recruited to play in college aren’t going to spam every college coach in their sport.

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4 Simple Tips to Organize the Recruiting Process

4 Simple Tips to Organize the Recruiting Process

Athlete using smart phone for 4 Tips to Organize Your College Recruiting ProcessCollege athletic recruiting is a process of narrowing down school choices while collecting increasingly detailed information about those choices and not losing track of where you are during the process. Piece of cake-right! The problem is that athletes won’t always be at the same stage in the recruiting process for every college they’re considering. One school may be at the “received a mass email flyer for a summer camp” stage while another is at the “scheduling an official visit” stage. So how do you keep track of everything? Here are four ways to organize the recruiting process.

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7 Useful Ways to Compare Colleges

couple sitting on sofa reading about the 7 ways to compare collegesIf you have kids old enough for you to be thinking about the college admissions process and how you’ll pay for it, you also need to be thinking about how you’re going to compare colleges. Because the fact is that you’re going to be comparing lots of colleges, the sooner the better. You’re going to compare colleges when you decide which colleges to visit, which admissions reps to talk to at the college fair, which colleges to apply to, and which one to ultimately attend. So take this opportunity to consider the various ways you can actually compare colleges and their relative worth to your family’s situation.

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How to Find Merit Scholarships: Follow the Money, Part 2

(Part 1 showed how to identify colleges that are likely sources of merit money.)

Slug following the money to find merit scholarshipsNow that you know who has the money, you need to target those schools more likely to be giving it away. I do this by looking at information on institutional grants. This is money the school is giving the student and is usually the largest single source of financial aid for an individual student at private schools. Since IPEDS doesn’t require the school to distinguish between need and merit based grants, I also look at the percentage of freshman who receive the institutional grants.

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How to Find Merit Scholarships: Follow the Money

Man-searching-on-the-beach-to find merit scholarshipsThere are 1,586 public and not-for-profit colleges with 500 or more full-time undergraduates.  Which of them are likely to give you merit scholarships? Unfortunately, there’s really no one right way to search for such colleges. After all, the college that provides a generous amount of merit scholarship to one student will deny it to another.

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Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Printing in Excel

Blackboard with lesson introduction to printing in excelDespite our best attempts to avoid printing information that we can access from our computers or smart devices, there’s going to be a time when you’ll need, or more likely someone else needs, to print out data from your Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, in this lesson I’ll cover the basics of what you need to know to start printing in Excel.

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Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Calculating Data in Excel

Lesson title introducation to calculating data in ExcelSooner or later while you’re looking at the data for a specific college, you’re going to wonder if a certain number is a good thing or a bad thing? It’s at this point you realize it would be good to know the average SAT scores for the schools you’re looking at. Or maybe what are the highest and lowest graduation rates. It would help you put an individual school’s number in context. So this week, I’m going to do an introduction to calculating data in Excel.

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Creating College Lists 101: Introduction to Formatting Data in Excel

Lesson on formatting data in Excel

Introduction to formatting data in ExcelI’m going to take a break from showing you how to copy data so that I can go over some of the ways of formatting data in Excel–including by copying. Excel provides more ways to format data than any one person could ever need. So I want to begin by showing some basic formatting options that I use frequently when creating my college lists.

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