Common Data Sets

I wish more high school students knew about the Common Data Set. The Common Data Set (CDS) is a form that many—though not all—colleges use to report information about the college. It’s where the College Board, US News, and Peterson’s all get their data about colleges. When you’re ready to do a “deep dive” to get to know a college, their CDS is one place where you look. How do you find a school’s CDS? Just Google “[name of college] common data set.” For example, here is a link to Austin College’s 2022-2023 CDS.

Most high school students looking for data are going straight to section C: “FIRST-TIME, FIRST-YEAR ADMISSION.” Find out exactly how many people applied to the college, how many were accepted, and how many enrolled. Find out if they have a waiting list, how many people were offered wait list spots, and how many of the people on the list were ultimately admitted. Wondering how many foreign language credits they require? How many science credits they recommend? You can find out in section C of the CDS. Does the school consider demonstrated interest? How about legacy status? or first-get status? They’ll tell you in the CDS. They’ll also tell you how important things like class rank and interviews are to them. You can find out what their SAT and ACT midranges were to compare your scores (if you have them). Pretty much any piece of information you would like to know about their admission process is in the CDS.

But if you only look at section C for admission data, there’s a lot you’ll miss that may be important to you.

Section B: ENROLLMENT AND PERSISTENCE. This section tells you how many students there are, broken down by gender, ethnicity, and type of degree. It will tell you what their graduation has has been over four, five, and six years.

Section E: ACADEMIC OFFERINGS AND POLICIES. Here’s where you find out if the college offers double majors, study abroad, internships, and student-designed majors, and other programs. It will also tell you if there are subjects where all students must take at least one class.

Section F: STUDENT LIFE. This section tells you what kinds of housing are available on campus (like coed housing, special housing for the disabled, theme housing), what percentage of students are in sororities or fraternities, what percentage of students live off campus, if the school offers ROTC, and what kinds of clubs and organizations are on campus.

Section G: ANNUAL EXPENSES. Tuition, fees, and living costs are found here. Notice there’s a place for schools to check if the costs are not the same for each year. For example, Austin College’s tuition and fees are $475 more for first-year students than returning students.

Section H: FINANCIAL AID. You can look through the financial aid section, and I encourage you to. But remember that it tells you nothing about the financial aid that you will receive. You only find that out once you apply and are accepted.

Section G: INSTRUCTIONAL FACULTY AND CLASS SIZE. Here you can find out how many faculty members they have, how many of them belong to minority groups, and how many of them have doctorate degrees. You can see what their overall student faculty ratio is, and see a sampling of class sizes.

Section J: DISCIPLINES. This section tells you what majors they offer, and what percentage of students graduate with degrees in the majors. So you can see what’s offered and also what’s popular.

That’s a lot of detailed information.

A few things to remember. Not all colleges participate in the Common Data Set , and not all of them answer each question. So while it’s very standardized, it’s not perfectly standardized. Also, different schools publish their CDS in different ways. Most have it as a downloadable PDF. Some a downloadable Excel file. And some have it formatted into their web site and not as a downloadable file at all. But you’ll still get plenty of information from any CDS you can find.

Combing through the CDS of every school you’re looking at might be too time-consuming. It’s fine to begin with each sites like BigFuture, Forbes, US News, and the Fiske Guide. But once you’re seriously considering a school—once it’s in your top 15 or 20—then you should take the time to look through the CDS. What all does the document tell you about the school? What questions does it leave unanswered? These are really important, and they’re (usually)waiting right there for you online.

 Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   What to think of college rankings

   Finding the right college can be like finding the right bottle of wine

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

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Finding the right college can be like finding the right bottle of wine

Last night I was supposed to give this talk to a local PTO, but instead I got Covid and am in isolation. I’m publishing it here for them and any other parent. And since the wine here is only metaphorical wine, anyone is welcome to enjoy.

For at least the next few minutes, go back to the beginning. Pretend you know nothing about colleges or the college admission search. For just a few minutes, feel that overwhelming feeling of knowing nothing. You probably know more than nothing; you may already know a lot. But I’ve found that even ambitious, well-informed high school students are often overwhelmed with the search, and somethimes it just helps to go back to the beginning and make sure you’re thinking it all through.

Depending on how you count, there are four to six thousand colleges and universities in the US. Even if you want to narrow it down to “the best” schools, the US News rankings (which aren’t actually an objective measurement of the best) include over 1,400 schools. There are just a lot of choices, and if you don’t know what you’re really looking for, it’s overwhelming. So as a way to think about that overwhelming range of choices, I’d like you to think about another one, something completely different.

Imagine you’re going to buy some wine at a wine shop. So there you are looking for wine, and you know little about wine. Maybe you know nothing about wine. You certainly don’t know what you like. You know some of those bottles are better suited to your taste than others, but you don’t know which ones.

Say you’re in a hurry. You need to pick up one or two bottles of wine for tonight. You’ve been invited to a dinner party and asked to bring wine. But you don’t know anything about wine. A good wine shop will have hundreds of different wines to choose from. How do you choose? 

Expert advice. You can ask for advice from a store employee and hope it’s good advice. But it’s difficult for them to give you good advice if you can’t tell them anything about what you like. The most you can hope for is that they’ll tell you what some of their more popular wines are, or maybe some wines that are good places for beginners. But they have no real way of helping you find something you’ll like in a hurry. 

Ratings and rankings. There are magazines and websites devoted to giving scores and ratings for wine. Many wine shops will highlight the highly rated wines in their store. If you go with something that was rated highly by the Wine Advocate, then you know you’re getting a wine that somebody likes, though you may end up not liking it. You may have completely different taste than the reviewers.

Pictures. Like a lot of people, you can choose a bottle based on how much you like the label. Wine producers pay a lot of attention to their labels and make them as appealing as possible. You can’t judge a wine by its label any more than you can judge a book by its cover, but both will tell you a little it about what’s inside. But not much. To choose based on the label is essentially to rely on advertising and design, not the wine itself. 

Experience. You can go with what you know, however limited that is, by grabbing a bottle that looks familiar. Maybe you see a bottle that you recognize from a restaurant wine list or a friend’s house, and you go with that. Maybe you had a glass of it once and thought it was ok, so you go with that.  

Proximity. Why go looking through all the bins if you don’t know anything about them? Instead, just pick one that’s featured up front and get out of there.

Any of these methods for choosing a wine may work out. Most people in this situation will use a combination of several. But even choosing a wine with a good score…that the store employee recommends…with a great label…can still end up being something you hate. You’re kind of relying on luck that the bottle you pick, however you pick it, will be one that you enjoy. You haven’t got time to figure it out.

A lot of high school seniors pick a college the same way. For a variety of reasons, they haven’t given college a lot of thought or attention before 12th grade. They haven’t thought about what they want or need, just what’s “good.” And then they only have a few months to go through the application process. Seniors who want to pick colleges to apply to when they haven’t done a lot of research use the same methods as someone buying wine in a hurry without much research. 

Advice. There are plenty of people out there willing to give college advice (including me). But the less they know about you, what you want, and what you need, the less useful that advice can be. 

Ratings and rankings. There’s US News and World Report. And Niche. And Forbes. Or you can Google “Best college for ____” and see what you get. I’m not as anti-ranking as many other college admission advisors, but I know that their use is pretty limited. The ranking site’s criteria are not your criteria.

Pictures. Colleges will send you so many pictures: smiling students wearing backpacks walking across campus; crowds at sporting events; extremely small classes held outside. The schools send these pictures because they know they work—many students make very large, expensive, emotional decisions based in some part on the images that marketers send out.

What they’ve heard of. The reason I hear the most often for a student being interested in a particular college is because “I heard it’s a good school.” They can rarely tell me where they heard it.

Proximity. You can narrow down your choices to ones that are nearby. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there are a number of great universities here in town. But it’s a limitation you would only want to impose for reasons beyond limiting the number of colleges you have to think about.

Like with wine, these methods may work. Or they may not. It takes some luck. But there’s another way.

If you’re not necessarily in a hurry to get wine for immediate use, you have time to learn what you like and what works for you. You’ve got time to find the wines that are good for you, not good for the store employee, the wine magazines, or the label designers. To do this takes time and experimentation. If you’re just beginning, try the mixed case method recommended by wine critic Eric Asimov.

“The best way to start out, once you identify a good shop, is to ask for a mixed case of wine. Tell the merchant your budget and parameters, say, half white, half red, with two sparkling wines, or a few rosés. Or, if a case is too much of an investment, just get a bottle or two at a time. As you drink the wines, note which ones you like and which ones you do not. Keep in mind that you can learn something from every bottle as you begin to identify your personal taste.

When you finish, go back to the merchant with your notes, and ask for another mixed case with selections based on your reactions to the first set. Your learning journey has begun.” 

With time, you can use this method to experiment and refine. You can figure out what works for you, which may not be what you would have predicted before you began paying attention. You can get advice, but the advice based on your preferences and, more important, your actual experience. The mixed-case approach takes time and upfront investment, but it’s going to get you to a point where you know what you want and where to find it. It’s going to get you to a point where when you walk into a wine store you know what to do and how to get good results.

If you’re a high school student now, in the 9th-11th grade, you have time for a similar approach to college. Begin with a (metaphorical) mixed case. Look at some large public universities, some mid-sized research schools, some smaller liberal arts college. Check out some of the more unique and “quirky” colleges that are out there. Pay attention and take notes as you learn about schools that you may not have heard of. Then use that information to find more of what you’re looking for.

This is essentially what I do with the students I work with. After a few casual meetings getting to know them, I recommend a bunch of colleges to check out. It’s a mixed case, but larger—usually 30-50 colleges to begin with. I ask them to take some time—from several weeks to several months to almost a year, depending on their grade—to get to know those schools and to take notes on what they find appealing about them. Then from there we add and subtract more schools based on their research until we get it down to around 12 schools for applications in the fall of their senior year. The list we make is balanced, and it’s tailored to them.

Even before we get to that point, though, we’ll do a “blind tasting.” I will give them a chart with descriptions and lots of stats for four to six colleges, but I don’t tell them the names of the colleges. That way the students can’t be swayed by the reputations of the colleges and need to look at them more objectively. We walk through the charts for each school, and I pay close attention to what kinds of things really stand out to them. Some really pay attention to student-faculty ratio, and others don’t care about that. Some are more interested in student diversity than others. Some want to know that their chosen major is a popular one, and some look for schools with a wide mix of popular majors. This exercise helps me get a sense of what they like and what’s important to them before I begin recommending anything.

Here’s a generic mixed case to begin with. 12 schools total: three big public universities, three private research schools, three small liberal arts colleges, and three quirky schools. For any of these categories, I could easily choose 30 more. But these will work. Spend some time figuring out which ones you like, and why. It’s not important right now if you think you might apply to any of them. The point is to get a sense of what you’re looking for, and why. Use Niche, Big Future, Fiske, and the college websites. Then, start searching for colleges with similar traits that you’re looking for. Also, your research can help you find similar colleges. The Fiske guide lists overlapping schools for any in the guide, and Niche also lists similar colleges.

Colorado State University. Fort Collins, CO

University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, AL

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Madison, WI

Case Western Reserve University. Cleveland, OH

Duke University. Durham, NC

Rice University. Houston, TX

Occidental College. Los Angeles, CA

Champlain College. Burlington, VT

Knox College. Galesburg, IL

Cooper Union. New York, NY

Colorado College. Colorado Springs, CO

Warren Wilson College. Asheville, NC

Let me give a warning about choosing a college based on your intended major. If you don’t know, don’t make it up. Around a third of college students change their major at least once, so don’t feel too sure of your major unless you’re really, strongly sure. If you’ve got no idea what you might major in, there are schools that are really good for that.

This is just a metaphor, and there are limits to how closely finding the wine you like is similar to finding a good-fit college. You’re not choosing one wine to be THE ONE. You can spend months and years trying many wines and finding a whole range of things you like. Most people, however, will only graduate from one college. That’s why early research is so important.

Also, at a wine shop, the price on the tag is generally the price you will pay. Not so for colleges. You don’t know what you can afford until you apply and are accepted. So while “affordable” has to be one of the final deciding factors, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in your early searches.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Three things parents should stop saying to their children

   Two documents all students should understand

3. Ask a question in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Angela Elisabeth.

Apply with Sanity is a registered trademark of Apply with Sanity, LLC. All rights reserved.

"The light is much better here"

There’s an old joke that goes back at least to the 1920s. One night a police officer sees a drunk man on his hands and knees in the light of a street lamp. “What are you doing?” the officer asks. “I lost my keys, and I’m looking for them,” replies the drunk man. The cop asks “Is this where you lost them?” “No,” the man replies, “but the light is much better here.” It’s a silly joke, but “looking for your keys under the street light” is also shorthand for doing something that’s simple instead of effective. It’s also a good metaphor for the biases we carry around with us.

It’s also, I want to say, a good metaphor for college rankings. The updated US News rankings came out yesterday, and they are—as they are every year, for better and worse—on the minds and in the comments of lots of people today.

Do most students really believe that the rankings will tell them which college is right for them?

Do most parents really believe the only path for professional success for their children is through a top-ranked school?

Do most universities really want to spend advertising dollars touting their ranking, even though they understand how incomplete and dubious that rank is?

No, but the light is just so much better there.

Instead of just laughing at the drunk man (remember: in my analogy you are the drunk man), let’s consider his situation for a moment. We might actually find some empathy and understanding.

One, he has a real problem. He has lost something valuable. He’s not just looking for any old thing, but his keys. It’s hard to get inside his home without them. If you are a student looking for a college that is a good academic, social, and financial fit for you, you are also looking for something valuable. Even if you think it’s silly for the man to be looking under the street lamp for his keys, it’s not necessarily reasonable to tell him to just go home without them. Maybe there’s someone else who can let him in that one time, but just giving up on your keys is not a viable solution if it can be avoided. Same for a good-fit college. You’re looking for something valuable, and that’s why you’re checking the rankings. You may not know yet where else to look, but giving up is not a good idea.

Two, he has external difficulties. It’s late and dark. He hasn’t got access to sunlight to make the search easier. In many ways, looking for the right college is also looking in the dark. There are thousands of two- and four-year colleges and universities in the United States. Most people only apply once, if at all, so you don’t get to learn from your earlier attempts. Even if you have parents or older family members who did go to college, the experience is much different now than it was a few decades ago. It’s overwhelming, and anyone willing to provide a shortcut, like rankings, is going to seem like a friend, no matter how useless in the long run that shortcut may be.

Three, he has internal difficulties. In the joke, the man is drunk. He hasn’t got all his internal resources to help him make a good and effective search. You’ve also got internal difficulties. In any year, having the time, resources, and mental energy to do a thorough college search—especially if you’re doing it without help—is a lot to ask. Few people have all they need for the best college search and application. The past two years have been a lot worse. If you’re overwhelmed and have too many other stresses to deal with, then hanging around where things look a bit easier isn’t surprising. It actually makes sense.

I feel for the drunk man, and I’m not going to judge him for looking under the street lamp. In fact, consider the inverse. Imagine a man loses his keys and spends days searching for them. He finally finds them…under the street lamp. He didn’t look there first because it seemed too easy. I also feel for college-seeking high school students, and I’m not going to judge them for checking the rankings. I look at them too, all the time. Don’t avoid them just because they seem too simplistic. But I will try my best to stick to the analogy I’m working with and give some further advice.

Start with the street light, but don’t stop there. I think rankings—whether US News, Niche, Forbes, or others—is a fine place to start looking for colleges. They seem to be a simple and easy place to get started on a daunting task. So have a look at those rankings. But don’t let yourself believe that they are objective, true, or best for you. They’re only an easing-in point. Then you move on to better research.

The keys aren’t under the street light, but other clues may be. If you go to a ranking site, don’t just look at the list and the rankings. Click on individual schools, and you’ll see a lot more information. The easy-to-find information is the great part of the rankings, not the order. If you’re going to start clicking on schools, don’t start with the top 10. Skip down to #100 and begin there. It’s not like you’ll never hear about Princeton again if you don’t click on that link right now.

If you know that the street light isn’t actually helpful but you’re just looking there for ease and comfort, admit that to yourself so you’ll know when to move on. Somewhere in his head, drunk as he may be, the man knows his keys aren’t there under the light. But it’s late, and he’s drunk, and it’s just reassuring to stay under the lamp post. Colleges know that the rankings have nothing to do with their true value—as do parents and students. But it’s overwhelming for students and it’s difficult for universities to distinguish themselves, and rankings are an easy and reassuring place to spend some time. If that’s what you’re doing, that’s fine. It makes total sense. But admit that to yourself and understand that you can’t keep thinking of the top-ranked schools as the “best” schools for you. One of those schools may end up being the best school for you. But if it does, I assure you, it has nothing to do with US News’s numbers and methods.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   What to think of college rankings

   About the Transactional Approach to admissions

3. Ask a question—or share other resources—in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring.

Apply with Sanity is a registered trademark of Apply with Sanity, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hey Google, where should I go to college?

About two weeks ago, Google announced they are severely enhancing their search tool to give you lots of information about colleges when you search for one. So if you do a Google search, for example, on SMU, then you’ll get several categories of data on SMU up at the top of the results page. They pull data from large government databses to get you all the relevant information—including average cost after finicial aid and where the school appears in a lot of different ranking systems. 

So what’s the big deal? Google gives you results search? Isn’t that what Google always does?

Partly, yes, it’s not a big deal that Google gives you information. But here’s what different: they give you a lot of easy-to-read information right at the top of your screen (it’s fully rolled out for your phone screen, and will eventually make it onto desktop as well). The information comes from reputable sources—it’s data, not advertising or opinion. And it’s all the same information for every four-year school in the U.S. 

So the first thing that comes to mind is that Google now competes with College Board’s Big Future and US News and World Reports. It’s a great, free resource for gathering information about schools. It’s professional and reliable. For this basic function, you might stop using Big Future. (If your school offers Naviance or College Greenlight, you may not use any of these. But my experience has taught me that those get ignored a lot by students.

There’s one major thing that Google’s enhanced search doesn’t seem to do that both Big Future and US News do, and that’s use a filter system where you can put in your test scores and preferences to get a list of possible matches. And if you sign up, both Big Future and US News will let you save your info and search results.

Also, at least so far, the “similar colleges” list doesn’t seem to be that great. I searched SMU, Southwestern University, and University of Texas at Dallas (because those are schools I’ve attended). For all, the listed similar colleges are just geographically close, not necessarily similar at all. I imagine as more people use Google it will track what they searach and imrpove the results on this. But it isn’t there yet. 

Another advantage that Google has over the other sites—which some people find creepy but others see as normal—is that Google is built on targeted advertising. So the more you search schools on Google and it figures out what you’re looking for, the more it can sell advertising to similar schools who will try to put their name up in front of you. It may take some time—even a few years—before it’s got enough data and establsihed advertisers to put all that together. But it could happen quick. If your internet is already good at seeimg to know what you want before you realize you want it, then soon this might be true of colleges, too. 

But please remember an important thing: if you’re interested in a colllege, you need to spend a lot of time on the school’s website. If they send you an email, click on the link! Google isn’t the only site that keeps track of their visitors. One of the primary ways that colleges gauge demonstrated interest is to track how much time you spend on their site and which pages you visit. So do some searching on Google...or Big Future...or US News. But remember that you might have a lot to gain from also searching the colleges’ sites as well.

Thank you for reading! Please share this post with people you know. If you have questions, suggestions, or comments, I'd love to hear them. It's easy to follow Apply with Sanity on Facebook and Twitter. You can get Apply with Sanity sent to your inbox monthly by signing up here.

Full disclosre: I have several friends who work for Google. I haven’t discussed this with them, but I’m on vacation and will visit them this weekend. If they give me any additional info on the new college search, I’ll pass it along.

Photo by Angela Elisabeth Portraits