List Building: Finding your top school choices

• Naviance: Supermatch is Naviance’s college search engine. Students can enter fit criteria and populate a list of possible colleges.  Scattergrams don’t include extracurricular involvement, the quality of college essays, legacy status, intended major, or other important factors.

• Corsava: A free tool to help you sort and list your preferences in a way that will help you figure out what you want from your college experience.

• CollegeXpress: Students can search from an amazing set of lists according to their interests. Students can type in anything from “Schools for the Free Spirit” to “Great Private Colleges for the B Student” and get a list of results compiled by experts. 

• Niche: Rankings/Niche Grades are based on rigorous analysis of academic, admissions, financial, and student life data from the U.S. Department of Education along with millions of reviews from students and alumni.

• BigFuture: The College Board's free college planning tool, designed to support students in the planning process and discover best-fit colleges. Provides tools to discover interests and career options.

• College Navigator: Created by the US Department of Education and its National Center for Education Statistics. 

• Cappex: Tool that allows you to input your weighted and unweighted GPA, your test scores, and your college preferences. It will match you with schools that meet your preferences and provide a rough sense of your chance of admission. Bonus: Cappex will give you the average Net Price paid by students (which is different from the sticker price) as well as the merit scholarships that are available at each school to which you are applying under the “Scholarships” tab. This will show up once you’ve added your colleges on Cappex.

• Unigo: Provides a student perspective. You can read students’ opinions on their schools. Read multiple reviews, in particular, the “What’s the stereotype of students at your school?” and “Is the stereotype true?” You’ll get a sense of the school vibe.

• CollegeData: TONS of data on the average test scores, general acceptance rates, and average GPAs of incoming first-year college students. It also provides data around average financial aid packages offered, specific financial aid packages offered to students who were admitted, and other numbers that might help you and your family plan for college costs.