University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Give us your Top Ten list": And other essay questions from Wake Forest, U of Chicago, and more...

Posted on Mon, 11/25/2013 - 12:53

Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post's Answer Sheet has collected some of the unusual essay questions colleges have posed this year in their supplements. One of our personal favorites: In 2006, graduate student Robert Stilling discovered an unpublished poem by Robert Frost while doing research in U.Va.’s Small Collections Library. Where will your Stilling moment be in college? Courtesy of University of Virginia. Check them all out here.

College Reality Check: Some Experts Weigh In On The Latest Tool for Families

Posted on Thu, 05/30/2013 - 09:25

There's no shortage of information when it comes to researching colleges -- guidebooks, email, college fairs, blogs, YouTube. In fact, there are so many new sites and tools -- College Score Card, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and their Shopping Sheet (this is a sample) -- that it can be hard to know what’s useful and what’s not. One of the newest tools on the table is College Reality Check, brought to you by a partnership between the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Gates Foundation. With 3600 colleges in its database, the tool aims to allow users to see how these institutions fare with regard to net price, graduation rates, debt rates and more.

We're big believers in information -- that is, good information. So we asked a group of college admission deans and high school college counselors to share their initial thoughts about the value of College Reality Check and how families can best employ the data this new tool provides. Read on to take advantage of their bird's eye view of this newest source of information: