Its Origins
How to find it
How to use it
Do you want to find out how many students transferred to Cornell University last year? Or, how many students received financial aid (institutional and government grants) at Pomona College, and how much each actually got? Or, do you want to find out the real student to faculty ratio at Dartmouth? If you do there are two places to go to answer many of these questions accurately and efficiently: College Navigator is one (and it has been profiled by me often. If you haven’t had a chance, you really need to go to its website and take a look at some of the schools you have under consideration. (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/). This is one example of our tax dollars well-spent; it’s truly a veritable goldmine of valuable college information.
The other tool of equal utility is the Common Data Set (CDS), and it is in today’s spotlight. The CDS is a collaboration among the vast universe of colleges and universities, the College Board, Peterson’s (an eminent educational publisher), and US News and World Report to standardize, improve, and make transparent information about higher education. In essence, the CDS standardizes, into a convenient 32 page report (approximately), a huge amount of data. Each college (most colleges-a word about this shortly) makes available its information on:
Average financial aid award
Break down of loans versus grants in average financial aid packages (very valuable when you’re attempting to figure out how much grant support your application may garner)
% of financial need met for typical student
Amount of merit money (if any) for affluent students who don’t qualify for need-based aid
Academic profile of freshman class—including GPA and SAT/ACT scores
Criteria for admission
Undergraduate class sizes
Accurate faculty/student ratio
Cost of attending
Retention rate and 4-year graduation rate
The quality and quantity of information you can obtain from a school’s CDS far outstrips anything you’d find in a standard college guide, such as Fiske or Princeton Review. Better still, getting a copy of the Common Data Set is as easy as logging on your computer and Googling up: Common Data Set <Name of School>. In many cases, the CDS, as with Pomona College, will come up as a PDF file that you can easily search. Better still, once you’ve accessed information on Pomona College, you can then turn to another CDS for, say Stanford University, and the format is identical.
When I was doing research for a student wishing to submit a transfer application to Cornell University, RPI, and Northwestern, I was able to go to section D of the CDS for each of the schools and immediately learn whether the school accepts transfers for the fall, how many transfer applicants each had, what portion were admitted, and what number actually enrolled. It also clearly explained all the items required for transfer students to apply for admission. Before the CDS became available, this type of research would require, in most cases, me to call each individual institution and pray I might find someone in admissions who actually could supply me with this information.
There are schools which, for whatever reason, don’t make their CDS available. Two I’m aware of are Washington University in St; Louis, and USC. Fortunately, Amherst College, Northwestern, Penn State, Yale, Centre College, NYU, UC Berkeley, to name but a few, do. Brown’s CDS even includes specific numbers on its wait list in section C2: 1,500 applicants were offered a place on Brown’s waiting list, 500 accepted, and 82 made it off it. Where else can you find such information? If you don’t review the CDS for each of the colleges on your short list for the financial grant information alone, you’re doing yourself a great disservice.