Further Narrowing Your College Application List

Level 4 - Highly Selective

Welcome back! Previously, we discussed our college selection tool and steps to narrow your list of colleges to apply to. 

That list was primarily focused on three things:

1. Academic Goals

2. Financial Planning

3. Academic Metrics

In a recent article, we used these three filters to narrow the college options for a student named Adam who is interested in civil engineering. 

If you missed that, you can find that article here:

These three filters form the core pillars of any college, university, or program that you apply to. If a school does not fit all three, there is no point in you applying.

But as the exercise with Adam showed, this is not enough to completely choose colleges, especially if your interests are fairly broad or common. 

For example, if you are pre-med, there are hundreds of colleges that you could choose from. Even if you look at the three lenses we provided above, you still may have 100 options to choose from.

So the question is - what do you do then?

This introduces what we refer to as non-core criteria.

Non-core criteria are preferences that drive selection after you have already gone through the preliminary methods to narrow your options. 

These preferences can be used in two ways:

1. You need to further narrow down your list of colleges

2. The preferences are influencing the modification of an existing list

Let’s talk through each of these.