Early April marks a major milestone for college-bound high school students, the time when they receive acceptance or rejection letters (probably some of both). For most, the long college search is nearing its end.
That search may be easier in the future, thanks to a new website created by the Pope Center.
North Carolina College Finder, launched today, provides a wide range of information on 54 North Carolina colleges and universities (all the state’s accredited nonprofit schools that give bachelor’s degrees).
Some of the information on the site is to be expected, such as school size, location, tuition, acceptance rates, the SAT scores and grade point averages (GPAs) of incoming freshmen, the student-faculty ratio and six-year graduation rates.
But a lot is distinctly different.
The website provides details not conveniently collected elsewhere and includes information that schools might not want to publicize. For example, students can find the average debt upon graduation held by the students at that school and the average starting salary of each school’s graduates (where the information is available), as well as the percentage of alumni who donate to the college or university.
NC College Finder has a complete page of information on each school, including a link to the school’s website. The page for each school also includes links to articles about that school that have appeared on the Pope Center website.
The website includes measures of academic quality and the political and intellectual climate at each school. For example, it reports on the political balance of professors. Using voter registration data for the faculty in economics and political science departments, the Pope Center rates each school as “balanced” or “unbalanced” and indicates whether the faculty leans more toward the Democratic or the Republican party.
NC College Finder also provides information on the existence of alternative newspapers on campus, the extent to which students can exercise free speech, and the level of student political involvement, as reflected by the number of political and activist organizations on campus.
The website, which I oversee, is an outgrowth of some soul-searching at the Pope Center. The Pope Center is committed to improving higher education in North Carolina, and its staff writes many articles about problems in the UNC system, from biased academic presentations to inefficiency and waste.
But in addition to making direct recommendations, we want to empower students and their parents to make wise choices. “Helping students become better-informed consumers represents a decentralized approach to improving higher education,” says Pope Center president Jane S. Shaw. “Just as in a marketplace, the choices made by many people will send messages to university and college administrators and faculty,” she says.
The center does not take sides, but, rather, provides information. “Students who wish to study on a liberal or progressive campus can identify the schools whose economics and political science departments are overwhelmingly liberal,” Shaw explains. “Those wishing to study on a more conservative campus can find schools that better match their needs.”
The database for the College Finder was compiled by the Pope Center from a variety of sources. Some come from the colleges themselves, but others include the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the College Board, the U.S. Department of Education, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Payscale.com, and the Project on Student Debt
It includes the ratings of schools’ “core curricula” provided by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) for the Pope Center.
Using the same database, the Pope Center will soon introduce a website called Alumni Guide. It will enable alumni of North Carolina colleges and universities to learn more about their schools than is normally found in alumni magazines.