Find the Right School with College Toolkit
October 13, 2007
The College Toolkit application offers a valuable collection of college-related tools for current and potential college students within the United States. Users have the opportunity to search for their dream college through a detailed search engine, shout out to a school they like, or light-heartedly trash a friend’s or rival school. find information on colleges they’re interested in.
The heart of College Toolkit lies in its college search utility and the immense amount of data available on individual colleges and universities throughout the country. A comprehensive search can be performed simply by entering details about the type of school you’re looking for, including student body size, acceptance selectivity, state or region, and religious affiliations. Entering personal SAT and ACT scores will help to further narrow search results as well.
Search results provide basic information about each school — name, location, selectivity, and cost rating — that help guide you towards the school you’re looking for. Selecting a school from the search results takes you to a “snapshot” of the school, providing a bit more information such as website address, contact information, SAT and tuition ratings, and further information similar to the selections made within the comprehensive search.
The true experience with College Toolkit begins with the collection of links beside the school snapshot. Pages specifically catered to topics of academics, admissions, tuition costs, financial aid details, student life, and news offer the opportunity to completely familiarize yourself with details and statistics pertaining to a given college or university. For example, the academics page offers information on degree opportunities, available majors, and the student-to-faculty ratio. The admissions page explains admissions criteria, application dates and fees, and average GPA’s of entering students.
While the amount of information offered is far too extensive to cover in detail, the screen shots below provide a look into what you can expect to find throughout these pages.
 College Overview |
 Academics |
 Admissions |
 Tuition |
College-ology, another feature available within College Toolkit, is mostly for recreational use with a bit of education mixed in. It is a series of 120-second “exams” that test your ability to match nicknames to their schools. For example, one quiz tests your sports team knowledge by providing a list of team names or mascots that must be dragged beside the school it represents.
College Toolkit also offers users the opportunity to make shout-outs to schools or even trash-talk them. By simply searching for a friend’s school name or that of a rival sports team, you can praise or put down a specific university. Each of these comments acts as a kind of rating towards a college — the application’s homepage the top 10 most shouted out schools along with those schools that are most trashed, as can be seen below.
In all, College Toolkit offers a great opportunity for applying college students to find vital information in what is otherwise a stressful, time-consuming process. If you have plans of continuing your education, you would be putting yourself at a strong disadvantage by not using College Toolkit.
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