St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Annie Allhoff was valedictorian of her high school class, and everyone expected her to apply to Ivy League colleges. Annie, 18, had other ideas.

Annie Allhoff, a freshman at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. used a search engine while she was in high school in Missouri to help choose her college.

“I knew I wanted a small liberal arts school comparable in academics to the Ivy League, but without the name-brand ultracompetitiveness that goes along with Princeton, Harvard and Yale,” she said.

Her mother bought Annie a thick college review book, and Annie visited the counseling center at her high school, in St. Louis. Ultimately, though, an Internet search engine helped Annie narrow her choices.

As the college application process has become increasingly available through the Web, many companies —Princeton Review, the College Board, Kaplan, Thomson Peterson and others — are offering search engines that help students put together a list of colleges to consider. Although some sites purport to calculate a student’s likelihood of winning acceptance, the site Annie used, and similar ones, are like a computer dating service, matching students with potentially compatible colleges.

Annie visited Counselor-O-Matic, offered by Princeton Review. After entering information about the kind of school she was looking for, along with her grades, class rank and SAT scores, the site generated a list that included an institution she had never heard of: Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.

The more Annie researched Pomona, the better a fit she thought it would be. She is now a freshman there.

Read the Full Story at the New York Times

Comments are closed.