Facebook application for college applications

My dad remembers waiting in line on campus to add college classes every semester. Lines so long they would wrap around several buildings, no matter how staggered the student numbers were, and no matter how hard the rain was falling in Tacoma that day. My college experience was not quite so low-tech, but there was still a lot of paper involved. When I first applied to schools, back in 97,* you wrote or called universities to request information. Then a few weeks later, huge, glossy pamphlets and brochures would arrive in the mail, and I’d spread them out on the kitchen table and look them over with my folks…ah, those were the days.

Those days, apparently, are gone. Now you can use College Planner, the Facebook app that lets you compare schools, get recommendations, check on what your friends are looking at and more.

I don’t remember how we found out about our options in my day. I imagine most schools have some kind of college counselor who can help you through all that, but at my school you were pretty much on your own. It was a big imaginative leap: first, to picture myself at college at all**, and then to figure out what schools were out there. Now the imaginative part has been removed, it seems to me, and you can search through every school in the country with the click of a mouse.

This is not me being anti-progress; I think it’s fantastic that kids have better ways to research their options. Although the application itself, I have to say, is not so great for that. Your only options for search criteria are what you want to major in, private or public schools, urban/suburban/rural settings, and where in the country you want to live. However, the app gives you an option to perform a much more advanced search at the parent site, Embark.com, where you are given a lot of input choices: everything from your preferred faculty-to-student ratio to how good your grades are. The major reason for using the Facebook app, I would say, is to see what your friends are looking at. It’s nice to know you’re going to know someone at the new school.

I’d like to see the application expand to include rating systems for the really important stuff like dorm ratings, dining hall reviews and descriptions of the social scene. Perhaps the developers can form some relationships with the universities who are creating a Facebook presence.

In the meantime, this application is definitely worth adding if you’re in the preliminary stages of college hunting. You’ll get a solid sense of what’s out there, and you can research your options more on your own.

*I’m sorry, I know this is such a granny story. “Eh, in my day it were tough to apply fer learning, not like you whippersnappers have it today.”

**This is making it sound like I grew up in the rural South or something, but actually I was raised in a reasonably affluent California suburb. Say, now that I think about it, why didn’t we have a college counselor?

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