If you can't visit a campus, I would encourage you to talk to as many people as you can track down who know what the campus is like. This goes back to a point I made in an earlier answer. You know from the beginning if a school has a high or low academic reputation, the cost, if it has big time sports, or whatever. What you can't find from the statistics is what the campus feels like. Picking a college is a matching process.
Every college is the right place for some students and wrong for others of equal academic ability.
For more information on campus visits, please click here . Hello, I am looking into several colleges. The tier rankings are determined by a relatively complex formula that includes the mission of the school as well as data that could be construed as affecting quality. Just because a school is in a higher tier, it doesn't necessarily mean it is better than one in a lower tier. Often it is, but not always.