How to prioritize a college list

Once you have a college list together, you can build a pretty basic spreadsheet to prioritize the colleges based on criteria that you decide upon. Some obvious metrics would be distance from home (either too far or too close could be seen as “bad,” it is up to what you want), cost, reputation of college, reputation of preferred major, quality of other possible majors (variety) - if you are undecided, activities (clubs, etc.), Sports (clubs or varsity), college vibe, Food (either just perception of quality offerings or if needed focus on needs like gluten free, etc.). You may have other criteria to asses as well, like scholarship or financial aid options (you may add these after you have been selected to several schools). Let’s look at an example of a prioritization sheet.

Engineering College Fit: A Visual Guide for Students with a 4.0 Weighted GPA

Finding the right college fit goes beyond rankings. For students interested in engineering—and especially for those with a strong academic profile like a 4.0 weighted / 3.9 unweighted GPA—it’s important to balance academic rigor, campus vibe, cost, and personal preferences like college size, distance from home, and environment.

Table 1 below evaluates 16 top engineering colleges on the East Coast using nine fit factors, including engineering reputation, specialties offered, location, dining, and more. We then categorized schools by admissions likelihood. As you can see, this sheet is more than just a ranked list. Each college has been scored on each rating factor using a 0 to 100% scale with 0 being “bad” and 100% being great. Those factor scores are then averaged to create one score for each college. Those scores are then sorted from high to low within each of three “Fit Ratings” (Safety School, Reach Schools, and Dream Schools). Theoretically, that gives you your list. But, you may subjectively love one school so much that it rises to the top for you anyway. This is just a tool to help you narrow you list.

Another thing that we have done here, is to color code by the “Fit Ratings.” The list is Table 1, shows unweighted prioritized lists for “Safety,” (red), “Reach” (yellow), and “Dream” (green) schools. Looking at this list, you would be able to drop (on numbers alone), WPI, Lehigh, Bucknell, U of Rochester, and MIT, and maybe Northeastern from your overall list. That would give you 10 total schools to apply to (3 safety, 4 reach, and 3 or 4 dream).

Table 1

- Red = Safety School / Yellow = Reach School / Green = Dream School

However, if you decide that some factors are more important than others (as they should be), you could apply higher weights to those. Table 2 below represents the prioritized list applying weights that assume Cost, Overall Reputations, Offering Engineering Specialties (Mech, Chem, Civil, etc.), and Campus Vibe are the most important factors. Applying these factor weights change some of the priorities, especially among the top colleges on the “Reach” and “Dream” schools. That said, based on the numbers alone, the colleges that would be recommended to drop from the list remain essentially the same (unweighted vs weighted), but Northeastern goes from questionable to the top of the “dream” list, with only MIT dropping from “dream” (for a total of 11 still on the list (3 “safety”, 4 “reach,” and 4 “dream”). Your actual weights might be different though. It depends upon what is most or least important to you. Also, you may still need to drop additional schools, perhaps based on other factors, or if sticking with the numbers, maybe the lowest remaining in each category (Penn State, Villanova, and Columbia) for a total of 8 schools) - application fees add up fast.

- Red = Safety School / Yellow = Reach School / Green = Dream School / Gray = Drop

• Green = Reach: Dream schools. Competitive admits where even top students face tough odds.

• Yellow = Target: Schools where a student with this profile has a strong chance of admission.

• Red = Safety: Schools where admission is likely, but still a good academic and personal fit.

While each student’s preferences will differ, these examples (unweighted and weighted) provide a clear and practical way to evaluate schools holistically—not just by prestige, but by what will help you student thrive. This is just an example. Depending upon your student’s profile (grades, SAT/ACT, etc.) and interests (planned major, priorities, etc.) the starting list would differ, not too mention if there is a regional focus to start (the list above is for northeast engineering schools and a student that is strong, but not the strongest).