With Hanukkah winding down and Christmas right around the corner, newspapers across the country this week have highlighted some cool websites and mobile phone applications that can make comparison shopping a lot easier. One product that caught my eye, was the mobile application, ShopSavvy, created by Big in Japan, a development company based out of Dallas, TX. Mentioned in the Wall Street Journal , and in the New York Times, the app allows people to take pictures of barcodes, upload them to ShopSavvy, and have ShopSavvy compare the price of that item across various retailers.
Now, if Bettergrads had any input regarding how this app would function, I think our team would want the app to be able compare the cost of attending various colleges. Imagine being able to hold up an iPhone to any text document where the name of a college appears, and with the simple click of the phone’s camera, the phone captures the school name, and instantly provides a line item breakdown of the total costs of attending that school for one year. Cool, right? Sadly, ShopSavvy does not offer that feature. But, here are some BG-inspired ways you can use to comparison-shop colleges.
- List Pros and Cons
This is a tried-and-true method that people use to help make decisions on practically everything. For the folks out there who are still deciding on whether or not to apply to certain schools before the Common Application deadline, and for the students who have already heard back from the Early Decision schools, one smart way to compare colleges and weed out the ones that are not so appealing is to make a list of the Pros and Cons of attending each school. Categories such as location, class size, distance from home, and social life, are some examples you can use to help distinguish one school from the other. In the end, Decision-making becomes easier when all the facts are organized into a clean and simple list.
- Compare Costs Across the Board
This is another, universal decision method to employ when the college search boils down to 3 or 4 schools. Just create a table (either in Microsoft® Excel®, a whiteboard, or paper and pen) with the names of the colleges followed by a detailed list of the various costs associated with attending those colleges. Some costs to consider include the obvious ones such as room and board, financial aid, meal plan, and the not so obvious ones including transportation to and from school, entertainment, books and supplies, etc. Bettergrads believes that author, Henry David Thoreau, known for his quotation, “Simplify, simplify, simplify…” would approve of this method too :)
Applying to colleges and then attempting to figure out where to spend the next two or four years can be a stressful process. The aforementioned comparison-shopping processes are a few ideas that work. Feel free to use the space below or hit us up on twitter by searching @bettergrads to list some more.