First Lady Touted Value of College; Here’s How to Find the Best One

Yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke to a group of D.C. high school students about the importance of going to college. She told them that by 2020,

nearly two-thirds of all jobs in this country are going to require some form of training beyond high school.  That means whether it’s a vocational program, community college, a four-year university, you all are going to need some form of higher education in order to build the kind of lives that you want for yourselves, good careers, to be able to provide for your family. 

To help students determine what institutions and programs are best for them, Obama suggested a couple of resources that the U.S. Department of Education and White House provide. These are fine tools and should be explored, but we humbly submit that a better tool is our College Results Online (CRO).

CRO is a free web tool that allows students and parents to select any four-year college or university and compare its graduation rate with that of similar institutions serving similar groups of students. CRO allows users to look at a school’s graduation rate by race, ethnicity, and gender, and students can also search schools by zip code, cost, state, student outcomes, and more. In short, CRO gives students and parents looking for college a better sense for which institutions offer them both the best chance of entering and the best chance of succeeding.

And isn’t that what we all want?