But Does It Have a Cute Mascot? Overlooked School Selection Criteria

When it comes time to pick a college, all those big brochures you get in the mail can get overwhelming. We at SparkNotes have a suggestion for exactly how to deal with them: Throw them away.

The truth is that the stuff you really need to know about your potential alma mater isn't in the brochure at all (unless you're super interested in whether that brochure is printed on recycled paper). Does the college's brochure tell you that it's awesome? Well, guess what, they all do. Does it list all the fantastic programs available to students? Sure, but it's not like there's going to be one list of fantastic programs and another list of sucky ones. Are the students in the photos hot-looking? Sorry, but they've probably already graduated anyway.

No, the most valuable information about a school doesn't come from a glossy marketing package. It comes from the kind of first-hand, real-world, immersive experience that you simply can't get without looking it up on the Internet. Of course, every school has a lot of information out there, so here's our little guide to help you in your search.

School Colors. Find out what they are. Do you look good in them? If not, sorry, deal-breaker. Find a cutting-edge school whose colors aren't green and radioactive yellow.

Mascot. This will tell you a lot about a school. Are they aggressive, like a tiger? Or wise, like an owl? Or cute and cuddly, like a amorphous red blob? Or plucky, like a giant child? Or completely unintimidating in any respect, like a boll weevil?

Fight Song. Is it in your vocal range? There's nothing more frustrating than trying to get an entire basketball arena to take it down a couple of keys.

Prestige. This used to be hard to measure, before Google came along. Now it's the easiest thing of all to quantify. "Harvard" gets 77.2 million hits. "Stanford" gets 53 million, and "Yale" a paltry 36.3 million. "Skunkberg Institute of Technology," alas, comes up empty.

School Culture. Nothing will tell you more about what the people at a school are like than logging into a message board where they hang out. Some student forums might require you to be a student to participate (in which case, the ease with which you hack in tells you something else about the school right there), but that's not where the real value is. Seek out an alumni message board instead. It's one thing to learn from a student board that people at the school are jerkwads; it's quite another to find out that people who went there are still jerkwads.

What things do you look for in a college? There's a wealth of information out there for the taking, if you simply use tools like Google, Google Image Search, and Google Maps Street Views. It's almost like a virtual campus visit.