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College Consensus uses top publisher rankings and student reviews (Includes interview)

On the inspiration to begin College Consensus, he said, “I was working as a freelance writer and editor for another national college rankings website and was struck by how many different ranking systems were out there showing different results for the same schools based on the different methodologies, metrics, and weights used by each one. There were also a number of student review websites coming online, offering reviews of colleges by real students at the schools.”

“So I started thinking, ‘With so many different options, where should a prospective student start to get an accurate idea of where the colleges they were interested in actually stood in terms of quality and reputation?’ There didn’t seem to be any good answers to that question, so I decided to try and come up with an answer myself, which eventually became College Consensus.”

Regarding the idea to come up for College Consensus, he said, “I was a big fan of movie and product review aggregators like rottentomatoes.com and metacritic.com. I felt like their aggregate scores gave a helpful snapshot of how a movie or product performs across many different reviewers. That got me thinking about doing something similar with college rankings and student reviews.”

When asked how the website ranks the best colleges in the nation, he explained, “We start by combining the results of all of the most respected college rankings publishers into a single Publisher Consensus score for each school. We also combine the results of thousands of real student reviews from around the web into Student Review score for each school. The average of these two scores is the College Consensus score, providing both the outside/objective perspective of publisher rankings with the insider/subjective perspective of students. This allows students to decide which perspective is most important to them.”

On the most challenging aspect of starting the website and building the brand, he said, “Gathering and combining the large amounts of data needed to produce our consensus scores and figuring out how to display them in a useful way ended up being the biggest challenge at the beginning. I’m not a programmer or a designer so it took some time to find the right people for the job. Other than that, just finding a way to stand out in a crowded niche. Thankfully we have a unique angle that is intuitive and exciting for most people when they find out about it.”

“I want the audience to gain a clearer picture of where the schools they are interested in are terms of quality and reputation. A good starting point for their search for the right college for them,” he said.

He revealed that he would give the following advice to his college self: “Don’t get too hung up on what your major should be. You probably won’t end up doing anything related to it anyway. Just study what interests you.”

On the future of College Consensus, he said, “We plan to become the most popular college search site on the web. We are currently expanding our rankings to include business schools and law schools.”

When asked how he would improve the U.S. higher education system, he responded, “Make public colleges and universities free and accessible to everyone, just like we do with public elementary, middle, and high schools. It’s a scandal how many bright young people in our country are unable to get a higher education because of financial reasons or end up with enormous amounts of debt after graduation.”

To learn more about College Consensus, check out its official website.

Markos Papadatos
Written By

Markos Papadatos is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for Music News. Papadatos is a Greek-American journalist and educator that has authored over 20,000 original articles over the past 18 years. He has interviewed some of the biggest names in music, entertainment, lifestyle, magic, and sports. He is a 16-time "Best of Long Island" winner, where for three consecutive years (2020, 2021, and 2022), he was honored as the "Best Long Island Personality" in Arts & Entertainment, an honor that has gone to Billy Joel six times.

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