Campus Explorer

Campus Explorer is a free tool for researching colleges and universities. Campus Explorer doesn’t just cover your major colleges and universities, it covers smaller schools and even trade schools.

The first thing I did when visiting the site was to search for a school. The search function is adequate. I typed in the exact name of a school and instead of bringing me to that school’s page it brings you to a list of schools with those words in them. To me that is unnecessary, if you do a specific search you want to go to a specific page. There is a lot of information available to you without registering with the site. Once you locate a school’s page you can see information on the student population, expenses, and academic programs as well as pictures and videos. Unfortunately most of the pictures are logos or Wikipedia graphics so they are very sterile and don’t give you a feel of the campus’ personality.
After you register for your free account you can ask questions in the College Advice section, which is powered by Yahoo Answers. There is also a section where current students can contribute information via Google Friend Connect.

Once you have viewed the information on several schools you can click on the “compare” tool and it will bring up a side by side comparison of 4 schools that you choose. This tool was very helpful to me in weeding out some schools that didn’t meet the demographics I was looking for. The school names didn’t show up in this screen shot but they are from left to right: The University of Tampa, The University of South Florida, The College of the Ozarks and The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

If you are looking for information on smaller schools and trade schools Campus Explorer is the tool for you. There is information on a lot of schools that are not covered at all on other sites.