High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).

Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.

High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.

College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.

Posted by Alexa Harrington