The Colorado Free Application Days campaign is an initiative designed to inspire more Coloradans to continue their education. From Tuesday, Oct. 7 through Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025, all 32 public colleges and universities in Colorado and several private institutions will waive their application fees, making it free for anyone to submit an application. By waiving application fees—a common barrier to higher education—Colorado Free Application Days aims to improve access to further education and training, which is becoming increasingly critical in the state’s rapidly changing economy.

For more information, visit the following Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) for more details, including the list of participating colleges and universities, here and here.

In 2024, there were over 65,000 applications received during the Colorado Free Application Days including almost 12,000 at CU-Boulder and over 4,300 at the University of Denver.

The CDHE also provides a lot of educational materials on its My Colorado Journey site. It includes resources for high school course selection, career exploration, college research , financial aid, and test preparation.

Best of luck to your student as they begin their senior year of high school and please reach out to the team at Great College Advice if we can help with their Colorado (and beyond) applications!

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On March 28, University of Colorado president Bruce Benson published a guest commentary in the Denver Post. In which he derided the study as an inaccurate and incomplete measurement of the value of a college degree.  Benson’s first objection was the study’s comparison of two- and four-year colleges. And its conclusion that four of the seven colleges whose graduates had the highest salaries were community colleges.  Benson wrote, “While [community colleges] offer a sound education, the idea that an associate’s degree is more valuable than a baccalaureate degree from a four-year research university is questionable at best. The study compares apples to oranges and essentially concludes that they are both fruit and therefore equal.”

Benson’s Argument

As I did in my blog post, Benson argued that graduates’ first-year salaries give little indication of how much they will make over the course of their careers.  Additionally, Benson pointed out, the study was conducted during the recession (2006-2010), which undoubtedly affected graduates’ salaries.

Benson stated that another of the study’s shortcomings had to do with the people from whom it collected data.  Individuals who were employed by the federal government — Colorado’s largest employer — were not surveyed.  Nor were graduates who were self-employed or working out-of-state.  And students who finished college and enrolled in graduate or professional school weren’t included, either.

Benson contended that the study only included about one-fourth of graduates from Colorado colleges. And that this was not a representative sample.  Indeed, the website on which the study’s results are displayed  has the following disclaimer: “To be included in the state wage data, graduates must be employed in Colorado and earning equal to or above the Colorado minimum wage. This equates to approximately 26% of all college graduates from 2006 to 2010.”  The site also explains that data were not collected from the people described in the previous paragraph.

Benson also condemns the study’s authors for being overly critical of the ability of graduates with liberal arts degrees to earn a decent living. He concludes by saying, “Reports such as College Matters don’t measure up when it comes to giving students and families an idea of how a college education can lead to lifelong career success.”  

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Another important consideration for future college students, especially those who will have to take out loans, is how much money you’ll make after you graduate. Your salary, both immediately after college and several years into the future. Will directly impact the amount of time it will take you to pay off your loans, not to mention other factors like your lifestyle.

Finding Data

You might be thinking, “How on earth would I know what I’m going to make five or ten years down the road?” Well, there are a couple of websites that can help you figure that out. One of these sites is payscale.com, which provides salary information for graduates from 1,000 colleges and for 130 different majors. 

To access the college data on this free site, click on “Education” and then “College Salary Report”. From that page, you can view a full list of colleges, best colleges by type (i.e., liberal arts, research universities, public colleges), and best colleges by region. Each of these groupings ranks colleges according to graduates’ average starting and mid-career salaries. The site also has tools to help you choose a major and a college.

Another useful website is alumnifactor.com. This site costs $3.99/month and provides information gleaned from surveys of graduates from 1,500 colleges. For the top 177 colleges. The site reports not only income and net worth data. But also information about more personal outcomes, like intellectual development and preparation for career success. It also ranks the top colleges based on alumni’s likelihood to attend the same school again. And recommend it to others, as well as whether they thought it was a good value.

What the websites don’t provide

One downside to both of these websites is that they don’t give any breakdown of average salaries based on the specific degree students earn from a college. In other words, someone who graduates with an engineering degree is likely to make a lot more money than someone who earns a teaching degree from the same school. For more specific data, try Nerd Scholar, which is also free. 

Although the site doesn’t list specific degrees, it does provide average starting salaries and employment rates for schools within universities. For example, if you want to study business, you can compare data for business schools at different colleges.
By helping you figure out your potential salary, these websites can help you determine if a college is worth the cost and worth taking out thousands of dollars in loans to attend.

The post Which Degrees Have the Best Starting Salaries? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

I don’t know if this student was embarrassed, but I certainly would have been.  While her response to the tour guide’s question may seem innocent enough, it quickly revealed that she had not researched the college before visiting.  Her lack of preparation was further evidenced by the fact that, during the tour, neither she nor her father asked a single question.  While the tour guide probably could have cared less (hey, it made his job easier), imagine if this student also had an interview with an admissions officer while she was on campus.  Had she answered a question about her intended major the way she answered it on the tour, or had she been offered the opportunity to ask questions and not done so, the admissions officer likely would not have been impressed.

Does the school have the major you want?

The point of this story is that visiting a college is a great way to learn more about it, but that doesn’t mean you should go in blind.  If you want to make the most of a college visit, you should do some research beforehand.  First and foremost, find out if the school has the major(s) you’re interested in.  If not, does it really makes sense to spend your time and money (and that of your parents) visiting?  Probably not.

What is important to you?

Secondly, take some time to explore the college’s website for information about things that are important to you.  Do you want to live in a single-sex dorm?  Better find out if the school has them.  Hoping to join a fraternity or sorority?  Make sure they exist at the college.  (Not all schools have a Greek system.)  Hoping to write for the school newspaper but don’t want to major in journalism?  You need to see if that’s possible.  If you have questions whose answers you can’t find on a college’s website, call the admissions office.

As I explained in my blog post, “When Doing College Research, People Are One of the Best Resources”, going on a campus tour enables students to not only see the college’s physical setting, but also to ask questions of a current student — the tour guide.  Take advantage of that opportunity to get inside information about what life at the school is really like.  Better yet, talk to other students in addition to the tour guide.  But before you do, do some research so that you can ask relevant questions about what you’re interested in.  And if you’re going to have an interview during your visit, research becomes even more important.

With a little preparation, you can avoid being caught in an embarrassing situation like the one I witnessed.  Additionally, you’ll get a great deal more out of your time on campus.

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• Information about the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
• Information about the Yellow Ribbon Program, which allows approved institutions to partially or fully cover tuition and fees that exceed those covered by the GI Bill.

Several websites have compiled lists of veteran-friendly colleges, including:

• Victory Media. This list includes four-year colleges and universities, as well as technical/trade schools that “offer military students the best services, programs, discounts, scholarships, clubs, networking and staff.” The link takes you to a page that gives the history and an overview of the list; to view the list itself, click on “2013 List” at the top. Once there, you can search for colleges by state. This article on NBC News’s website explains the criteria and methodology Victory Media uses to generate its list.
• U.S. Veterans Magazine. According to the magazine’s website, “Military friendly colleges offer some important benefits that are not provided by all schools, such as added support for Post 9/11 GI Bill  Benefits, participation in the Yellow Ribbon Program, availability of tuition discounts and scholarships for military students, and the option to study entirely online.”
• Military Times Edge. This website has a list of the best career and technical colleges for veterans, which includes community colleges. The link takes you to information about the survey used to generate the list; to access the list itself, click “The rankings” under “Read more” on the left. Military Times Edge also has a list of the best four-year colleges for veterans.

There are numerous websites that provide information about scholarships for veterans. Here are a few, and you can find more by doing a search for “scholarships for veterans”.

• Fastweb
• CollegeScholarships.org
• Military.com Scholarship Finder

If you are still in the military and are transferred frequently, you might consider attending a college that’s part of the SOC, or Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges.  The 1900 colleges and universities that belong to this association have agreements to accept each other’s transfer credits, and many of the schools also offer online programs. This website provides more information about the SOC and has a link to the SOC Consortium

Guide, which lists all of the member colleges.

Finally, here is an article from U.S. News and World Report that describes some of the challenges veterans encounter in college and what colleges are doing to address those challenges. The article also mentions an executive order issued by President Obama last April that requires colleges to be more transparent in providing information about financial aid and graduation rates.

Thank you to all of our servicemen and women, and Happy Veterans Day!

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Where, exactly, can you find answers to questions like these?  A good place to start is The National Survey for Student Engagement, or NSSE (pronounced “nessie”).  This yearly survey, conducted since 2000, asks students at hundreds of colleges about their “participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The results provide an estimate of how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college.” (NSSE website).

The NSSE survey also addresses another aspect of college life that U.S. News overlooks: how students spend their time outside of class.  After all, college is (or should be) about more than just going to class and studying.  In fact, I would argue that over the course of a college career, one can learn just as much outside of the classroom as inside it.  Unlike high school, where you’re in school for approximately seven hours a day, five days a week, in college you only attend class for 12-15 hours per week.  While you should be spending some of your “free time” studying, you’ll still have considerably more unscheduled, unstructured time than you did in high school.
To assess how students spend their time, NSSE asks about their involvement in a variety of extracurricular activities such as clubs, sports, fraterntities and sororities, and community service.  Additionally, the survey has questions about students’ participation in activities that are more academically-oriented, such as independent study, research, study abroad, and internships.  It also asks how much time students spend “relaxing and socializing”.
To find out which colleges have participated in the NSSE survey, visit the organization’s website.  There, you can view a list of all the participating colleges (organized by state) and the years they participated, or you can search for a specific college by clicking on the link on the left.  While NSSE does not publish individual colleges’ results on its website, you usually can find these on a participating college’s website.  If you know a college has participated in the survey but can’t find its results, call the admissions office.
As with the rankings in U.S. News and World Report, the data collected by the National Survey of Student Engagement should be just one source of information in your college search.  However, unlike U.S. News and many other rankings, NSSE provides a more holistic picture of the college experience.

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