by our College Data Analytics TeamBeyond college level rankings to the best college for each individual veteran.
While there are plenty of sham rankings out there seeking to promote so-called military friendly schools, there are also some very good ones. The Military Times Best for Vets ranking and our own College Factual Best for Veterans rankings are among them.
These rankings are a great start, but they are indeed only a start. To drive better veteran education decisions, we have to do more to ensure each veteran is getting the best fit school for them.
Good answers start with good questions. Identifying the best colleges for veterans overall implicitly asks the question, “What are the best colleges for the average veteran?”
The problem with that “one-size-fits-all” question is that it yields a very “one-size-fits-all” answer. Every veteran and their family are unique, and so to truly help veterans make better decisions, there need to be rankings and decision tools that are as unique as them.
While many others end at college-wide rankings, this is only the starting point for us and the tools we are working on.
To enable a veteran to quickly begin to personalize the rankings, we enable each veteran to quickly filter results by state, region, academic selectivity and odds of graduating. We then go even further by allowing a veteran to change many of the factors in our ranking and see how that changes the top schools in our Custom Rankings tool.
The real power of our Best Colleges for Veterans rankings methodology is when it is applied at the programs and majors level.
The extent to which a school is a good choice for a veteran depends largely on what they want to study. The best college for Nursing, is not the same as the best for Business, is not the same for Computer Science.
We combine our in-depth veteran rankings with our similarly comprehensive program and major-level rankings to help veterans get a better idea of what colleges will both support them as a veteran and set them up for future success in their chosen career field.
Example Veteran Rankings by Major:
While each of the above allows a veteran to personalize and handful of factors to get their rankings more in alignment with their unique goals and circumstances, the optimal solution is one that would provide an entirely customized set of rankings to truly answer the only question that matters to a veteran:
Going beyond this high level question, any matching must go beyond basic concepts of veteran “friendliness” and answer the following questions:
The fact that someone is a veteran is just one dimension of them and their life. That is why our matching tools help a veteran answer all of the above questions in a comprehensive way to ultimately help them maximize the use of their GI Bill benefits to identify the best fit education their money can buy.