JANE BRYANT QUINN
The college-search season is pretty much over for high school seniors. The mouse has been passed to juniors, whose turn it is to find a school.
Yes, the mouse. Every year, a higher percentage of students turns first to the Internet to see what the schools have to offer. In a survey last year of 500 higher-ability students, 78 percent had visited individual college Web sites, according to Art & Science Group, a college marketing consultant in Baltimore, Md. That compares with 58 percent in 1997 and just 4 percent in 1996.
The colleges didn’t expect the Internet hordes so soon. They’re scrambling to put their best Web foot forward and deal with a rising tide of e-mailed questions and requests.
For students, the Web is a fast, free way of getting a feel for different kinds of colleges and universities. You can reach beyond local and brand-name schools to find interesting places you otherwise might not have thought of. Use the Web to:
? Take a college tour: Most schools offer online viewbooks stocked with color photos of the campus at its best, or short recruiting videos. A few give video tours, where a camera follows a campus guide from place to place.
You might even get a 360-degree view of the campus from various spots. Duke University’s virtual tour provides 10 panoramic scenes.
Some schools sponsor a virtual open house. You join a live chat with students, faculty members and admissions officers. This spring, the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University did two live video presentations. Prospective students heard about the curriculum, saw photos of the campus and business school, and could put questions to faculty and admissions officers.
Web tours give you a feel for faraway schools that might be too expensive to visit. And they narrow your choice among the schools within traveling range. For an online index of what’s available, go to www.campustours.com.
Warning: If your modem is slow, clicking through Web tours will take a while. You might prefer the traditional viewbook, with photos in picture-album form. You can usually order one online.
? Gather data: You can check the school’s list price, student-aid practices, student activities, classes taught in your field of interest and your odds of making the cut academically. To judge academics, look at the students’ average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
? Screen for schools: At some college-search sites, you can enter various criteria location, size, cost, sports, major and get a list of schools to check. The most popular site is Collegeboard.org. Some others are CollegeEdge.com, CollegeNET.com, CollegeView.com.
You’ll get different lists at different sites, depending on what’s in their databases and whether they take payments from schools to be on display.
Payments aren’t generally disclosed (much of the Web is still ethically challenged). But even paid sites expose you to schools you haven’t heard of before, some of which might interest you.
? Schedule a visit: Some schools offer preview days, when prospective students come to campus, attend events and meet with professors in their area of interest. You can schedule your day online, to avoid events that overlap.
But students are more reluctant to talk to admissions and financial-aid officers online, ASG reports. A majority would rather get on the phone with someone real.
? Apply: Some schools provide online application forms. Starting this year, the business school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology outlawed paper applications.
Where they have a choice, however, even students who gather data online prefer to apply the traditional way, says ASG’s Rick Hesel. He’s not sure why. Maybe they think online applications won’t be taken as seriously. Or they may want to enclose other things: artwork, music on disk, videocassettes.
Helpful as the Web is, nothing beats a real visit to campus. But virtual tours help you find which schools may suit you best.
Living too long
We know that we ought to insure ourselves against the risk of dying too soon. But something new is happening, thanks to healthy living and good medicine.
We have to think about insuring against the risk of living too long.
You’re pretty safe, financially, if you have a company pension and can live on that income plus your Social Security check. Both cover you for life. Social Security rises with the inflation rate, so it never loses purchasing power. Some pensions, especially public pensions, have inflation adjustments, too.
But around 53 percent of the workforce isn’t in a pension plan, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Instead, they have some form of personal savings say, 401(k) or 403(b) plans, inheritances or savings outside a retirement plan.
If you retire at 60, you might live for another 30 or 40 years. How can you be sure that your savings will last as long as you do?
That’s a job for immediate-pay annuities. An insurance company takes your lump-sum savings and turns it into an income for life. You can also choose to cover the joint lifetimes of you and your spouse.
A fixed immediate annuity gives you a guaranteed sum each month. Fixed payments make it easy to budget but inflation will nibble away at your purchasing power.
A variable immediate annuity links your income to the future performance of stocks and bonds. In some years, your income will decline. But over time, it stands a good chance of rising perhaps substantially.
Variable payments are generally lower than fixed payments, at the start. But they could rise much higher, over the years.
Fixed immediate annuities can be bought later in life say, early 80s for a woman, late 70s for a man, says Moshe Arye Milevsky, an assistant professor of finance at York University in Toronto.
Until then, you might create a home-baked annuity. Put 60 percent or more of your money into diversified stock-owning funds, then withdraw the very same monthly amount the insurance annuity would have paid. At a later age, buy the lifetime insurance annuity with the money you have left.
Variable immediate annuities, however, should be bought at retirement. You need to allow enough time for a stock strategy to work.
Syndicated columnist Jane Bryant Quinn can be reached in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200.
