Picking the right college can be a big ordeal, which requires balancing respected reputations and affordability. Then you have to consider if you want a large or small student body, geographical distance from home, and an urban or suburban setting. Well now there's the World University Rankings iPhone app, perfect for high school students fresh out of there SAT exams and that are looking for the right university.
The World University Rankings app pulls data from 400 top ranked Colleges by Times Higher Education to help answer these questions and more. The main college browsing options in the app is to go down the ranked list of universities, which are customizable based on your preferences of the teaching faculty, student diversity, and influence with innovation or reputation. The lists load lighting quick, populating as soon as you start the app, plus they can also round down by filtered categories of region and cost.
While we though the filtered search was a nice, simple touch to the app, it can only pinpoint a location down to the country level. For example; we setup our filters for the US region, a low tuition cost and a low cost of living and the app gave us five universities including the Colorado School of Mines, MIT, Clemson University in South Carolina, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virgina and the University of North Texas. However to offset this there's also a embedded satellite Google map to give users a more tactile way of searching for a University and to view where it is.
When looking at one college, the app gave us even more information with a brief summary of the university along with statistics about the faculty, student body demographics, course subject matter, and the latest news from campus. We think one major omission of this app is the lack of a search function, so we could not quickly look up or check back to a college we wanted. The app does not list every college in existence since it is powered by Thompson Reuter's data, but it more than makes up for it's weaknesses with its ease of use. The World University Rankings app goes for $4.99 on the iTunes Store.
