Some Questions and Answers

College Kingdom has been live for a few weeks now. I thought in this blog post that I would answer some of the questions we’ve received.

Q. Why doesn’t school xxx come up higher in the search results when I use the Google Custom Search™?
A. The results are determined by Google. Searching the school websites is just like searching Google, but without any third party / non-accredited school sites clouding up the results. The ranking of pages within the search results is dependent upon all the factors that normally affect a page’s rank (page titles, copy, links, etc). While we have the ability to give more weight to certain pages to help them rank higher, we currently do not do so.

Q. Why doesn’t every school have a website listed?
A. We have spent hundreds of hours identifying the schools’ websites. Simply put, we couldn’t find the websites for some schools – mainly beauty schools or schools that reside in Puerto Rico. For the schools whose websites we do have, we verify the website each quarter (sometimes websites can change, schools can merge, etc – our quarterly update helps ensure we have the most accurate information). If you are aware of a school website that we don’t have or a change to an existing website, please let us know.

Q. I know a school offers a program in xxxx, why doesn’t it appear?
A. The academic program information we have comes from the IPEDS survey. There are numerous accredited schools that we have listed on our site, that have not completed the IPEDS survey. As a result, we do not currently have any program information for these schools. In addition, the IPEDS survey was completed by the schools some time ago. Academic program offerings change all the time, so some new program may not be listed or the school may not have added all of the programs when they completed the IPEDS survey. We plan to offer the ability for schools to dynamically update their information on College Kingdom. In the meantime, we’d be happy to manually modify any school’s information to make it more accurate or more complete – just let us know what needs to be changed or added.

Q. Why don’t you offer tuition / room and board information?
A. Most tuition numbers reported on other college search sites is out of date. In addition, the tuition, fees, room & board, can vary depending upon what you study, where you live, etc. We believe the most accurate and up to date information will come from the schools themselves. It’s why we allow you to search each school’s website from their school page and of course, search some / all school websites throughout our site.

Q. Why does Penn Foster have a logo / ads on their school page, but the other schools do not?
A. Another feature we plan to offer is for schools to have enhanced school profile pages. The enhanced profile will allow the schools to display their logo and advertisements, among other benefits. Penn Foster is helping us test this functionality. An important point to note - we’ll never limit the core information we have on a school based upon whether the school has an enhanced profile or not. All information will be displayed.

I hope this is helpful to you. If you have other question about College Kingdom, please let me know.