picture of cap and gown, textbooks

City-by-city directories of western states colleges and trade schools

—Colleges, universities and vocational institutes in the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming

Our western states college directories:

Our western states trade school directories: (schools with a website)

Picking a location to attend college

At some point, finding the right college or trade school will be on one‘s agenda. Oftentimes their location is the deciding factor and our ‘browsable’ directories of western states colleges are the quickest way to see the schools within a given area… and with just links to their websites lets them tell their own story. It's a simple approach. While often ditched by the latest technology, simplicity doesn’t throw functionality out with the bath water.

Help for counseling, admissions, scholarships and student loans

While there are many questions one faces in choosing a career, from its stability to the financial rewards, high schools and colleges can make available counselors to help you decide. Of course, in order to achieve your goals, it’s also about finding the right college, getting admitted and paying for it all.

Although only six western states belong to the Career Information System (CIS) network, it's an excellent source for guidance and information (generally free to the state's residents).

Arizona Career Information System
Idaho Career Information System (good - see student and parents for lots of free advice without having to 'enroll' in the CIS program first)
Montana Career Information System
Nevada Career Information System
Oregon Career Information System
WOIS/The Career Information System (Washington State)

If you need additional help the following links may prove helpful (does not constitute an endorsement):

Careers & Colleges (offers searches for scholarships, colleges, student loans, career schools and provides career assessments)
Common Application (The) (for undergraduate college admissions)
My College Options (offers college search, help researching majors, college planning tips, high school counselors, college admissions)
Xap Student Center (offers how to plan and prepare for a career, college matching wizard, financial aid wizard, scholarship search. application assistance)
Zinch (offers application assistance, 'optimizes exposure in the college recruitment process', guidance counselors)

Fateful college decisions

Since decisions are always fateful, of an everlasting impact both professionally and personally, the need for due diligence is stressed as the rewards are often relative to one’s researching efforts. Right decisions shouldn’t rely on luck. A flexible curriculum should also be considered allowing one to re-focus later if a better idea arises. After all, born of the imagination goals evolve… seldom resembling the targets of yesteryear.

Important: Be aware of 'diploma mills'... for more information see:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation
FTC Consumer Alert - Diploma Mills: Degrees of Deception
FTC (facts for business) - Avoid Fake-Degree Burns By Researching Academic Credentials
Washington (State) Higher Education Coordinating Board - FAQs about Diploma Mills

Thoughts on education

With an agrarian society having been tossed aside as an ideal, one of true independence and self-sufficiency at the household level, of a closeness to nature, to family, getting a good ‘bourgeois’ education is more important today than ever before. In the process however one’s spiritual side should not be forgotten. While it’s the tendency, often being intellectually incompatible, it is the other half of 'success'. Whether for better or worse, it is the reality we've been dealt… the first minted coin made it inevitable.

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs." --- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"Among all the evidences for the existence of an overruling Providence that I can discover, I see none more convincing than the elaborate and, for the most part, effectual provision that has been made for the suppression of genius. The more I see of the world, the more necessary I see it to be, that by far the greater part of what is written or done should be of so fleeting a character as to take itself away quickly. That is the advantage in the fact that so much of our literature is journalism.

Schools and colleges are not intended to foster genius and to bring it out. Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way. They are as the artificial obstructions in a hurdle race, tests of skill and endurance, but in themselves useless. Still, so necessary is it that genius and originality should be abated that, did not academies exist, we should have had to invent them." --- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Last modified: 02/11/10