With a seventeen-year-old high school junior for a son, the time has come once again to go college shopping. And as one of those guys who hates to shop, I naturally was looking for something that would allow me to visit a university or two hundred without leaving home. After all, travel expenses can be...well, expensive.

So imagine my joy at finding not one, but two CD-ROMs which provide information, supplemented by sites on the World Wide Web, on thousands of higher education institutions. And one of them a multimedia presentation, too?

College View has come out with a new version of its College Search CD-ROM program -- this one designed for consumers, not just educational institutions. It contains information on 3,550 two- and four-year colleges and universities.

The program offers the ability to customize the search process based on a dozen variables such as the location, size of the community surrounding the school, distance from home, types of degrees offered, racial breakdown of student population, and financial aid packages.

If more information is desired, the program offers two alternatives: it generates letters which can be used to request additional information from the schools being considered; and the College View Web edition allows users to contact admission offices for information or to file an application for admission.

The Web site also offers another valuable asset -- the Coffee Shop. Here, interactive messages and chat rooms help users locate students at the institution being appraised to discuss life on that campus.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the program, however, is its multimedia capabilities. Brief audio and video presentations allow Users to view "snapshots" of selected institutions.

One aspect of the program that did bother me was the criteria for examining the racial makeup of an institution. College View considers 10 percent to be the threshold for minority populations. In other words, if you are looking for a historically Black institution, you will get a list of every school which has a student population that is at least ten percent Black.