The way it’s discussed in policy circles, choosing a college can sound clinical. Would-be students weigh data points on graduation rates, student-loan debt, and salaries, then base their decisions on such metrics. Or they would, if only they were better informed.
The current obsession with return on investment is understandable. College is expensive, debt is commonplace, and the job market for new graduates leaves something to be desired. Getting a degree does pay off, on average. Still, going to college is taking a risk.
Teenagers, though, are not robots. To be sure, many prospective students’ choices are driven chiefly by financial circumstances, geography, or clear career goals. But especially for traditional-age students on residential campuses, a single-minded focus on ROI ignores all that might happen to them between sending in an admissions deposit and receiving a diploma.
College isn’t just an investment in students’ human capital. It is also a phase of life.
Kristen Dickerson, a school counselor at Gahanna Lincoln High School, outside Columbus, Ohio, wants her students to avoid taking on too much debt. But she also reminds them, as they’re making up their minds, that “you have to eat, sleep, breathe, live in this place.”
The data points on college outcomes do matter, says Ben Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia. But asking prospective students to ignore everything else, he says, “would be like telling kids, Just buy sneakers based on their durability.”
For many students, choosing where to go to college is, at least in part, an emotional decision. That’s not one more higher-education problem to be solved. It might even be a good thing.
Comfort and Community
Numbers loom large in the life of anyone who works in admissions. Yet it’s a cliché in the profession that the dean’s fate rests on the fickle decisions of 17-year-olds.
New research from Longmire and Company, an enrollment-management consulting firm, resonates with that reality. Longmire had already discovered that students’ likelihood of enrolling at a college was correlated more closely with their excitement about attending than with the college’s cost or perceived quality.
A follow-up study of college-bound high-school students released this spring shed more light on that ineffable process. Longmire found that more than a third of students headed to four-year colleges could recall the exact moment they realized a particular college was the one for them.
Those moments were personal, but some themes emerged. The realizations usually occurred on the campus, especially as prospective students were “connecting with current students in relaxed, unstructured environments.”
The takeaway for colleges? Their role is to put prospective students “in a place where this epiphany can happen,” says Bob Longmire, the company’s president. “I learned a long time ago: Facts tell, but emotions sell.”
Ask admissions counselors how they gauge prospective students’ interest, and they will probably mention the campus visit. Sometimes they’ll even grow wistful: If we could just get them to campus …
There’s a chicken-or-egg question about visits: Do they change students’ minds? Or are the students who show up already predisposed to enroll? Either way, going to see the campus sends admissions offices a signal. So Longmire’s finding about students’ epiphanies most likely rings true in the field. The idea of a “relaxed, unstructured” moment, though, may cause some discomfort.
Colleges tend to emphasize their formal visit programs. But if the crush of identical viewbook photos of students reading under a tree failed to give prospective students the impression that all colleges are basically interchangeable, a few official campus tours just might.
The reason? Admissions offices don’t want to lose anyone. The staff is happy for students to have that positive “aha!” moment, says Jeff Kallay, chief executive officer of Render Experiences, a firm that helps colleges improve their campus visits. But if a visit accurately conveys what a college is really like, other students will “have an ‘aha!’ moment that they don’t want to go there,” Mr. Kallay says, “and no one wants to talk about that.”
So what gets prospective students excited about a particular college? It could be anything.
Mr. Castleman, the UVa professor, would like to see prospective students focus on the subjective facets of colleges that connect to their development. For instance, a high schooler could use the campus visit to suss out how students build a community there. But teenagers, he says, gravitate toward the tangible.
“Some institutions intentionally exploit this,” Mr. Castleman says, by focusing on attractive amenities. A student might learn something about a college by considering its graduation rate, he says, but “it’s a lot easier to latch onto a fancy dorm room or a wood-fired pizza.”
Visitors connect with housing and dining for a reason, says Mr. Kallay, the campus-visit consultant. Parents are looking for a college that is safe, that they can trust to meet students’ needs. The way a campus meets the most basic of needs — food and shelter — provides some clues about how students will be cared for.
Colleges build fancy dorms and climbing walls because students seek them, says Tim Lee, director of undergraduate admissions at the State University of New York at Albany. Sure, students want to be comfortable. Their comfort can also have important consequences. “The more engaged you are,” Mr. Lee says, “the better able you are to persist and graduate.”
That gets back to the sense of community Mr. Castleman talks about. Even if students make an entirely pragmatic decision with regard to their intended major, career path, and loan-repayment strategy, plans can change. Not every pre-med becomes a physician. “Do we lose 50 percent of our students because they couldn’t get past o-chem?” Mr. Lee asks. “We hope they’re attached to the university in some other way.”
Chemistry Matters
So how should prospective students approach a decision that involves both hard facts and unmeasurable qualities?
Even when data points are easy to quantify, there are still quirks in how people think about them, says Carey K. Morewedge, an associate professor of marketing at Boston University. For instance, people tend to overstate the importance of an upfront cost — like tuition — relative to a long-term reward.
Comparing those quantifiable traits to the unquantifiable ones adds another layer of complexity. But maybe there are ways to investigate the intangibles. Students might benefit from an index of previous graduates’ happiness, says Mr. Morewedge. (At least one effort to capture something like that is underway.)
And it makes sense to talk with current students, Mr. Morewedge says, as the prospective students in the Longmire study reported doing. Current students can speak to aspects of the college experience that a high schooler’s parents or friends probably cannot. Still, Mr. Morewedge adds a note of caution. The current student a prospect meets on a campus tour is never going to be a representative sample, and indeed “the admissions office may have selected them because they’re particularly enthusiastic.”
Perhaps college selection is like online dating, says Dan Chambliss, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College, in New York. Someone creating a profile probably wants to set basic criteria that potential dates must meet. That part of the process is rational. But once the daters meet, will things move forward? That comes down to chemistry.
Students have to live at the college they pick, Mr. Chambliss says. And if they hit a roadblock — a bad day, a difficult class — “they’re not going to go back to the website and console themselves” by reading about its high graduation rate.
Mr. Chambliss has observed that two sorts of students at Hamilton appear to be unhappy there: Those who picked the college because it was the highest-ranked one they got into (often international students), and those who came primarily for its financial aid.
Money, of course, matters a lot for most prospective students. It can constrain not only which college someone ultimately chooses, but also which campuses they can visit. Some parents are willing to go to great lengths and into significant debt to get their children into their dream college. There are real questions about whether or not that is wise.
Perhaps, as in Mr. Chambliss’s dating example, prospective students should use cold, hard facts to come up with an initial set of college candidates. Then, when it’s time to make a final choice, they could go with their gut. On the other hand, maybe the final decision is the best time to devote extra attention to what they’ll pay and what they stand to gain in return.
Helping students understand the pragmatic aspects of choosing a college is a worthy goal. But even with a firm grasp on all the data points, the minds of prospective students will still turn to the smell of the food, the look of the residence hall, the chance encounter in the student union. Those aren’t metrics, but they matter — especially when you’re trying to decide whether a college is a place you can see yourself growing up.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
