There has been a proliferation of consumer information meant to help prospective students choose a college. A number of those tools seem to take it for granted that prospects will embark on a broad, national search. They assume that prospective students are shopping around, just as they might for a car or some other big-ticket consumer item, and that they’re willing to pick up and move anywhere in the country.
That kind of college search might dominate hand-wringing news articles and cocktail-party chatter, but it’s far from standard.
For many students, the set of choices is not the thousands of colleges sprinkled across the country or the name brands clustered at the top of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. It’s the contained, sometimes even sparse, group of colleges within a reasonable radius of home.
That reality raises questions about what sort of information is meaningful to the average prospective student—and about the utility of recent efforts to help them, not least the Obama administration’s college ratings, a draft outline of which was released on Friday.
The numbers show that many students who go off to college don’t go all that far. Fifty-four percent of freshmen attending four-year institutions in 2013 went to one no more than 100 miles from home, according to the most-recent Freshman Survey from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, part of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Nearly 30 percent were 101 to 500 miles from home.
Moreover, that survey reflects only the experience of first-time, full-time students attending four-year colleges. It doesn’t count students enrolled part time or at community colleges—students who are particularly likely to choose a local option. Adults, especially, may have work and family ties that rule out a move.
It’s no accident that so many students go to college near where they already live. After all, a majority of students attend public colleges. States subsidize residents’ tuition and, in many cases, offer merit or need-based scholarships in an effort to educate and retain their work forces.
“Students more often than not are working in this closed system of institutions,” says David A. Hawkins, executive director for educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. As a result, he says, the information that serves them best focuses on career options, and on what they’ll have to pay.
The Importance of Cost
Tara K. Lebar has seen this pattern play out in Kansas. Most students at Blue Valley West High School, where she is a professional school counselor, come from upper-middle-class families, Ms. Lebar says. But that doesn’t mean money is no object when it comes to choosing a college. “At the end of the day,” she says, “the cost drives the decision.”
The top 15 percent or so of the class tends to do a global search, Ms. Lebar says, but most students look to stay nearby.
In-state tuition isn’t the only cost savings if they do, Ms. Lebar adds. Flying to a distant college is an additional expense. And the cost of living is lower in Kansas and its neighboring states than on the coasts.
There are additional reasons to stay near home, Ms. Lebar says. Many students want to be near their families and in a place they know, she says—in other words, “where they are comfortable.”
The school, in a suburb of Kansas City, sends a lot of its graduates to the University of Kansas and to Kansas State University.
Even for students who want to go farther afield, Ms. Lebar recommends visiting nearby colleges to get a sense of whether they prefer a large or a small campus. After all, she says, “we have every type of college within a two-hour driving distance.” They can begin a national search with Ms. Lebar’s help once they have a better idea of what they’re looking for.
At North Central High School in Indianapolis, only about a quarter of the graduating class goes to college out of state, says Susie Bremen, coordinator for college counseling. There are lots of good options in Indiana, she says. And whether their parents went there or not, many students feel that Indiana University at Bloomington, an hour away, is “their legacy.”
The high school has a sizable first-generation and multicultural population, Ms. Bremen says. Some students want to live at home during college, not only to save money but also to help their families by working or helping care for younger siblings. For them, the local community college or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis can be good options.
Of course, just because students go to college relatively close to home doesn’t mean they never consider more-distant alternatives.
But there are some groups for whom that is probably true. Take community-college students. Many of them probably applied to exactly one college—the one that they’re attending, says David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges. “They choose their local community college,” he says, “precisely because it is their local community college.”
For such students, Mr. Baime says, comparisons of programs might be more valuable than comparisons of colleges.
Community-college students are just one population whose needs are not necessarily met by tools that allow them to compare institutions across the country, says David A. Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Other groups that probably won’t get much out of such tools, he says, are nontraditional-age students studying online and high-school students taking dual-enrollment courses.
The data the government collects can help colleges improve themselves and can be used to hold them accountable, Mr. Longanecker says. But that doesn’t mean the data convey what consumers need to know.
‘Education Deserts’
In some parts of the country, particularly larger cities, a prospective student might have multiple public colleges from which to choose. But there are other places where students have few, if any, choices. About 11 percent of Americans live in “education deserts,” where there are limited public-college options—often, just one community college, according to a recent paper by Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
If a student is place-bound—unable to move because of family obligations, a job, or something else—and there’s one affordable local college, then what is the value of comparing that college to others? Furthermore, the paper argues, if the ratings are eventually tied to federal funding, as intended, a community that used to have one college might be left with none.
Since the paper came out, Mr. Hillman has wondered: “How do we build the capacity of those communities?” That’s a taller order than expecting potential students to make their way to someplace with a college that’s well rated.
Geography has been an underappreciated part of the college-selection process. Proximity to a college is associated with, and a possible causal factor in, applying to college, according to a 2009 paper by Ruth N. López Turley, now a professor of sociology at Rice University. The likely explanation, the paper argues, is convenience. Going to college is easier financially, logistically, and emotionally if there is one close by.
“Where you live constrains your choices,” Ms. Turley says, especially for the most-disadvantaged students. Some more-recent research suggests that this may be changing, she adds, at least for high-achieving, low-income students.
Some prospective students might not be as place-bound as they imagine, says Robert Shireman, executive director of California Competes, a nonprofit education-reform group. Not everyone realizes that financial aid can be used toward living expenses as well as tuition, he says, and that knowledge could enable a student to go farther away than first seemed possible.
Part of the decision to leave home comes down to risk tolerance, Mr. Shireman says. And the level of risk involved varies.
Some students are being launched. Others are helping to prop up their families. “If you don’t have a safety net,” Mr. Shireman says, “it’s a lot harder to make that leap.”
Perhaps efforts to inform students’ choices should start by grappling with that.
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.
