How Students Really Decide: College Selection from the Inside

Colleges and universities spend significant amounts of time, money, and effort to convince potential students to apply to their institutions, while publications like U.S. News and World Report publish annual lists of questionable efficacy ranking colleges in categories ranging from academics to party potential. Now, a new study has investigated what factors actually influence incoming college students in making the decision about where to apply, and, ultimately, what institution to attend. The study, How Students Really Decide: College Selection from the Inside, was conducted online in late spring 2009 by college-matching Web site Zinch.com. The 28-question survey drew more than 1,000 respondents, all high-school students in the United States who had voluntarily provided their e-mail addresses to Zinch.com. The survey population closely mirrors the demographic makeup of American college-bound students. Topics in the survey included the people and information sources that are most influential to students’ college decisions; how much institutional prestige matters; and the role that finance plays when selecting where to apply and attend.

FINDINGS

Who and What Influences Students?

• Parents were the strongest influence, by far, in students’ college decision-making process.  Fifty-eight percent of students cited their parents as “extremely influential,” or rated their influence as a 6 or a 7 on a 7-point scale of influence. Only 12.5 percent of students rated their parents’ influence as a 3 or lower.
• Teachers and school guidance counselors were significantly less influential—only 5.9 percent and 6.8 percent of students, respectively, rated them a 7 on the influence scale.
• Visits to a college campus were the most influential information source in students’ decisions of where to apply (47 percent rated “extremely influential”), followed by college Web sites (27 percent “extremely influential”) and college viewbooks (21.6 percent “somewhat influential”).

Institutional Characteristics

• When it came time to choose where to attend school, the largest percent of respondents (39.7 percent) chose to stay within 25 to 50 miles of their home.
• Students tended to apply to schools of all sizes, but when choosing where to attend, large schools came out ahead—31 percent chose schools with more than 10,000 students, and 24.6 percent chose schools with more than 5,000 but fewer than 10,000 students.
• The cost of attending a particular college was influential to students: while the largest percentage (32 percent) said costs mattered “a reasonable amount,” a combined 50.7 percent said cost influenced their choices considerably or very much.
• Most students (63.1 percent) were not swayed away from a college by the presence of large lecture classes; only 38.6 percent chose their school specifically because they wanted to avoid large lecture classes.

Emotional Concerns

• More than one-third of students (35.9 percent) said they experienced “a reasonable amount” of stress during the college application and decision process; 24 percent experienced “quite a bit” of stress and 21 percent reported experiencing “more stress than I ever imagined.”
• Institutional prestige was important to 35.5 percent of students and their families; while 42.2 percent of students said prestige wasn’t an issue for them. About 11 percent of students said prestige was important to their parents but not to them.
• The largest percentage of students (42.3 percent) called the school they chose to attend “a solid school, quite well-known regionally” while only 13 percent reported choosing “a top-tier, highly selective ‘brand name’ school.”

The complete survey results may be read in PDF format.

DID YOU KNOW?

• Students say that their “gut feeling” and the college tour are the most influential parts of a college visit (53.2 percent and  28.5 percent , respectively, called these “extremely influential”)
• Friends were only moderately influential to students’ college decisions—the largest percentage of respondents (49.5 percent) rated friends as “somewhat influential” and gave them a 4 or a 5 on the influence scale.
• College guidebooks such as Fiske Guide and Peterson’s were rated as least influential among all college information sources—37.8 percent of students called such guides “not influential at all.”