In a graduate program about 20 years ago, I interviewed six undergraduate students attending one university about their reasons for choosing it. Specifically, I wanted to learn what factors students considered in their decision. Through my review of the literature at that time, I learned that college choice is influenced by factors which can be divided into two types: personal student characteristics and external influences.
For high school students, the external influences of friends, family, and high school personnel impacted their college choice. Students and parents might decide on a college based on their joint perception of the quality of an institution. For my interviewees, religion and parents’ education appeared related to college choice. College costs may affect the probability that a student will attend college and even a particular college. The student characteristic “socioeconomic status” interacted with the two external influences of institutional cost and financial aid.
An external influence outside of family and high school personnel is the economy. For example, when economic conditions produce fewer jobs for college graduates, potential students tend to favor institutions which focus on professional or vocational paths. As the job market improves for non-college graduates, they become increasingly less likely to return to school.
The student characteristic “ability” affected students’ application decisions. They may judge their chances for admission based on their high school achievements and then apply only to those institutions. Financial aid, an external influence, also interacted with ability: those with high financial need and low ability were less likely to consider as many colleges as those students in the opposite situation. The higher the students’ aptitude, achievement, educational aspirations, family income, and parents’ education, the more likely they were to choose expensive, selective, private, and geographically distant four-year colleges and universities. In addition, race, sex, religion, personality, lifestyle, self-image, personal values, benefits sought, parents’ personalities, and environmental factors may also impact students’ college choice.
The institutional characteristics of location, academic programs, and institutional communications also affected a student’s college choice. Campus visits made quite an impression on my interviewees: for two of them, their visits helped them decide on that particular university. In general, students appeared more attracted to those institutions which offer a broad curriculum, close geographical location, more financial aid awards, and lower overall costs. In terms of their final choice of a college, students seemed most influenced by the institutional characteristics of cost, size, quality, programs, location, athletics, financial aid, social atmosphere, religious emphasis, and job availability. My interviewees had various reasons for choosing the particular post-secondary educational institution: cost, location, religious affiliation, reputation, campus, academic programs, financial aid, transfer option, small classes, and best friend attended the same school.
My interview included a question about the student’s use of the Internet during the search process. For the students I interviewed, their college choice appeared to have been partially determined by how they conducted the college search, if they had the knowledge and skills to perform a search, and if they felt limited by family constraints before beginning their search.
Since my research of about 20 years ago, external influences have expanded beyond the traditional word-of-mouth conversations among friends, families, and neighbors. Whitney Lehmann compared these traditional sources with “eWOM” or electronic word of mouth conversations. Examples of eWOM include blogs, review sites, and social networking sites where individuals or groups, who are often strangers, can interact with each other and share their opinions. Several social networking platforms did not exist until after 2003: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Lehmann asked about the use of traditional word-of-mouth versus eWOM to 276 first-time, non-transfer undergraduate freshmen students who were enrolled at the University of Miami and born between 1985 and 1996. The conclusions: the data suggested that traditional word-of-mouth had a greater perceived influence than eWOM on these students' college choice. On the other hand, the data also suggested that eWOM had a greater perceived influence during the search phase as opposed to the choice phase. A more specific finding about eWOM: it had a greater perceived influence via online reviews or forums rather than through social networking sites. eWOM influenced a certain percentage of students when making application and enrollment decisions: one-third used eWOM when making an application decision and one-fourth used eWOM when making an enrollment decision. (“The Influence of Electronic Word-of-Mouth on College Search and Choice”, College and University, 92 no. 4, Nov 2017: 2-6).
Also in 2017, Marcia Layton Turner examined two specific online sources used by potential college students: school websites and social media. She distinguished the types of information students gathered from these different sources: general information about the school itself from school websites but a sense of the school climate from social media. Per a 2017 report that she cites, 2 out of 5 students decided on where to attend based on social media, but only after gathering information from school websites. The social media sources that students most commonly used include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube so schools do likewise. (“Like, Love, Delete: Social Media’s Influence on College Choice”, Journal of College Admission, no. 237, Fall 2017: 31-33).
Now, six years later, a health pandemic has impacted everyone in the world: the virus Covid-19. The repercussions, which are ongoing, have affected potential college students thinking and planning for college, if they even decide to attend college. Also, what about the misinformation generated over these last six years about Covid and other events? Few states require the teaching of media literacy in schools so how do students learn to check the credibility of what they read and see online?
