The Psychology of College Choice

As the school year winds down, high school seniors are going through an important rite of passage – what to do after high school? May 1st is the typical deadline for high school seniors to make their college decision, which makes the month of April a 30-day stretch of stress and anxiety in many households across the country. The high school graduation parties and summer family reunions will soon be here, and students need a story to tell when relatives ask, “so what are you going to do in the fall?” Sorting through the various aspects of a decision that has a significant effect on the trajectory of one's life can be overwhelming. Fully understanding the variables and the choices in play is a critical component to making the right decision that can help ease that natural anxiety.

Twenty years ago, I took a class called the Psychology of Student Success as part of my doctoral program. One of the topics covered was the psychology of college choice – why do students choose the colleges they do? The research was one of the most scattered, inconclusive bodies of knowledge I ever encountered in my studies. It uncovered variables such as familiarity (parents or sibling attended); academic program (when most students change their major multiple times); social reasons (high school friends are attending); and several other factors that held great influence over choosing a college but have little to do with the eventual satisfaction with the overall college experience.

At 18 years old, it seems unrealistic to think that we know exactly what we want in a college when the college experience is typically an unknown frontier in great contrast to high school. Sorting through the information is particularly hard when colleges seem to blend all too easily into an indistinguishable array of pretty buildings, smiling tour guides, and piles of information that can easily morph into a hodgepodge of ambiguity – leaving a prospective student to sort through marginal differences when trying to decide between colleges.

Our Vice President for Learning & Academic Affairs, Dr. Maryrose Eannace, always speaks about how a successful college decision is comprised of a triangle of choice in which all three points need to be satisfied – the head, the heart, and the wallet. If all three aren't accounted for, students run the risk of making a choice that may limit their immediate and long-term success. The head component is comprised of all the quantitative factors – location, enrollment size, academic program choices, campus life, housing options, and other specific things students might be looking for in a college. The heart component is comprised of the qualitative factors – emotional reaction to the idea of the college, the feeling when you walk around campus, first impressions when meeting faculty, staff, and students, walking through the buildings and visualizing spending the next few years there. And finally, the wallet component is as straight forward as can be – is the college affordable and how much debt may be a part of the future after graduation? Satisfying any two and not the third will create risk for success. If the wallet is satisfied (graduate with no debt) and the head is satisfied (all logical criteria are satisfied), but the heart isn't there (it just doesn't feel right and there isn't a connection), the likelihood of the student being engaged and committed is not good. Likewise, if the head and heart are satisfied but a student graduates with a mountain of crushing debt, it's not likely to have been worth it in the long run.

It's very difficult to tell an 18-year-old facing one of the most significant decisions in their life to this point that it will all work out eventually. Phrases like, “It's not so much where you start as it is where you finish” hold little weight when all that seems to matter at 18 is where you start. It might be difficult for 18-year-olds to tune out peer pressure, but in reality, the opinions of their high school friends probably won't matter as much a year from now. The important part is that they make that college choice and get themselves excited about wherever they go, because it's not so much the college that will make them successful as much as their own personal attitude and motivation to engage, connect, and finish that will.  

I haven't seen the most recent research, but I have my own theory about the psychology of student success – we all have the choice to make the best decision we can with the information we have and make the most of whatever experience those decisions provide us.  

If you have any comments or questions, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

Silver Linings

I had the great pleasure of joining my family and some friends at the Kacey Musgraves concert at MVCC this past weekend at our own Robert R. Jorgensen Center. Our amazing Events Office partnered with Big Frog FM Country to bring Kacey to town. She’s a two-time Grammy Award winner and two-time Country Music Award winner who writes playfully vivid lyrics.  Kacey and her band gave a great performance and I emerged a new fan as her music provided me with a new lens on our world.

My academic training in organizational development often orients my mind to applying concepts and experiences – however disparate – to our College as a way to continually analyze and understand where we are.  One of Kacey’s hit songs is called “Silver Lining,” and I bought it the day after the concert. Some of the lyrics quickly brought to mind our current enrollment and budget situation. As she sings, “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining, it’s gotta be a cloudy day. If you wanna fill your bottle up with lightening, you’re gonna have to stand in the rain.” Kacey captures the two sides of every coin paradox that certainly applies to where we are with our enrollment – as we now return to “pre-recession enrollment levels.”

We’re emerging from the Great Recession where the counter-cyclical nature of community enrollment was magnified in an unprecedented manner. From 2007-2014, MVCC had the 3rd largest percentage enrollment increase within the SUNY system (28%) and assumed the highest percentage of Pell-eligible and career-oriented students while maintaining the 5th lowest tuition and the 2nd lowest cost per student in the system. This was due in large part to the regional economic toll of the recession combined with our creative and aggressive outreach efforts – when people can't find work, they go back to college to upgrade their skills, and we were there for them. 

As the economy got a stronger footing in 2013 and people went back to work (the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% to 5.5%), the declining enrollment impact was amplified by the fact that the high school graduating class was the first one born after Griffiss Air Force Base closed 18 years earlier in 1995. The subsequent overall drop in high school graduates certainly has had a negative impact on our enrollment, but ironically, the percentage of high school graduates in Oneida County attending MVCC has increased in the past few years, surpassing 30% this past fall.

While we were expanding enrollment 5% to 10% a year from 2009-2012, some wondered why we would pursue such growth knowing it could not be maintained in the long term. The short answer is that MVCC needed to be there for this community when it needed us most – during a once-in-a-century recession. The positive relationships and the community trust that was nurtured as the result of our response has been confirmed in a recent community assessment that involved nearly 900 individuals participating in interviews and focus groups.

From that assessment, it seems clear that we do have lightning in a bottle, but now we just need to stand in the rain for a little bit. And while the current budget makes for some cloudy days, the silver lining is that we have an abundance of partnerships, as well as a deeper sense of our core mission, to provide a trained workforce and educated citizenry through a robust array of workforce development programs and a heightened commitment to the liberal arts and sciences.

The future economic outlook for our community has never been brighter.  MVCC is now seen as a central catalyst to helping reverse four decades of economic decline in the next 5-10 years, as we collectively pursue a diverse high-tech economy that will be oh so sweet.  We have some challenging decisions to be made in the next few months to balance the 2015-16 budget, but as Kacey Musgraves sings, “If you wanna find the honey, you can’t be scared of the bees. And if you wanna see the forest, you’re gonna have to look past the trees.”

Those lyrics are on point as I think about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. Cloudy days are all too easy to find here in the Mohawk Valley, but fortunately, the silver linings are getting easier to spot as well.