A smarter way to pick the right college

0:00You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle. When you say the names of big brands, like Coca-Cola, Apple, McDonald's, Disney, people immediately know what you're talking about, and they generally have some emotional response. Because that brand is everywhere, and they've been served a million ads about it. Well-known colleges and universities are big brands too, just like this. And teenagers who are deciding where to apply to school, They have been served up images of on-campus bliss at some of these schools their whole lives. Whether it's Harvard, Yale, MIT, Howard, Wharton, Brown, Notre Dame, University of Texas.

0:46Your favorite TV show and film characters went to these schools. So did a lot of your government leaders. Maybe your favorite college athletes or even your own family members. These places become aspirational. And you start to think, I have to go to one of these schools. And if I don't get in or I can't afford it, my life is ruined. Prestige is not worth it at any cost. This is higher education journalist Jeffrey Stalingo. He wrote a book called Dream School, Finding the College That's Right for You. And he believes that when it comes to searching for the right college, a lot of students and families get distracted by sending out a million applications and focusing on prestigious schools.

1:27And yes, going to one of these schools can open doors for you. I can attest to this as a first-generation college student who went to Brown and made a lot of connections there that helped me build my career. But just because a school is prestigious doesn't mean that it's right for you or that you'll like it there. Jeffrey interviewed one student who got into Columbia University, and at first it felt like they won the lottery. But then in their freshman year... They get to campus and they couldn't get into the classes that they wanted. There was a particular class they wanted and they said there was a waiting list until junior year.

2:00They wanted to do undergraduate research with a professor and the kids' advisor said, well, basically that professor only works with graduate students. The core curriculum, which, by the way, nobody looks at on the college tour, right, was like it was just a slog to get through. Nobody was having fun. This student didn't really look at what the social aspects of this school were like. Jeffrey says this student went home at winter break and said, Hey mom, I want to transfer to the University of Minnesota, an in-state school. He ended up transferring and I met up with him a couple of years later and he said, I have great professors, I'm doing undergraduate research, I found my group of friends.

2:37There's all these things we don't look at because all we do is look at the name on that degree, on that sticker, and we just say, that's what we want. On this episode of Life Kit, we're rethinking the college search. I'm going to hand things over to Morning Edition host Michelle Martin, who talked to Jeffrey. They'll discuss why the college admissions process gets so out of control and offer tips for what to actually look for in a college.

3:06So first, let's talk about just how crazy college admissions has gotten. Without giving my age, I applied to four schools. Okay, those were the schools my college advisor told me to apply to. I did. You did the same, what, four? Four colleges. Four schools, right? And so why is it now people are applying to 30 or 12 or what is going on here? Well, I've worked in and around higher ed for nearly 30 years. And I could say this with certainty that we kind of lost our way. We don't think about purpose anymore in higher ed. We think about prestige. And so what's happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of applications filed to the most selective colleges and universities have gone from about 600 ,000 applications to nearly 2 million applications.

3:55And so what's happening is that students are worried. They're hearing stories about kids not getting into college. And so the following year, they apply to more. And then the following year, senior class applies to more colleges. Everybody just keeps applying to more colleges. And they're kind of forgetting, by the way, that most colleges accept most students. But we keep coming back to this idea that prestige matters. And we know that success is not exclusive to just the Ivy League. Well, the other thing you point out in the book, though, isn't just that the most selective colleges are getting this huge increase in applications.

4:29Pretty much all of these schools are getting inundated with college applications, aren't they? Yes, everyone's getting them, but they mostly want the most selective. So then what happens is who says yes to a acceptance offer? And so yield, that's the percentage of students that actually say yes to a college when they get accepted. Those numbers have been falling except at the most prestigious colleges. And so colleges are left. We're trying to figure out, well, if we accept this student, are they going to come? And so there's all this guessing that goes on in the admissions offices trying to figure out whether they're going to come.

5:02Well, forgive me for putting it in such crass terms, but whose fault is this? Because it feels like it should be somebody's fault. Is it these rankings, these books or magazines that famously seem to exist only to rank colleges and they rank them according to selectivity? Or is it something else? Is it just this is actually an affluent country and more people, when you have more money, you tend to go to college? Well, I'm not trying to get out of the question, but everyone's to blame, right? So we have the Common App, which makes it now easier to apply to college with essentially a press a button.

5:34The rankings are to blame because everyone is trying to move up in the rankings. And so yield particularly is a sign of prestige because if students have 10 choices and they make that one, that shows that that's popular. Colleges are to blame because they keep adding different rounds to admission. So now we have early action and early decision, and they're trying to make students commit earlier than ever before if they get in. And then finally, at the end of the day, it's really the families. At some point, somebody has to say, stop. And this is what I'm trying to do with this book is I'm trying to give parents permission to say it's okay to think more broadly about what signals a good college.

6:15Student engagement is actually higher at some less selective colleges than it's at higher selective colleges. So if you're sending your kid off to college and you want them to find a mentor, you want them to find a faculty member who actually cares about teaching and cares about their success more than their own success, meaning, you know, the research that they're doing or their next, you know, speaking engagement or their next book, then a less selective college might actually be better for you. There has been tremendous legal and political energy around affirmative action in recent years. There's this attitude that these unqualified black and Latino kids are taking up all the spots based on your research.

6:53So, no, I mean, my last book, I was embedded in three selective colleges. And I will tell you, and this was what really frustrated me during the oral arguments in the Supreme Court a couple of years ago in the affirmative action case, is it just doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. Do they talk about race and income and ethnicity? Yes, they do. But they do it at the very end when they're trying to balance a class. And that's when you have highly qualified students from all different kinds of backgrounds. And you're saying as an institution, as is your right, by the way, with institutional autonomy, that we think diversity is important.

7:27I noticed that in your book, you didn't identify anybody by race. I mean, you gave some sort of markers about like where people live and what kind of community or what kind of high school they came from. So I'm just asking, like, is this primarily an upper middle class issue? Well, the focus on prestigious colleges, yes. Race and class definitely play a role here. Most students are in high schools where they get very little advice about college. There might be one or two counselors for hundreds of students. Most of those counselors, by the way, are also dealing with social-emotional issues. They're dealing with just, you know, getting the right classes in high school to even get into college.

8:07There's all these things people don't know. We're going to take a quick break, but when we're back with Life Kit, Jeffrey Selingo is going to give families and students tips about better ways to think about their college search.

8:27What do you hope parents, students, and counselors should look at? So I want them to, I want to give them the tools to look beyond kind of the top 25 rankings. And what should they be looking for? First, what are the colleges and universities that give you a supportive start. One in four kids are not going to make it to their sophomore year, and only 50 % of students even graduate in four years. So you want to go to a place that has kind of built-in support structures. Many of them call them first-year experiences, where they're giving students access to professors. They're having these wraparound services where they have, you know, classes in small cohorts for students, where essentially they have extended orientation.

9:07So you want to look for something with that first year experience. They build that scaffolding around you and then they slowly take it down as you become a sophomore, junior. And this is not just kids who don't who are first gen college students. No, this is everybody. Everybody needs this now, especially, by the way, post covid. A lot of students are coming to college and they're just not ready. They're not ready for the experience. They're not ready for the experience in the residence halls. They're not participating in clubs. They're sitting on the sidelines. They're spectators to this to this experience called college.

9:37So everybody needs that. Second, where connections are easy. We know that belonging in college matters. Again, it matters to completion. So where are you going to find professors that stick around after class that are available? When I go to visit campuses, I always walk through the academic buildings and see if the professors are actually in during office hours. Many students come to college not even knowing what office hours are. They don't even know they can go see a professor just to talk about a problem they're having or a difficulty in their class. But where are those mentors found? And they're not, by the way, just faculty members.

10:10But what you want to notice is how are the connections being made on campus as you're visiting? Do students talk to each other? Are they just looking at their phone or have their AirPods in? Are they talking to professors? What about faculty and staff and advisors to clubs? So you want to ask other students about did they find a mentor in that first year of college? We know that finding a mentor is incredibly important to graduating from college for, again, students at all income levels. What about the money aspect of it? The whole question of how expensive it is. Should costs be a factor? There's no doubt about it.

10:44We should be thinking about not only the academic fit and the social fit of college, but I think that too many families don't think about the financial fit because they think, well, we'll just stretch. But what's really interesting, Michelle, is that we did not only in our survey of students, but a long-running survey that Sally May and Ipsos does of how Americans pay for college. We've seen over the last 10 years, the percentage of parents say they're willing to stretch for college actually fall. So we're now starting to see, especially around prestige, and I found this in the book, that people are willing to pay for the most prestigious colleges, which, by the way, have very generous financial aid programs anyway.

11:24But they're not willing to pay for what they perceive as really good but not good enough, especially if you can get a discount somewhere else. So the average discount now off the sticker price of tuition, we always talk about the sticker price of tuition, but many of those colleges on average are discounting tuition up to 50%. You say in the book that people are more willing to look at a broader range of schools if they feel that there's more of a value add. Why is that? Is it just because the sticker price has gotten so high or are there other factors? No, I think there's other factors. I think we have a narrowing definition of prestige.

12:03Second, they want to do something else with their money if they can afford it. Most people have to take care of aging parents. They might have multiple kids and siblings, and they might just want to be able to do something else with their own money, including, by the way, retire someday. And then third, we know that students, especially now in an age of AI, everyone's worried about how these kids are going to launch from college. And I think many parents say, you know what? We don't want to place all of our bets on the undergraduate degree. We might have to help them with a graduate degree. We might have to help them when they move to a new city to get a job.

12:38If we have the financial resources, we want to be able to hold some of those back in order to help them launch. So I think those are the three reasons why we're starting to see parents say, I'll pay for a certain level of prestige, but I'm not going to pay as widely as we used to. Does that speak to what you're saying, that maybe both parents and students are saying we've got to hedge our bets here, like with AI, all this disruption in the economy? Could it be that, you know, you have people like President Trump who are slamming, particularly elite institutions, conservatives, some conservatives have really made a campaign out of slamming some of the tech billionaires have been very critical of the college experience for lots of reasons.

13:22since they have a myriad reasons why. And I wonder if that part is part of it. There's no doubt about it. There's sort of a backlash. Right. And there's also a narrative that you don't necessarily need a college degree. In a number of states, by the way, they've done away with degree requirements for state jobs. Pennsylvania has done it. Maryland has done it. Virginia and a few other states. Now, the problem with that is that if you go back and ask them a year later, who did you hire? They mostly are still hiring people with a college degree. And I think that's important to remember, that a college degree gives you flexibility, It gives you mobility.

13:52It gives you choices in life to move up and out of a job or up and out of a career that somebody without a college degree doesn't necessarily have. But I definitely think this narrative that college is not worth it, not valuable, or it's a place that will indoctrinate your kids or won't get them a job, that narrative is definitely having an impact on college enrollment. In fact, here's one stat that still shocks me. Ten years ago, 70 percent of high school graduates went right on to college three months after high school graduation. Seventy percent. We're now down to close to 60 percent of American high school graduates going right on to college.

14:29And college is definitely out of reach for more and more Americans. Just think about the Pell Grant. The buying power of that has eroded over the last 10 years. So there's no doubt about it that there's a lot of factors playing into why students aren't going to college. So if families hear this and say, look, I'm open. Okay, you got me. I'm listening. I'm open to a more affordable option with perhaps less name recognition. How should they go about finding the right fit? Okay. So we talked about some of them, a supportive start, like those places that have that scaffolding around that first and second year of college.

15:04We talked about connections, finding those mentors, finding places where faculty actually care about teaching. Third is you really want real job experience. Look for places that are going to give you opportunities to have co-ops or internships that are going to help you get those internships. Go into the career services office. Go and talk to the major, the department chair of the major that you're going to major in and say, hey, where did students in this major look – where did they intern in the last couple of years? And then fourth, because there's a lot of concern now about the financial health of colleges.

15:39We're seeing every month some colleges close, merge. More so what we're seeing, Indiana just closed in the state of Indiana. Public universities there just closed hundreds of low enrollment programs. So that's the other thing. You want to look at those colleges that have the resources to invest in you. But what if you don't really know what you want to do? I don't know how many people at 16, 17, 18 really know what they want to do. What if you really don't know? I mean, you just... Well, and that's a great place to think about the first year experience. So these first year experience programs are designed to introduce not only students to college, but to a variety of majors.

16:17And you're right. Most people don't know what they want to do at 18. Unfortunately, though, they're sometimes pressured to go into what are seen as practical degrees. Those might be in health and education, which are great degrees, by the way. But they also might be in business and STEM. And we keep forcing students into those. And I will argue that in an age of AI, we don't really know what the jobs of the future are going to be like. We want, I think it's best to get a broad education. You want to go to a place that offers a variety of majors where a variety of employers are going to be recruiting from there.

16:50And that's, again, you want to look at a place that has all these different majors and not just students, you know, going into two or three places all the time. So considering all of this, how do we define the dream in dream school now? We tend to think of a dream school as that one single place. And what I want to tell parents and students and counselors is to give them permission to think more broadly than that and to think of a place where they're going to thrive, where they're going to meet their people, where they're going to have those connections and where they're going to get that real job experience, a better fit.

17:24And the only way you find that better fit is if you look beyond the top 25 and 30 schools in the rankings. First of all, you may not get into those schools. Second, they may not be a good fit. And third, you may not be able to afford it, even with their generous financial aid programs. And so you want to look more broadly at these schools that may be a better fit for you. And all I want parents and students and counselors to do is to just start to consider the wider range of institutions out there. There are hundreds of good schools out there, and we tend to keep talking about the same 2025 all the time.

17:59Jeffrey Selingo is the author of Dream School, Finding the College That's Right for You. Jeffrey Selingo, thanks so much for talking to us. It was great to be here. Thank you. So to recap, employers are still looking for people with college degrees. But where that degree comes from matters less. So in your college search, look beyond the prestige schools. Look for colleges where professors really engage with the students. Jeffrey says that connection is important. Get a sense of what student life is like on campus. Can you see yourself or your student finding a club or social circle there? See if there are internship opportunities and career services.

18:37And of course, keep your budget in mind. It might not be worth it to go more expensive just for the name recognition.

18:48That was journalist and author Jeffrey Selingo with Morning Edition host Michelle Martin. By the way, did you know that LifeKit has its own newsletter? We have so many smart, supportive listeners that send us amazing tips, and they're often featured in that newsletter. If you want to be part of that community, subscribe at npr.org slash LifeKit newsletter. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Ben Abrams and Margaret Serino. It was edited by Adriana Gallardo. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Grebe. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

19:25Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from David Greenberg and Ted Meebane. Fact-checking by Jane Gilvin. Special thanks to Michelle Martin. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thank you for listening. Thank you.