How do you make decision for the right college when you have multiple great acceptances
There are many ways.
The first cut to me is money.
If you have a budget, you eliminate any at (inflation) or above the budget.
Secondly, you visit (hopefully) and then some will stand out more than others - and you cut those that don’t stand out well.
Thirdly, you can start doing head to heads. So if you have 5, instead of looking at all 5 at once - take two - if you had school A or B, which would you choose. The winner stays in. The non-winner drops off. If A wins, now you compare A to C, etc.
Other things (if you can’t get there) - ask the school to speak to a student ambassador, and you can ask questions about vibe, feel, etc. Look at curriculums - do they have your major? How many electives do they offer? Do they have other minors or majors of interest?
You can look at niche ratings - for food, dorms…student reviews…or other.
Weather
Access to transportation
What’s important to you - but many ways to narrow in on a choice.
Here’s the other thing - it’s not a one and only - you might choose a school, not sure if it’s right - but it’s possible that A, B and C would all be great for you - so you may not have a bad choice!!
Good luck.
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Hopefully you are the student! If so, you choose the one that you think you can see yourself at for four years the best.
Hoping all are similarly affordable. Check that with the parents to see if you need to consider the varying net costs if these acceptances.
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Condensed checklist:
- Affordability (remove any school that is not affordable, and be sure to include travel cost)
Fit variables:
2. Academics (access to major, curricular style, academic vibe, research & internships)
3. Location/Setting (location, weather, size of school, urban/rural/suburban environment)
4. Social vibe (campus scene, city/town scene, clubs, greek life, sports fandom, etc.)
5. Housing and food (often overlooked; don’t)
6. Other things that are important to you
Rank the schools based on those metrics.
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Hopefully this was done before you applied.
Please clarify annual budget with the parents. If they are able and willing to pay your costs to attend anywhere, please thank them. It’s a wonderful gift. Some parents won’t pay the full cost even if they can…so if yours are willing, that’s a great gift.
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Also, if you tell us what majors you’re considering or admitted for, your budget without loans, net cost, and personal deal breakers, we can review your options with you.
(To know net cost, calculate
(tuition fees room board) - (grants, scholarships) = … )
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Yes to money #1.
You can visit and attend classes, maybe even do an overnight.
Sometimes I flip a coin (between two choices as suggested above) and see how I feel when one of them wins!
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As I posted here yesterday Help me pick a school please (sociology + political science) [pre-law; WIlliams, Bowdoin, Vassar, Swarthmore, Georgetown] - #114 by jym626 and have often mentioned previously when this is asked, it can be helpful to create a ranking/hierarchy by taking your choices 2 at a time. Look at school A and B. Which is the higher choice of the two. Then take the “winner” of that pairing and pair it with another school. And so on. Next thing you know you will have a priority list. Good luck!
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The head to head approach (feel free to toss in the coin flip technique as well) seems to be working pretty well for a lot of kids. Seems kinda obvious, I guess, but something about that A or B framing seems to really help crystalize for some kids where they would truly be most excited to go.
And between us, that is really all you can reasonably achieve at this point. Assuming you did a good job choosing your colleges at the application stage, at the offer stage you probably can’t really predict reliably whether A or B will actually be the optimal future path for you. Life is too complicated, four years is too long, you are too young and (hopefully) still evolving–so it just isn’t the sort of thing which is subject to that degree of predictive accuracy.
But I think it sure doesn’t hurt to start off as excited as possible. So, you know, figure out where you would be most excited to go, and then make the most of it once you do go. I really am skeptical there is a much better plan than that.
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That’s just it- it seems like it should be obvious, but often people get paralyzed by too many choices and don’t think to break it down like that. It’s a strategy I used with clients for years to help them with decision-making.
I can’t agree with the coin flip, because that takes the choice away from the person trying to decide. In my field we call that internal vs external “locus of control”.
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Another way to approach decision-making (with the information you have available to you at the time, so as to avoid hindsight second guessing later) is to follow the adage “don’t live with regret”. When you put 2 schools head to head is to ask yourself “Will I regret it if I let go of “x” (vs “y”) school. If you can’t decide, make a list of the pros and cons of the schools 2 at a time, and see if either one has a heavy weighting for the school or a possible “deal breaker” against it. The negative can even be something as seemingly inconsequential as dorm hall bathrooms or no guaranteed housing after sophomore year, but if you truly can’t decide, those can make a difference.
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Just to clarify, the coin flip technique as I understand it works something like this.
You assign heads to A, tails to B, then flip the coin. While it is in the air, you realize you are rooting for heads or tails. What then happens with the coin is immaterial, you have your answer. The variation above involved waiting to see how you felt about the result, but I understood it to be the same thing–what matters is how you feel, not the actual coin result.
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Ah, interesting. That sounds like another way of framing the “don’t live with regret”. Same issue- check in with how you feel.
That said, I often use the rationale of “will I regret it“ to make some probably unnecessary purchase when something is on sale!
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I tell everyone this trick!
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A number of years ago a daughter had five acceptances to five universities that were all affordable. One she (or we?) quickly eliminated based on academics. This left four that were all affordable, all in attractive and relatively safe locations, and all academically appropriate.
Past this point, it was entirely her decision. As parents we could give opinions, but any choice that she made was fine with us.
We did arrange to visit all four, went with her, and paid for the trip. One was a bit more difficult to get to so she cut the list to three. She sat in on a class and talked to a professor at all three.
How did she decide between the last three? It was actually tough for her (and would have been tough for me if I had been expected to decide). You make a list of pluses and minuses. You visit and see how it feels. When you have already been accepted with an affordable offer, a visit feels very real – the student knows that they really can be here as a student in September if they want to do it. You consider cost, academics, travel difficulty, the location, and whatever else comes to mind.
After considering all of the relative advantages of all of the choices, sometimes the student just needs to forget about it for a couple of days, and then do whatever feels right.
Having the student make the decision makes sense in multiple ways, including the fact that they are the person who will need to be living there and showing up at class and doing the homework. Also, going away to university is a major path in the direction of growing up and becoming an adult, and letting the student make the decision is a big step on that path.
And as @tsbna44 said above, sometimes there may be no bad choice. Sometimes you have multiple very good choices, and you just need to pick one.
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That sounds exactly right to me. Like, if it comes up heads, and you think, “Darn, I wish it was tails,” that is basically an immediate regret reaction.
Admittedly it probably makes more sense in forced choice contexts. But on the other hand, I think some of us with naturally cautious tendencies may well regret more of our inactions than actions. Others could be the opposite, of course. But for us cautious sorts, I suspect asking this question more often is not such a bad idea.
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“some of us with naturally cautious tendencies may well regret more of our inactions than actions.”
This.
In my excuse to buy something on sale (usually not something terribly expensive), I have found a time or two that when I miss the sale and the price goes up, even a bit, I am disappointed. And life is too short to be disappointed, especially over something relatively small. Obviously making a college choice is not small! It’s much harder to make a choice when all are essentially equally good options, as described by the OP. That’s why all things considered, maybe one relatively small thing may be the decision-maker. So the good news is they really can’t go wrong. We all wonder “what if…” That’s natural. And it’s ok. Some have buyer’s remorse. That’s natural too. That’s why if the person has made a written list of the pros, the cons, the weighted factors and/or the deal breakers, they can go back and look to reassure themselves that they are happy with their choice and the variables they used to make it.
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Definitely agree with doing head-to-head comparisons. I’ve even seen students set up their decision in tournament bracket format, and that works pretty well!
The problem with not doing this is that it can be a setup for bad logic. When you’re considering multiple schools at once, it’s easy to have thoughts like, “School A is pretty good, but I really like the honors college at School B, and the maker space at School C.” But you can’t mix and match the qualities of schools B and C in real life, so this just muddies the waters. Breaking it down to 1-on-1 comparisons prevents this.
As for the cost thing… I agree that budget should have been discussed beforehand, and if some applications were based on “This will only be an option if they give merit,” that should have been understood. Nonetheless, I don’t think that final decisions need to be entirely cost-blind within what is financially possible. At minimum, price is a great tiebreaker! And it can also be a more nuanced part of the assessment - does it make sense to go to a school I like 10% better, for 2x the price? Are there other uses for the additional money that would be more beneficial? Of course, if you can afford a more expensive school and you see the value-added, that’s great!
The tough part here is that if all has gone well, there will be roads-not-taken that are hard to let go of. Sure, sometimes there’s one choice that’s a clear slam-dunk. But more often, you’ve found things to love about more than one choice, and you’ll never get to see how things would have gone for the alternate-reality you who made a different decision. Daily Affliction - The tragedy of commitment
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