I was 1st gen college student in my family. I looked at schools depending upon where older friends I had attended. Budget was extremely low. Had to keep it to in-state public’s. Visited only 2 schools. One with my mom and one with my friend who was already a student at another. Applied to only 3 schools - was accepted at all 3. Chose the least expensive.
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So, why do you suppose they chose to attend college?
But I imagine for those, like me, raised in an upper middle class household, it’s the default. Most I know from hs went to cc (very common in California) or four year schools - spread nationwide but mostly So Cal.
People in my area are just raised with the assumption of college. Same at my kid’s schools.
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My kids were raised in NoVA, and 4 year college was almost expected. The overwhelming majority of my kid’s friends parents were college graduates.
But it was ( still is) very different in the rural Midwest area where I was raised.
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We weren’t low income or an immigrant family. However, my older brother was the first to get a college degree. My mom graduated from a four-year RN program, but it was from a hospital (not a “degree”). My dad was the first male in his family to graduate from high school, and his parents took the money he saved for college. I grew up with a lot of kids who didn’t go to college. We moved when I was in high school, because our parents valued education & wanted a “better” school district. Two of us have college degrees, two dropped out of college without a degree, and one had no interest in college (all of us ended up self supporting). Now? All of our kids have college degrees.
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Ultimately I picked a large public university in a neighboring state because a few people (relatives, family friends) had told me it was good for Engineering. My mom had said she would only help financially with college if I went to college either in-state or in a neighboring state. I had visited our state flagship university, the only major Engineering school in the state, for a camp and hated the campus. I didn’t really have much interest in continuing to search, so I just went for the other one I had heard about. Just the one application for me!
I do remember that somehow I had heard of Rose-Hulman (I have no idea how…maybe a brochure?). I was very intrigued by it, but even though it was just a few states away, my mom said no.
I think what is much funnier is how I decided that I thought I wanted to be a Civil Engineer. I won a toothpick bridge building competition in 8th grade! 
Since I liked science and math classes, I decided I would probably be good at being an engineer. I stuck with it through high school and one year of college, and then realized this was really not for me. I chose English with a specialization in Technical Communication and pretty much everyone I knew told me things like, “oh, we knew you would change your major. English is so much better for you!” 
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If you mean FDR attending Harvard, I expect college attendance was influenced by your community, family and social circle in FDR’s time; much like today. While attending college was extraordinarily rare as a whole in FDR’s time. It was the norm among Groton students, with ~80% attending college. Located 30 miles from Harvard, Harvard was by far the most common choice for Groton students, with a ~99% acceptance rate among Groton grads. I expect attending college was also common among children in the aristocratic social circle, as among his relatives. For example, FDR’s brother attended college decades before FDR.
In more modern times, a similar effect also occurs. In the low SES rural south community I mentioned above, hardly anyone attended college. One of my relatives was the first person in the history of their HS to take the SATs. The small minority of students who did attend college went to the local non-selective one. Attending a selective college wasn’t expected, so hardly anyone did so. However, in the upper SES suburban community where I live now, attending college is expected. People might innocently ask a senior, “where are you are attending college”, rather than, “are you attending college”?
My earlier contention more related to the implication that I said attending Harvard had no influence on FDR’s life, rather than not being the key to entering politics.
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What influence do you think attending Harvard had on FDR’s life?
Let’s return to topic of how you chose a college. You can even expand it to peers in your social circle. The reasonings for historical figures are now deemed to be beyond the scope of this thread
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I grew up in the 1960s. Although attending college was almost certainly a default position among my peer group (lower middle-class NYC high school kids), it was almost certainly tied to the absolute belief that a college education was inseparable from understanding current events the stakes for which were existential for many of us. There was a reason why colleges in the northeast were such hotbeds of political activism; I had friends whose parents had survived McCarthyism; kids whose parents had first-hand accounts of life in the Jim Crow South. And all of us were staring down the strong possibility that without a college deferment they would be headed to a ground war in southeast Asia. Learning what was going on in the world (and by implication, how it had come to be so messed up) was like a narcotic for us.
I am hoping it is still ok to talk about our immediate family’s experiences and how they may have shaped our college perspective. Both of my parents went to college in NYC. In fact, my mom was going to go to medical school (this was in the 1940’s) but ended up marrying my dad. Unfortunately I can’t quite recall if she was already in med school or had just applied (and maybe admitted??) when she married my dad. Was certainly rare back then. She ultimately went back to school and got an advanced degree.
When my brother applied, his guidance counselor told him he had a snowball’s chance in h*ll of getting into Yale. When the acceptance came, he made a snowball out of the frost in the freezer and brought it in.
Also back then, there were lots of college decals in the rear windows of family cars (probably still are). So my brother and I decided it was funny to modify our college window decals a bit. We scraped off the first letter of his school and the first and last 2 of my college, so my parents’ car said “ale” and “a$$” on the rear windshield
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I was the first in my extended family to go to college. My only sibling followed a few years later. Because I ended up in college on a fluke (posted upthread) and it changed my life so dramatically, it was never an option in my mind for our son not to go to college. We told him from the time he was little that he could go to any college he wanted (just not “The” OSU), study anything he wanted, and do anything he wanted afterward, but he WAS going to college, end of discussion. He never argued.
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I’m requesting the mods delete this post as it does not fully reflect my views.
My father had the”4 hour rule”-any college we selected had to be no more than a 4 hour drive from home. He wanted to be able to round-trip it in a day if necessary. That pretty much meant anywhere from Boston to Washington. Lots of good choices. This was in the early 70s and many all-male colleges were starting to admit women. I was at an all-girls school and targeted my search this way. I was in the second class of women at my college and boy was it a change. I certainly wasn’t used to all the deep voices in the classroom.
I grew up in a college town (East Lansing) where my mom was an associate professor in the Engineering department of MSU and my dad was also affiliated. About 95% of my class went to college and pretty sure at least one classmate ended up in each Ivy.
I honestly don’t remember any discussion with counselors. My brother was already at U of M and I just defaulted to going there too. My parents only said I would need a reason to go out of state and I didn’t know enough to consider anything other than Michigan because why pass up such an excellent school at in state tuition? I may have gotten mailings from other schools because I was a National Merit Finalist but have no memory of such. MSU did actively recruit and I applied so I could go stay on campus for their recruiting event.
In retrospect, I wish someone had actively counseled me to consider smaller and more personal colleges. I thought I wanted to major in math but got dropped from Honors College and ended up majoring in Anthropology. I don’t think the University was much help to me in this situation. My major was very interesting but all it got me was a government job.
I should have gone to business school and gotten an MBA. As a female MBA in 1975, I likely could have written my own ticket. Ah well, too late now. I did go back to college when son was little and got a 120 hour certificate in accounting from Northwestern’s adult university (equivalent to a second bachelors degree) and enjoyed that kind of work. My affinity for this type of work has been useful for doing our taxes all these years. And for settling the accounts in my mom’s estate. My brother, who did get an MBA and had been a banker at one time, let me take the lead and determine everything we needed to do.
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My parents went to UCLA so I applied there and it was the only college I applied to. Back then you could only apply to a single UC. There were no essays, just your SAT score and HS transcript. The acceptance rate to UCLA was something like 75% or more so I wasn’t particularly worried. And anyway UC guaranteed a UC spot to the top 10% so if you got rejected to the campus you applied they’d offer you a space at Riverside. At the time it was called “redirect” so when I got the postcard in January saying my application was not going to be redirected I knew I was as good as in.
I do remember getting brochures from colleges senior year after taking the PSAT in 11th grade. Michigan State for some reason seemed to have spent a fortune on glossy flyers and letters. But my parents were both teachers and so I never even asked them about attending a college out-of-state, I just assumed the money was not there.
I did graduate but probably would have been better off giving more thought to college selection. Fit, it turns out, actually matters. Back in the day UCLA was a commuter school, 4 dorms and that was it. Classes were large in popular majors (75-100 in upper-division Econ and the like) so it wasn’t a very personal education nor was it easy for a person on the introverted side to build a group of friends.
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I had no idea what Michigan was all about. It’s hard to believe now, but I thought Michigan, Michigan State, and Michigan Tech were all just different ways to refer to the Ann Arbor campus. Really, I had no clue there were different “Michigan” schools until some time after I got there. Also, because I lived in the Residential College all four years (scholarship requirement), Michigan was just my 800 dorm mates and the kids who lived in the nearby housing. I didn’t even know there was a north campus and never went. I took several classes right in the Res college where I lived, and the rest were in the buildings surrounding the Diag just up the street from my dorm, never needed to walk far or take a bus anywhere. I never had a class in my major with more than 20 students and only took two large lecture/lab classes. Also, because DH lived on my hall and we always studied together in the East Quad library, I hardly left the dorm. So, Michigan seemed very small and personal to me.
I should have chosen Michigan for my MBA program. I picked the wrong school and didn’t stay to graduate. It was the wrong fit. I’m pretty sure I would have completed the degree at Michigan.
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MSU in my day was very anxious to get National Merit Finalists. They may have had an inferiority complex to Michigan .
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You left out Eastern Michigan and Northern Michigan!
After we moved to San Diego, it took me a while to distinguish UCSD, SDSU, and USD. (At least when they were referred to by acronyms and not full names.).
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That’s because I had never heard of them.
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