A variety of factors should enter into your decision about which college to choose, including: location of the college, size of the student body, net cost to you or your parents, orientation of the educational environment, options for majors, and housing and social life considerations-all in addition to those very important sports-related factors. Let's examine each of these factors separately.
Location of the College
When considering how well a school's location suits you, think about the climate, the size of the surrounding population, and the proximity of the campus to home and friends and to the area where you eventually might like to begin your career. Even though some of these concerns may seem important to you now and others may not, each deserves your consideration.
Climate: We often take climate for granted, but scientists have shown that climate can severely affect our moods and the efficiency of our performance. If cold weather, snow, or frequent rain bothers you now, don't assume that you will be able to overcome that reaction when you go off to college. Some people get depressed when trees become bare and the cold of winter sets in; others are depressed by the day-in, day-out sameness of a lack of seasonal changes. If you are severely bothered by hay fever, think carefully before selecting a college in an agricultural area. If hot, dry weather makes your skin crawl, think twice about a school in the Southwest. How people react to climate is not a matter of maturation or will power.
Urban or Rural Setting: If you've been raised in the city, do you think you could feel comfortable spending most of four or five years in a town with a slow pace, where everybody knows everything about you, and there is little or no nightlife? If you've been raised in the country, could you feel at home in a fast-paced urban setting, where noise and commotion never seem to stop and no one seems to know or care about you? Maybe on your campus visit you liked the life-style because it was a change from what you were used to. But can you see yourself liking it when it becomes your daily life?
Closeness to Family and Friends: You may feel very anxious at the thought of moving away from family and friends to attend college. Or, on the contrary, you may feel that college is the opportunity to set yourself free and expand your horizons. No matter which way you feel, it will probably become less important once you are settled into school. Contact with family members is usually possible in some form if and when you really need them. You may drift apart from old friends, but that is in the natural order of growing up. The easiest time of your life to make new friends is during college, especially if you just let it happen.
If you go to a college located within a 2 or 3-hour drive of your home, you will probably see your family and old friends fairly often, possibly every week, especially during your first year at college. If school is as much as 6 to 8 hours from home, you would perhaps see family and friends three or four times each term, or possibly more if they want to see you compete. If school is much more than 8 hours from home, don't expect to see family and old friends other than during the holidays and rare weekends, unless they are especially motivated to see you compete.
It's hard to tell before you try it whether being apart from family and friends would be an emotional hardship or would give welcome freedom and more of a chance for you to grow in your own direction. But even though you can't predict how you will react to being separated from your parents once you are settled into college life, your feelings on this issue should still be considered in your choice of schools. Make sure you discuss with your parents how all of you feel about being close or distant. Too often this is an issue that gets overlooked or hidden because we don't want to hurt others' feelings. Discussing this openly as one element in your college choice can help to overcome later worry and problems.
Future Job: You may feel that it's too soon to be thinking about where you want to work after graduation when you are only at the point of selecting your college. You may have little or no idea of what you want to major in yet; much less what specific career and job you'll be seeking upon graduation. But you should realize that the reputation you earn and most of the contacts and associations you will be making will be most useful in the general location of your college and less useful the farther away from school that you begin your career.
Size of the Student Body
Some people feel very comfortable among large herds of people, while others feel intimidated by crowds. Some students work and grow best with the intensive personal attention from teachers and advisors that is more likely to occur at a small college, while others value more highly the range of resources, both educational and recreational, that tends to exist at big universities. As with climate, don't assume that you can adjust to and thrive in any environment, because that environment will be there every day, all day. Also, remember that more people on campus, does not necessarily mean more friends on campus. In fact, the opposite is often true. In large cities, large universities, large dormitories, and large classrooms, students see lots of people but tend to interact with and become friendly with few. In smaller settings, students often have more chances to interact one-on-one and become friends with a larger number of people.
Net Cost of Your Education
The cost of going to college is clearly an important factor in determining which school you finally choose. Inflation has doubled the cost of a college education over the last decade. Tuition and room and board expenses have risen between 11 percent and 16 percent each year, and costs are likely to continue rising. In 1983-84, expenses for one year in college, including tuition and fees, room and board, transportation, books and supplies, and personal expenses, were estimated to average $3868 at two-year public colleges and $8440 at four-year private colleges nationwide. Students who want to attend a public college in a state other than the one in which they live and their family pays taxes can expect their annual tuition costs to be up to $3000 more than those of residents of that state. With the much higher cost of tuition at private colleges, a single year at the nation's most expensive schools, such as Amherst, MIT, Princeton, Harvard/ Radcliffe, Stanford, Brown, or Cornell, can cost well in excess of $13,000.
The net cost of your education is the money you or your parents have to spend after deducting any scholarship, grant, or work-study income you will receive. It includes your anticipated outlays for tuition, college fees, books and study materials, room and board, transportation to and from home, clothes, entertainment, and other miscellaneous expenses. Most college catalogs include an estimate of student expenses at their school; these figures often are broken down separately for in-state and out-of-state students and according to the living and meal arrangements that are available. We recommend strongly that you look carefully at the dollar-by-dollar breakdown of expenses in the catalog of each college you are considering.
If you were not offered an athletic scholarship or some other monetary grant or tuition waiver, cost may be the most important factor in determining which college you will select. If cost is a major problem, your choice might be limited to local schools so that you can live at home. An alternative that many college students take to cut costs is to attend a local two-year college for a year or two before heading off to the four-year college of their choice. In recent years, some highly selective colleges have increased the number of transfer students they will accept because they realize that the cost of a four-year education at their school has gone beyond the reach of many families.
To help defray the cost of their education, roughly half of the students at four-year colleges across the nation receive some financial aid, work part-time, or both, but the numbers vary widely from school to school. Loans can be a college student's salvation, although paying back the principal and interest may prove to be a burden long after you graduated. Work-study programs provide a means of gaining income, but you must spend time and energy earning it.
Liberal Arts or Career-Oriented Focus
A liberal arts education is a broadly based academic program that focuses on understanding our world and cultural heritage. Improvement of writing, thinking, and analytic skills forms the focus of a liberal arts education. Few courses that a liberal arts major takes (e.g., Critical Thinking, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Culture of Classical Greece) will apply directly to a specific career, although the skills fostered by liberal arts study serve well in many occupations.
A technical or career-oriented program is more narrowly focused, emphasizing knowledge needed to do well in a particular career or profession. Many of the courses taken in a career-oriented program will focus on information and skills needed in a particular line of work (e.g., corporate accounting, magazine writing, reinforced concrete design, teaching the retarded).
Some liberal arts colleges also provide training that is career oriented, with programs in education, journalism, business, and similar employment areas, while many technical institutes also offer liberal arts majors. To confuse the issue a little further for the moment, many career-oriented programs also require general education or core courses in thinking skills, communication skills, and the humanities.
The point is not what you can study where, but where you will be most comfortable studying what you want to study. There are clear differences between a liberal arts college and a school in which the academic focus is on preparation for a specific profession or career. One difference is in the proportion of courses you will take that either educate you broadly or train you to do a particular job. Another important difference is the attitude of instructors and your fellow students toward specific job training versus using your college years toward becoming broadly educated. People at technically oriented colleges will tend to pressure you to find your niche and to "think career," while those at liberal arts colleges tend to feel strongly that training for a specific job should come after a person is more broadly educated and has developed thinking and communication skills to a high level. Deciding which environment would suit you better is an important factor in selecting a college. Other things being equal, in a career-oriented program you are likely to learn more about a specific field (your major and possibly the career it is designed to lead toward), but gain less general knowledge. On the other hand, you will gain a broader base of knowledge and are likely to develop more fully your communication and analytic skills if you choose a liberal arts curriculum, in which more research and writing are generally required of students.
Your Major
Some students emerging from high school know exactly what they want to major in and may even know what career they want to enter after college. Many other college-bound students have absolutely no idea about either. The great majority, however, are simply unsure, one day feeling that a particular major or career sounds great, and the next day thinking either that it would be the bore of a lifetime or that they don't possess whatever it takes to be successful in that field. The fact is that most college students change majors and career directions; some change several times. Students who are certain that they want to major in a particular area may select a college based on the availability of courses in a particular field of study. However, if you are not sure about the major you want, select a school that has some majors you think you might like and let other factors contribute more heavily to your decision about which college to attend.
A variety of paper-and-pencil tests and computer-based instruments are available from school counselors to measure vocational interests and relate them to appropriate college majors. These guidance tools are not designed to make up your mind for you but rather to give you a little more insight into the direction that you might like to take.
Be aware that early commitment to a major based on what a test, a computer, or your parents tell you may exert a subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to continue with that decision even when your feelings tell you otherwise. Selecting a major because it is "hot" could also be a mistake. In the 1960s, education was a popular major because there was a shortage of teachers; in the 1970s, teachers were driving cabs because too many had been attracted to that "hot" major. Business majors in the late 1970s and early 1980s were recruited at high salaries; now only the very best have a choice of jobs, and many have to struggle to find one. The same cyclical swings may be true in engineering, nursing, medicine, and even computer science in the '80s and '90s.
The lesson here is not to select a school based solely on what you think or have been told you should be aiming for in a career unless you feel strongly committed in that direction. If you make an early selection of a major and career direction, you should want it irrespective of what other people say and what the job possibilities look like. Be patient with picking your future, because circumstances in that career area or your interests may change over time. If you feel certain of your career direction no matter what anyone says, move this factor to the top of the list and go for the top-rated college to which you can be admitted that offers this major area. Find out from your guidance counselor and from people who work in your chosen field which are the top schools and which ones have the best record of placing graduates in jobs in that field.
Housing and Social Life
College is a total life experience. It should be far more than classes, studying, team practices, tests, and athletic contests. College should help you to grow into the kind of adult you would like to be. It should help you learn to get along with people, even those who are quite different from you. College should teach you how to open your mind to other people's feelings and opinions, as well as to hold firmly to what you believe is right after examining alternatives. And college should certainly be fun.
Living with other students can help you to enjoy the many opportunities that college offers in addition to classes and sports. The kinds of meaningful social experiences we are talking about tend to happen most readily at residential schools where a large proportion of students live in campus housing or in nearby apartment complexes. They happen least easily at "commuter" campuses, where most students come to school specifically for classes and leave when their classes and library time are finished.
Residential campuses tend to offer a ready-made social environment in which it is easy to make friends. You are all in the same boat, contending with similar concerns (courses, professors, grades, sports, dating, food, transportation) and sharing experiences. The intense, daily contact with your peers will help you to develop your social and communication skills and learn to understand the idiosyncrasies of others.
At a residential campus, students have numerous opportunities to share ideas, perceptions, and opinions; there is also more chance to meet and interact with professors outside of class than at a commuter campus. If, however, for financial or other reasons you opt for a commuter college, all is not lost. The student union is often a good gathering place to meet people. Furthermore, at many commuter campuses, clubs and study groups have been formed to serve the social and out-of-class academic needs of students.
