Why Is It So Hard to Make Good College Choices?

College for Christians - Introduction

Welcome to the start of my experiment in self-publishing! From today through mid-2025, I’m planning to share one chapter each week (with a few breaks) as I serialize College for Christians, my guide to college for Christian teenagers — and the parents and others who advise them. Chapters will be available to all subscribers for three weeks, after which point they’ll enter my archive and you’ll need a paid subscription to read them. If you’re a Pietist Schoolman subscriber who would rather not receive College for Christian chapters, you can modify your subscriptions in your Substack account settings.

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If you want to get a college degree in the United States, you have 4,000 options.¹ They come as small as Deep Springs College, whose two dozen students work on a cattle ranch in the Sierra Mountains, and as large as Southern New Hampshire University, whose 135,000-some students mostly take classes online. They’re as old as Harvard University (est. 1636 to train Puritan pastors) and as new as one of Harvard’s neighbors, Sattler College (est. 2018 in a Boston high-rise office building). Some, like Sattler, are explicitly religious in mission; most have either grown more secular over time, like Harvard, or are public institutions that depend on government funding in a country that separates church and state. The most expensive can cost over $80,000 a year to attend; the cheapest, like Deep Springs and the military service academies, charge no tuition.

Every year those colleges and universities educate about 16 million undergraduate students, who study everything from accounting to zoology… when they’re not playing sports, performing in plays and concerts, protesting social injustices, going to parties or prayer meetings, and working on- or off-campus to help pay for it all. These students are as diverse as the colleges they attend and the activities they engage in. Millions go to college close to home; about 5% aren’t U.S. citizens. Students come to college much more likely than their parents to hold progressive positions on issues like immigration and environmental protection, yet more of them identify as moderate or conservative than liberal. The majority enter college as Christians, but atheists and agnostics are much more common on college campuses than off.²

With that many different people attending that many different schools, there’s got to be a good option for everyone, right? In fact, the majority of American freshmen say that they are attending their top choice of college. One in ten applied to that school and no others.

But there’s another way of looking at the same numbers. With so many options, isn’t it likely that many of those 16 million students made the wrong choice? Every year over a million students change colleges.  Sometimes that was always the plan: for example, students will start at a community college, then complete their major at a larger university. But many others transfer unexpectedly, as when they realize that their first choice wasn’t a good fit after all, or that its cost didn’t end up matching its value. Some go to their top choice and waste their time; others end up at a school well down their list, but make the most of it and have a transformative experience.

This country may offer over 4,000 higher ed options. But the more I think about college choice, the harder it seems.

The Paradox of Choice

Having thousands of options can make any decision more difficult, not less. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz describes going to the mall to make a simple purchase: a pair of jeans, size 32-28. “Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” asked the salesperson. “Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?” While it’s good to have the freedom to choose from a variety of options, Schwartz realized that having too much choice leaves us feeling debilitated, not liberated. Being overwhelmed with options not only makes it more likely that we’ll make worse decisions, but can cause us to experience “anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction…”³

Shopping for a college may leave you feeling as overwhelmed as Schwartz did that day at the mall. Say you know you want to go to college. But then come the choices. Not button- or zipper-fly, but two- or four-year, public or private, broad education or professional focus, big city or small town? Will you live on campus or off? Do sports matter to you? (Division I, II, or Division III?) What’s more important: strong academics or close community? (Can you have both?) What about cultural, political, or religious diversity, or the lack of it?

Similarities and (Tiny) Differences

What makes the choice all the harder is another paradox: the more colleges try to set themselves apart from their competitors, the more they resemble each other. If one college starts a successful engineering program, its neighbor down the road does the same. If one university builds a new student commons, its peers start raising money for the same kind of project — possibly designed by the same firm. If one college starts a lacrosse team… If one college creates an online option… If one college offers bigger financial aid packages…

Success breeds imitation, and differences soon flatten into similarities.

So it’s no surprise that students often end up making their decisions based on distinctions that seem insignificant or irrelevant to college professors like me. If colleges are largely the same, what else is to separate them but the quality and variety of food in the dining center or of work-out options in the fitness center, whether the campus visit went well or the football team had a good year?

There are meaningful differences, but many are hard to recognize until you’ve actually spent time as a student. Given an overload of awfully similar choices, applicants can feel like the decision comes down to a coin flip.

The Weight

What a decision it is! One of the biggest you’ll make in your life.

First, there’s a lot of money at stake. Next to their mortgage, college is the biggest investment many Americans make. Getting that degree has a significant impact on career earnings, typically adding hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond what high school graduates make.

Then there are the things that really matter. At college you learn more widely and more deeply than you ever have before and ever will again. You meet some of the most important people in your life: best friends, role models, and perhaps your spouse. Maybe most importantly, college is where you get a clearer sense of who you are and what you believe. It’s where you grow into the first version of your adult self.

But that also means that you’re making the college decision when you’re still just a kid. In one of his specials on Netflix, comedian John Mulaney tells the story of deciding to go to Georgetown University, back when it cost $30,000 a year to attend.

I agreed to give them $120,000 when I was seventeen years old, with no attorney present. That’s illegal!…

They pulled me out of high school; I was in sweatpants, all confused. Two guys in clip-on ties are like, “Come on, son, do the right thing. Sign here and you’ll be an English major.”

I was like, “Okay.”

You may enter adulthood at college, but you’re browsing college websites and paying visits to college campuses at the same time that you’re picking a dress for prom and learning to drive a car.

Mulaney had the help of his parents, both of whom went to Georgetown, then Yale Law School. Familiar with the upper echelons of American higher education, they could help their son navigate a process that’s far more mystifying to “first-generation” families.

Almost 25% of college students are the first in their household to reach that level of education. Their parents have to help their children make a choice they never faced. Some of them speak English as a second language; all of them need to learn the lingo of higher education, which is full of words and phrases that are hard for native speakers to understand.

Even those parents who are college graduates themselves may feel ill-equipped to help their kids make so important a decision. You may remember what college was like in your day, but how relevant are those decades-old memories to the complicated choice facing your child right now? You learned words like tuition or major or phrases like work-study and gen ed when you were eighteen, but do you know what they mean today — after decades of cultural, demographic, economic, and technological change? Or maybe you went to the college your own parents expected you to attend, but now you want your children to consider a wider variety of options — colleges and types of colleges that you don’t know at all.

On top of all of that, if you’re reading this book, you’re trying to make this choice as a follower of Jesus Christ.

Everything I’ve written so far could be true for virtually any American family. But Christians might feel like all these problems get worse when you add layers of faith. A hard decision weighs even more heavily when one’s soul is in the balance… when college is the place where you meet your best friend, and meet God in new ways… when college is not just a site for career preparation or intellectual development, but spiritual formation… when college is a place to make your faith your own — or, as many Christian parents fear, a place where students lose their faith altogether.

Good News…

Fortunately, college is what you make of it. If it wasn’t a good fit for the reasons you initially thought it was, you may find yourself growing into a different, better fit. If you didn’t get into your top choice, you may find that the “safety school” was the better option all along. If it’s really not the right place to be, colleges are making it easier to transfer. Wherever you go, you can find community with friends who get you, purpose in classes and activities that challenge and fulfill you, and mentors who want to pour themselves into your development and open doors to future opportunities.

Anywhere in higher ed, young Christians can learn more about themselves, their world, and their God. And if you follow Jesus Christ, you can trust that you’ll do all of this with him at your side. Wherever you go to college and whatever happens there, people who believe in the Resurrection can live in hope, not fear.

…and Bad News

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad: all of that also means that “college choice” doesn’t stop when you get accepted, put down a deposit, and move into your dorm.

College is what you make of it, but only because you continue to make decisions as important as where to go: what to study, and how to study it; whom to befriend and emulate; what to do with your life after graduation, and how to prepare for it; which questions to ask, and how to answer them; how to seek and serve God through it all.

Indeed, I’d argue that the choices you make in college are at least as important as your choice of college.

Alas, deciding how to spend your years in college is no easier than deciding where to spend them. In fact, one of Barry Schwartz’s prime examples of the “paradox of choice” was higher education itself. “These days,” he wrote in 2004 (but it’s more true today), “a typical college catalog has more in common with the one from J. Crew than you might think…. the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall,” since it “offers a wide array of different ‘goods’ and allows, even encourages students—the ‘customers’—to shop around until they find what they like.” But are students any more ready to choose from among dozens of majors and hundreds of courses than they were to choose from among thousands of colleges? Schwartz didn’t think so: “Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when they may lack the resources to make them intelligently.”⁴

My Plan

College for Christians is meant to be one such resource. Having published hundreds of blog posts and one academic book about higher education past and present, I want to translate all that theory and history into something more practical. Having taught and advised college students for over twenty years, I want to equip more teenagers to take that big step into adulthood and make the most of their college experience. Having met with hundreds of prospective students and their parents on campus visits, I want to do more to clear up the confusion, ease the anxiety, and deepen the excitement that I always see mingling on those families’ faces.

There are many college advice guides available, of course. So what makes this one different?

1. I assume that “college choice” continues into college itself.

There are books about picking a college and books about thriving at college. I treat both subjects together, since the choices you make at college are at least as important as the choice of college — while your reasons for choosing a college can affect your experience of it.

Thinking in tandem about where to go and how to spend time there is all the more important because more and more American students are taking college courses while still in high school, shaping their college experience even before they actually choose the college they’ll graduate from. I’ll have more to say about “early college” in ch. 2.

2. While this is a college guide, I’m going to ask questions more often than I give answers.

Some principles are universal (“College is what you make of it”), but every student is different — a unique mix of traits and talents, motivations and aspirations. So I will share some general words of advice, but what’s more important to me is that I help more students — and the people who know and love them — to ask and answer the questions that will help them navigate their journey into college and through it.

Some are questions you already have; others you haven’t yet thought to ask. Together, they provide the structure of this book.

3. I’ll strive for a mix of the practical and the philosophical.

I’ll ask What questions to help you master the confusing vocabulary of higher education and How questions to help you develop strategies for decision making. But I’ll also ask Why and Should questions that prompt you to step back and consider your preconceptions and priorities.

Before the sections offering more concrete advice for choosing a college and thriving once you get there, I’ll pause to pose some bigger questions about life, learning, identity, and purpose. Don’t skip past them — how you answer those broad questions will help you answer the narrower ones that follow.

4. This book is for students and their families alike.

And who is the “you” I keep addressing? Most of the questions I pose are those I’ve heard students ask — or that I’ve wished that they would ask — with only a handful aimed directly at the concerns of parents. The second half of the book in particular, full of questions to guide students’ experience of college itself, is what I wish I’d received when I graduated from high school.

But my hope is that teenagers will read this book with their parents — or guardians, grandparents, siblings, guidance counselors, teachers, pastors… whomever students trust most to help them make these important decisions. Read College for Christians together, and discuss your answers together.

At least, that’s what I plan to do with my own family. Our twins started high school this fall; it took less than two weeks for them to start receiving postcards from colleges! So I don’t want to push too hard too fast, but I have started to ask my kids some of the questions in this book. And I’ve invited my wife and relatives to offer feedback along the way.

When we turn to sectors and roles in higher ed that I don’t know well myself, I’ll introduce you to Christian friends who were generous in sharing their experiences and expertise with me. And I’ll try to introduce you to some of the many other excellent books that cover different aspects of college.

I just hope that you get as much out of reading the book as I’ve gotten out of writing it!

5. The writing is both personal and relatable.

In that sense, College for Christians is the most personal book I’ve written. While I draw on the work of other authors and the insights of friends from different pockets of higher ed, there’s a lot of memoir here. Presented in bits and pieces along the way, I’ll share my story of choosing a college, learning to make the most of that choice, then coming to see higher education from the vantage point of a college professor.

Since every student is special, with distinct perspectives and priorities, you probably won’t want to approach college exactly the way I did. (You ought to laugh out loud when I reveal some of my more ridiculous search criteria!) But if my college experience is personal, I hope it’s also relatable. As the pastor-novelist Frederick Buechner started one of his memoirs, “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”⁵

6. Finally, and most importantly, I hope to help you think about college as followers of Jesus Christ.

There are many ways to do this. This guide is not an advertisement for the Christian university where I work, or an argument for any particular model of Christian higher education as opposed to others. I’ll even recommend that Christian students strongly consider public and other secular options. (And some might even decide to postpone college!)

But wherever you end up attending college, and however you approach your time in college, I want to help you make those choices as disciples of the One who is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6⁶), so that you can see more clearly how college can help you to love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love your neighbors as yourself.

Wherever the college search leads you, and whatever your experience of college, my prayer for all those who use this book — future students, and those who love and guide them — consists of the New Testament passage I pray often for my students at Bethel University: “...that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (Phi 1:9-11).

Next week: “The Big Questions Every College Applicant Needs to Answer”

1. Actually, the U.S. Department of Education counts almost 6,000 postsecondary educational institutions — but a third of them don’t grant degrees.

2. Unless otherwise noted, most of my general statements about American college students come from recent iterations of the American Freshman survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI).

3. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Ecco, 2004), pp. 1-3.

A word about citations… If I’m quoting some article or statistic that I found online, I’ll just include a direct link. But if I’m quoting a traditionally published book, expect a footnote.

4. Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, pp. 14, 15, 17.

5. Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Memoir (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 30.

6. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.