Why Is It So Hard to Make Good College Decisions?

The first draft of the introduction to my new book for Christian families

I’m happy to report that I’m starting to make some headway on my next book: a college guide for Christian families. If you’d like to track along with my progress on that project, follow me on the new Threads app (@cgehrz), where each weekday through August I’m planning to share a snippet from whatever chapter I’ve been working on.

But today I’d like to start by sharing the first draft of the book’s introduction with my paid subscribers. (If you’re not yet in that category, you can always get a free trial to read the full draft.) I’m sure it will go through many changes before I actually submit the proposal to publishers, but I think it does alright at articulating my goals for the book — and I’m starting to find the tone for a book that’s about higher education, but is written for prospective students and their families, not academics themselves. Feel free to use the comments section to let me know what you think is working, not working, or if I’m just missing something important.

College for Christians - Introduction

“Why Is It So Hard to Make Good College Decisions?”

If you want to go to college in the United States, you have over 4,000 options. They’re as small as Deep Springs College, whose 24-30 students work on a cattle ranch in the Sierra Mountains, and as large as Southern New Hampshire University, most of whose 135,000-some students take their classes online. They’re as old as Harvard University (est. 1636 to train Puritan pastors) and as new as Sattler College, which started holding classes in 2018 in a Boston high-rise. Some (like Sattler) are explicitly religious in mission; many (like Harvard) have grown much more secular over time, 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.

The oldest building on the Harvard campus, Massachusetts Hall dates back to 1720 - CC BY-SA 3.0 (Daderot)

Together 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, and working part-time jobs to help pay for it all. These students are as diverse as the colleges they attend and the activities they engage in. Over 50% go to college less than 100 miles from home; about 5% aren’t U.S. citizens. College students are much more likely than their parents to hold progressive positions on issues like immigration and climate change, but more than 60% come to college identifying as moderate or conservative. About that same percentage are Christian, but atheists and agnostics are more common on college campuses than off.

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; 10% applied to that school and no others.¹

Of course, 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? It shouldn’t be a surprise that every year over 1 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. Others stick with their top choice, even as their college experience makes them question that initial decision and wish that they had investigated some other options.

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