Costs and Course Quality Draw Even in College Selection Choice

Posted on October 22, 2008 by Barbara Macaulay

UMassOnline Chief Academic Officer Barbara Macaulay This brief post is directed at all college-bound high school seniors and their parents to provide you with insights on college selection and how to deal with choices in this time of financial crisis. You may be interested in reading about how others are managing this. The information comes courtesy of a new survey conducted jointly by ApplyWise.com, an online college admissions counseling service and Next Step Magazine, a publication for high school students and their parents. At this link you can see all the various statistics and the steps people are taking to get an affordable, quality college education. But the one data point that caught my attention was:

The cost of tuition and fees was cited as the factor having the greatest overall influence in college decisions by 27% of the respondents. The academic programs offered by colleges is the number one criteria for college selection among 35% of the families responding to the Next Step and ApplyWise survey… “Academic offerings have always been the number one reason students select a college, but clearly now, the cost of attending college is equally important,” said Katherine Cohen, PhD., president and co-founder of ApplyWise.com.

An important side note is that more than half of the families surveyed also said they were considering in-state public colleges. This, of course, would include the University of Massachusetts and UMassOnline.

Comments

One Response to “Costs and Course Quality Draw Even in College Selection Choice”

Bill R. on October 26th, 2008 9:50 am

I suppose that the “silver lining” of our current dark economic condition is that it forces students and families to get creative. In the long run, increased consideration for more cost effective education will benefit everyone, even if it hurts in the short term.

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