Students choose colleges based on both the perceived educational quality and costs, according to a national study by Maguire Associates and Fastweb.com.

More than 2,400 high school students who use Fastweb, a site that helps students pay for college by providing scholarship and financial aid information, were surveyed to gain insight on the factors most important in determining where they enrolled for college. 

Results showed that, even two years after the height of the recession, economic concerns continued to influence where students enrolled, forcing many into a school that was not their first choice, according to the July 12 news release.

Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb, said while academics play a large roll in where students apply, it is the financial aid offer that ends up guiding many of the students’ final decisions.

‘I think that money definitely has a significant influence on the college decision process,’ Kantrowitz said. ‘It’s not the only reason why someone chooses a college, but it can be a deciding factor. If you can’t afford to go, you can’t afford to go.’

Although 56 percent of the seniors surveyed received need-based financial aid, 82 percent of the respondents applied for it, according to the release. Lack of funding led one in five seniors to appeal their original financial aid offer.

Many students who still did not get the assistance they were hoping for were forced to quickly change plans, enrolling in public schools despite a preference for a private education, and vice versa, according to the release. Kantrowitz said in almost all of these cases, the sole reason students switched was because of money. 

While Fastweb did not begin issuing the annual survey until the credit crisis, Kantrowitz said that although financial aid has always been a factor, it has never played such a large role in students’ college decisions until the recession. One-sixth of the students reported that one or both of their parents were out of work during the decision-making process, causing even greater financial strain on the family, Kantrowitz said.

‘The trend that we’re seeing is that families are getting more sensitive to two factors,’ he said. ‘One is the bottom line cost of the college — what the cost is after you subtract just the grants. The other is: What is the return on investments? Families are perhaps willing to spend a little bit more to get a better quality institution. But they are increasingly focused on what the cost is, in part because the cost has grown so much.’

Chloe Guillemot and her family are willing to pay top dollar for her education. The freshman broadcast journalism major will attend Syracuse University this fall even though the school offered her no financial aid. Guillemot, a Tiburon, Calif., native, said her family swallowed SU’s hefty price tag so she could attend one of the country’s best communication schools. 

As the oldest of four, Guillemot worries that her parents’ pockets will eventually wear thin. Guillemot said she will begin looking for external scholarships to help lighten the load, but SU is worth the money.

‘Especially right now, with the current unemployment rate and the recession, getting jobs is harder and harder,’ Guillemot said. ‘If you don’t have that impressive standout resume when you’re going on the job hunt, you’re just going to be put to the side.’

Kantrowitz agrees that a college degree is becoming increasingly important to getting a job. He said that while the unemployment rates for people with both high school diplomas and bachelor’s degrees are up from the recession, there are half as many people unemployed with advanced degrees. 

Many fear that college tuition costs will continue to rise in the coming years, but that remains to be seen, Kantrowitz said. But, he said, in an effort to make cost information available to the families sooner, the government will require every university to have net price calculators (NPCs), to estimate total enrollment expenses, on their websites by late October.

Kantrowitz said this is a step in the right direction.

Said Kantrowitz: ‘The idea would be to somehow know exactly how much this college is going to cost you before you apply for admission, so that if the college is just out of reach you don’t even bother. Why waste your time applying to a college that might admit you, but when they admit you they deny you the financial aid you need to attend?’

egsawyer@syr.edu

Published on August 22, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Liz: egsawyer@syr.edu | @3sawyer