How Do Students Choose a College?

How Do Students Choose a College?
7/25/08 at 10:49:07 AM

—Rachel Drake, Academic Adviser
Languages & Mathematics Student Community

The Languages & Mathematics staff is happy to be (mostly) wrapped up with freshman orientation and we are turning our attention to transfer students.

It’s a particularly interesting time of year to be pondering how students select colleges, a subject that was discussed in the July 23 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Researcher Ken Steele has surveyed over 100,000 applicants to Canadian universities since 1997 and has identified four categories of applicants: 1) the scholars, 2) the careerists, 3) the conflicted, and 4) the drifters—based in part on whether they are being “pushed” or “pulled” into college. Interestingly, though the scholars and careerists are more likely to be successful in completing degrees, high school grades do not vary significantly across the groups.

Survey respondents ranked “successful athletic teams” last on their list of deciding factors, so maybe that’s good news for Gopher Football.

Katy Korchik is wrapping up her research methods course for her English as a Second Language master’s program at Hamline. This means she's going to have a lot on her mind in the next few weeks as she balances work in the Languages and Mathematics Student Community with the task of developing her research project and assembling her committee. She is interested in studying how teaching assistants who are not native speakers of English are prepared to teach college classes in English. We are eager to hear more about her research, since we perennially have students who complain that their TAs or professors “can't speak English.” Katy expects to finish her degree in spring 2009.

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