View in browser

Many choices, little help

Overwhelmed in the cereal aisle? Picking breakfast is easy compared to choosing among the collective 1.85 million credentials offered by the more than 134,000 providers of education after high school in America, including more than 4,300 colleges and universities.

Students and their families get little help with this. College counselors at public high schools are thinly stretched. Private college counselors are pricey. University rankings measure more about the quality of students the institutions admit than the caliber of graduates they turn out. And the information provided by colleges and universities themselves can be inaccurate, confusing or purposely deceptive. 

Nearly half of people in their teens and 20s say they don’t have enough information to decide where and how to continue their education, according to a survey by Jobs for the Future. Even when there is objective, independent data available, research shows that consumers don’t use it. Many students simply pick a campus that’s within commuting distance. And now there’s a new wrinkle for people considering a college: figuring out if it will stay in business long enough to get through.

No wonder that a significant number of students regret their college choices, and wish they’d gone somewhere else or had picked a different major or degree. A growing number are voting with their feet. Nearly 1.2 million students a year, or more than 1 in 10, transfer from one college to another, a number that is rising steadily, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Transferring is a minefield in itself, with lost credits, graduation delays and higher costs. Thirty percent of students change their majors, the most recent study of this, in 2020, found.

The first step in picking a college or other postsecondary education pathway — and doing it right on the first try — is knowing where to find the facts. The second: asking the right questions.

Even the best-intentioned college counselors at public high schools struggle with huge caseloads and other obligations. The average college counselor is responsible for 372 students, according to the American School Counselor Association — much higher than the recommended maximum of 250 to 1. Nearly 1 in 5 high schools have no college counselors at all. 

The limited number of college counselors available spend only about a fifth of their time on admissions counseling as compared to scheduling classes, conducting tests and helping students with mental health and other issues.

Frustrated students have resorted to an increasingly common source of help to pick and compare colleges, according to the higher education consulting firm EAB: artificial intelligence. But admissions recruiters are on to them, and using the same tricks as marketers of other products to rise to the top of search results so that generative AI recommends their college first — whether or not it’s the right match.

Some families turn to private college counselors, whose charges for consulting start at $150 an hour, a study by the tutoring, test-prep and admissions company Private Prep found. A growing number of employers offer private college counseling as a benefit. But consumers who don’t have access to that perk, and don’t have or want to spend that kind of money, are left to navigate the process on their own. 

If there’s a glaring example of how this lack of knowledge affects decision-making about education after high school, it’s that 8 out of 10 families eliminate a college from consideration because of a high listed price, according to a survey by Ipsos for the private student lending company Sallie Mae. 

In fact, almost no one pays that so-called “sticker” price. On average, private, nonprofit colleges and universities discount their tuition by more than 57 percent for entering students, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. To see the actual net price, by family income, of any university and college, use The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker.

This week's class is sponsored by: 

Job outlook and salary can be important factors when choosing a college major.
Engineering fields continue to top lists of the most valuable majors. Private College 529 Plan has 150 members that offer programs in engineering, including MIT and CalTech. Families can lock in tuition at these colleges and hundreds more.
Explore this prepaid 529 plan for your students.

Explore this prepaid 529 plan for your students

Finding the facts

What prospective students want to know even more than what college will cost is how much they’ll make when they finish. That’s the indisputable conclusion of myriad surveys, including one by Gallup in which 84 percent of students said they saw additional education as a route to higher pay, a better job and other employment-related factors.

Yet few appear to consult some of the most comprehensive resources available to tell them this — most notably, the College Scorecard, a federal government website that lists earnings by major and institution. Research shows that the scorecard has little effect on students’ choices. Use it. 

Of course, some of those 1.85 million postsecondary credentials, including college majors — communications? — can be hard for laypeople to connect to real-world careers, so the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics helpfully translates which academic majors lead to what potential occupations.

Another valuable but little-known tool is the PSEO Explorer (for “post-secondary employment outcomes”), a Census Bureau website that shows real earnings, by major, for graduates from a limited group of (so far, mainly public) colleges and universities. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has an interactive tool, too, called The Major Payoff, that lists early and mid-career earnings and employment rates by major, though not by school.

Here’s who generally not to trust about the financial outcomes of a major from a specific university or college: that university or college itself. 

Read the fine print

Whatever they’re paying for their education, entering college students understandably want to know if there is likely to be a job waiting for them at the other end. Yet the job placement rates provided by most colleges and universities are notoriously inaccurate, based on unscientific email surveys of alumni. Universities that shared their 2024 placement rates with the National Association of Colleges and Employers said that 86 percent of bachelor’s degree earners had gotten jobs or gone on to graduate study. A closer look shows that this figure included only the little more than half of graduates who had bothered to respond.

It’s one of the surprising number of ways that making higher education choices requires much more scrutiny than people think, and has fewer consumer protections than most other kinds of purchases. 

Even the College Scorecard, in reporting the proportion of students who graduate from a college on time, shows the percentage who earn bachelor’s degrees within eight years — not the four years colleges and universities promise it will take. That detail, too, is hidden in the fine print. Hechinger’s Tuition Tracker lists slightly more accurate graduation rates, but even those reflect six-year completion times, since that’s the minimum the government requires institutions to report.

How long it will actually take to graduate is among the questions prospects should ask, since the answer is that most undergraduates don’t, in fact, finish four-year degrees within four years. That not only increases the price; it also means those students still struggling to finish aren’t yet earning a full-time salary — what economists call an “opportunity cost.”

Ranking the rankings

Outside of considering graduates’ career success, deciding which college makes the best fit can be a deeply personal decision. At a time of polarization and state laws banning diversity programs, some factors to consider might include the level of comfort on a campus experienced by people of various socioeconomic, racial, sexual, ideological, religious and political backgrounds. The Hechinger Report’s College Welcome Guide rates how welcoming colleges are to all kinds of people. Studies show that feeling a sense of belonging on campus can improve student outcomes. 

Using college rankings as a starting point to pick a school can be helpful, but even the most popular are based largely on inputs — wealth, faculty salaries, admitted applicants’ standardized test scores, research performance, prestige — rather than on outcomes, such as what graduates learn or how satisfied they are with their educations. In the end, students give little weight to these, according to research by the higher education consulting firm Art & Science Group, which found that only 3 percent knew the U.S. News ranking of their top-choice school. Universities, on the other hand, take them so seriously that several have allegedly provided them with incorrect data to improve their standings. 

Now there’s a new measure by which consumers are being forced to consider colleges: whether they’re going to close. An estimate by Huron Consulting Group projects that 442 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are at risk as enrollment declines and they take on their own institutional debt. The Hechinger Report’s interactive College Financial Health Tracker shows colleges’ financial status.

Community colleges and for-profit schools

The importance of personal fit notwithstanding, there are additional important caveats about certain types of schools or programs. Starting at a community college, for example — whose tuition is free or nearly free in more than half of states or with federal financial aid — seems a smart way to get credits out of the way toward an eventual bachelor’s degree. Four out of 5 students who begin at a community college say they plan to do exactly that. But largely because of a lack of information and advising, fewer than half of community college students manage to transfer to a four-year university, and fewer than half of those who do earn bachelor’s degrees.

Another caution: For-profit colleges that often provide vocational training — typically leading to certificates rather than degrees — have widely been shown in independent studies to leave graduates less well off compared to students who take the same kinds of courses in community colleges and elsewhere. Tuition at such schools is five times what community colleges charge, on average, while earnings and placement rates are lower. Several, such as Corinthian and ITT Tech, have closed and left their students stranded.

Up next: Getting into college is easier than people think.

Invite others to sign up for our newsletters.

Copyright © 2026 The Hechinger Report, All rights reserved.

Click here to manage your newsletter preferences