Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life

At its heart, this book is about addressing the college-choosing problem. It is about helping people make better, more satisfying choices. The rankings, metrics, analytics, college visits, and advice that we use today to help us make these decisions are out of step with the progress individual students are trying to make. They don’t give students and families the information and context they need to make such a high-stakes decision about whether and where to get an education. This book seeks to strip away the noise to help us understand what’s driving us and what we are trying to accomplish as individuals to help us make better choices.

The research in this book illustrates that choosing a college is complicated. By constructing mini-documentaries of how more than 100 students chose over 200 different postsecondary educational experiences, the authors explore the motivations for how and why people make the decisions that they do at a much deeper, causal level. The authors will help readers understand not what job students want out of college, but what “Job” students were hiring college to do for them. 

By understanding these motivations through what we call the “Jobs to be Done” theory, the authors have been able to piece together five different Jobs for which students hire postsecondary education. Accordingly, from these Jobs, readers will understand the set of experiences necessary to help them get a particular Job done well, offer them guidance for how to frame the decision before them, and allow them to see their true set of desirable options.