Analyzing How Students Choose Colleges Is Key Topic at Meeting of Planners

Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson covers a SCUP concurrent session on a topic near and dear to SCUPer hearts. (We'll have a non-protected link shortly.) It was very well-attended:

Defining students merely as "Millennials" is "a handy shorthand for the fact that kids today are different from us," says Ken Steele, senior vice president for education marketing at the Academica Group Inc., a consulting firm. But generalizations about plugged-in students don't get you very far in determining how they choose their colleges.

In a presentation about how prospective students form impressions about colleges, delivered here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the Society for College and University Planning, Mr. Steele proposed a different set of labels for would-be undergraduates: the scholars, the careerists, the conflicted, and the drifters. Those "psychographic clusters" represent students' motivators—either pushed or pulled into college, either to get the college experience or to advance to a career.