Choosing the Right College

Join Nikita for this mini-episode on choosing the college that's right for you. In this episode, she discusses different factors to consider when making your selection. Including things like: college credentials, networking, location, cost, resources, and more. 

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Nikita 0:00

Hello 3rd Decade friends! We're happy to have you here. I'm your host Nikita. The focus of this episode is gonna be on finding the right school. And we know that college comes with a lot of decisions. So we're taking it a bite at a time today. We'll be going over what you should be looking for when finding the school that's right for you. As an aside, we don't believe college is the only form of valuable education and training beyond school. Later this season, we do plan to have an episode on alternative forms of higher education, but let's get into it. We're gonna cover eight things to help narrow down which colleges you apply for. Some of these are a little more obvious. Others might be something that you haven't necessarily considered first and foremost, college credentials, depending on what degree you're pursuing. You can find information online about certain college credentials that help make you a stronger candidate in your field. Once you graduate. For instance, if you wanna go to a business school, you'll probably wanna find one that's earned their AACSB accreditation. That stands for associate to advanced collegiate schools of business. Onto the next point. Another thing you might wanna keep in mind is the reputation of the school and whether or not you'll have good networking opportunities by getting your education there. This could come in the form of internship opportunities, career fairs, or just being well connected to the community. Location is important to consider for a lot of reasons. One of the major ones being difference of in-state versus out-of-state tuition costs. Speaking from what I know about my local university, it's about three times as much for an out-of-state student than it is for an in-state student. So if the field you're pursuing is high paying and warrants, that extra cost, this might make sense, but if you're pursuing something like a bachelor's degree in a lower paying field, it may might make more sense to find a good college within the state that you currently reside in this easily brings us to the next point of cost. Does the cost of the program make sense, given what your field will pay you when you graduate? This varies widely, but it's worth doing some calculations. For instance, something that I was considering years ago was pursuing a master's degree in social work. That was until I was told that the $40,000 program would pay on average $38,000 per year after graduation. This isn't always the case, but I was glad that I asked the question and that they gave me an honest answer. The fifth item that you'll want to consider is the availability of financial aid awards. Some schools have better offerings than others. You can find out about financial aid offerings by typically just Googling the phrase, financial aid offerings and insert the college name that you're considering. Other colleges actually have portals where you can specifically filter out criteria that does, and doesn't apply to you and they help match you up with potential scholarships and financial aid. So you can go that route, but it should be pretty easy to find this information on their websites in one way or another, in a similar vein, you may want to consider a school based on the resource that they have available to their students, whether that's mental health counseling for students, disability, resources, or tutoring, whatever it is that you can foresee benefiting from, it might be helpful to factor it into your calculation of which school you wanna attend. Campus environment is another significant factor. What kind of campus culture is important? You do your due diligence and research. If the school that you're interested in matches that culture that you're hoping for. And lastly, identify your own priorities. This will be different for everybody, but with the power of the internet, if you take the time to write out your non-negotiables and then do some research on which schools align with those, you're setting yourself up for a positive experience. We hope you found value in today's short episode. Thanks for sharing your time with us. Take care!