Episode 169: Why the College’s Enrollment Matters

Today we are going to talk about Step 6 of your kid’s summer homework, as explained in our episodes throughout the summer and also more elaborately in our workbook How To Explore Your College Options: A Workbook for High School Students.  So, order a workbook from Amazon for your son or daughter if you want the longer version and the actual worksheets.

We are up to Questions 8 through 16 on the College Profile Worksheet this week as your kid answers nine questions about student enrollment at each college on his or her Long List of College Options (or LLCO, for short).  The questions are about how many students are enrolled and what their personal characteristics are.

By the way, it occurs to me that your kid could be following along with us and doing the “questions of the week” for each college on the LLCO, but that means that he or she is going back to each college website or College Navigator profile every week as new questions are posed.  That seems a bit inefficient.  On the other hand, when your son or daughter gets accustomed to finding information on a college website or on College Navigator about a certain topic, it might turn out to be efficient to find that information in a similar place on each website or in each College Navigator profile--thus, making the whole process not really so inefficient as it seems.  Of course, you could advise your kid to do some of each:  Go along with us each week for a handful of colleges to make sure it is clear what to do and then, at the end of the summer, go back and finish up the other colleges by doing all of the questions for one college at a time with only one trip to the website and College Navigator profile.  That’s your family’s call.

With that said, although today’s Questions 8 through 16 on the College Profile Worksheet can be answered from a college’s website (especially by looking at the common data set), we think that it is actually easier to get most of the answers by using a college’s profile at College Navigator.  You might think that enrollment is just a matter of a number or two, but you are going to see that there’s a lot more to think about here.

1. Number of Undergraduate Students

Let’s start with the obvious:  number of undergraduate students.  This is what we explained to kids (though the workbook provides additional detail about exactly where to find the right numbers):

Here is one very important thing to remember when you are jotting down undergraduate enrollment for each of the colleges on your LLCO:  Be consistent about what statistic you use.  For example, some colleges include part-time and full-time students in their enrollment count; others separate them.  Sometimes, it is hard to know what students are included.  Ideally, you should use numbers that mean the same thing from college to college so that you can compare the sizes of the undergraduate student body as accurately as possible.

Our vote for where to find that undergraduate enrollment number is College Navigator.  After you search for your college, you will see many categories of data that are available.  Click on Enrollment.  You will refer to this category a lot as you fill out this section of the College Profile Worksheet.

Under Enrollment, you will notice that the figures are probably for the fall of the preceding school year.  Those figures are fine to use, because most colleges do not have huge enrollment changes from year to year. 

Question 8 asks students to jot down the undergraduate enrollment of the college.  That’s the easy part.  Here is what we said about my personal pet peeve in judging the size of that undergraduate enrollment:

Eventually, you will have to consider whether the size of the undergraduate student body matters to you.  We think that this issue is given too much weight by many high school students and their parents.  We often hear kids say things like this:  “I think I would like to go to a small school.  The University of (fill in the blank) seems too big to me.”  Of course, a big university might seem overwhelming to a high school senior.  But perhaps that is because most high school seniors have spent no time at all in a large university setting.  We believe that most high school seniors have no rational basis for making a valid judgment about student body size. 

And, although it is tempting, we don’t think you can judge the size of a college based on the size of