Most Graduating Seniors Will Attend the Kind of College They Prefer, Survey Finds

Most graduating high-school seniors will attend the kind of college they said they preferred, according to a survey released today by Maguire Associates.

The survey, conducted in May and June, is a follow-up to a survey of 30,866 high-school juniors and seniors, and 5,705 parents of juniors and seniors, who were members of FastWeb, a scholarship-search Web site, conducted in February and March.

The second wave of the survey found that 98 percent of seniors plan to attend college in the fall. Of those who had said they preferred to attend a public institution in the first survey, 86 percent are enrolling in a public college, and of those who preferred a private institution 73 percent are enrolling in a private college.

Yet some students, dubbed “switchers,” are attending a different kind of college from what they said they preferred. In many of those cases, affordability seems to have played a large role. The survey found that 225 respondents were going to a public institution despite preferring a private one. That was no surprise in a year when many expected students to shift toward less-expensive public education, said Kathleen Dawley, president of Maguire Associates.

What was more of a surprise was that 226 students who said they preferred public college were enrolling in a private institution. “It was interesting that it went both ways,” Ms. Dawley said.

Of the students who wanted to attend a public but chose to enroll at a private institution instead, more than half had a self-reported annual family income of $60,000 or less, suggesting that they may have received a significant aid package to attend the private college. Sixty-one percent of these “switchers” received need-based financial aid from the college they will attend, and 49 percent received merit aid.

Of students who had said they preferred a private institution but chose a public one, 55 percent said economic conditions had made their college choice more difficult.

Maguire Associates also surveyed some 8,000 high-school juniors and nearly 900 parents of juniors during the initial survey phase, in February and March. The juniors and seniors expressed a similar level of worry about the economy. And 36.6 percent of the juniors strongly agreed with the statement “I am unlikely to be able to afford a private college education,” compared with 30.4 percent of seniors.

Unlike the graduating seniors, juniors will have had the economic downturn in mind during much of their college-decision process. Maguire Associates plans to follow up with these students again as seniors to see how the recession might be influencing their plans. —Beckie Supiano