Don’t you wish there was a college decision making machine? You just enter some basic information on what you’re looking for in a college, what you can pay, click a button and you get the results–go to school X now! Well Tier One Athletics has created just such a college decision making machine.
Like many of the college search websites, you can enter your preferences for affordability, location, academics, safety, research opportunities, and social life. You then rank each category for the colleges you are considering and then the machine generates a score for each college. (Spoiler alert-for the full-effect you should use the college decision making machine before you read any further.)
What makes the Tier One Athletics results different is in how you interpret them. Basically, after you go through the process of ranking all of the schools in various categories, according to the interpretation instructions only one category counts: intangibles. According to Tier One Athletics:
We all want to think we make or decisions purely based on logic and rational thought. (If that were true, nobody would decide to have children) The truth of the matter is that we process far more information in our brains than we can present on a spreadsheet. And while we can’t always put our finger on why we decide a certain way – we call it gut-feel or instinct – it’s a powerful and usually accurate assessment of the “˜big picture’. The “˜intangible’ column was the place where your subconscious mind, that has been busy evaluating everything, can weigh-in on the decision.
Take it for what it’s worth – no guarantees that your subconscious has made a good decision, but hopefully it helped you get closer to deciding.
I’ve heard variations of techniques using the subconscious to make the decision. One was when you have to decide between several options, immediately make a decision. Then over the next few days pay attention to whether you are focusing on the reasons why it’s a good decision or a bad decision. If the focus is on the bad, then you probably didn’t pick the right school.
Now I’m not so sure that I would eliminate the tangibles such as financial aid or graduation rates. I think these come in to play as setting minimum standards. After all, if you simply can’t afford a school, it doesn’t matter how high the intangibles rank, you aren’t going to go.
My son made his final decision based on the intangibles but it was after he had narrowed down his choices to three schools. All three were acceptable in terms of cost, graduation rates, and academics. If we had carried out the “objective” rankings of the three schools, the one he is currently attending would have ranked the lowest. The intangibles carried the day.
Anyone looking to play athletics at academically competitive colleges should spend some serious time on the Tier One Athletics blog.