Why it can be so dreadfully difficult to make good decisions about your college education

Part 1—The problem with abundant choice

Author’s note: In this seven-part series, I’m setting out to learn the real reasons why choosing between different educational paths and career possibilities can be so challenging and, sometimes, wreak such havoc on our emotional and mental health.

I love music the way a drowning asthmatic enjoys oxygen. My digital library contains more than 8,000 songs. But, increasingly, I find I have nothing to listen to. It’s so hard to choose between all those tunes. It can even be downright stressful—especially when I’m running late for work, want something rockin’ for the drive and can’t make up my mind.

So I abdicate responsibility and set my iPod to shuffle. Free of the burden of decision-making, all is fine for a few moments. But then I start skipping ahead to the next song…and the next…and the next. I even skip my favorite tunes because I think the following one might be better. Instead of immersing myself in music the way I used to, I just snack on it. It seems the more music I collect, the tougher it becomes to pick something—and the less I enjoy the resulting listening experience.

Modern life is cluttered with this phenomenon. From trying to choose which kind of breakfast cereal to buy, to selecting the best insurance plan, we’re often overwhelmed by more options than can be reasonably evaluated in the little time we have available to decide. And some of us pursue so many different interests and hobbies—each with their own whopping set of possibilities—that we’re lucky if we can ever master just one. But we’re especially flooded with choice at some of life’s biggest milestones.

“What are you going to do with your life?” This has long been one of the most anxiety-arousing, fog-inducing questions people can be confronted with. But now, with the glut of educational and career choices available, it’s become even more difficult to answer. It’s not as easy as using an iPod, not so simple to test the options and skip ahead to the next alternative, although many colleges and universities seem to be trying to make it so.

Some notable researchers today believe that we may be so over-choiced it’s hard for us to make satisfying decisions. This could be especially true when it comes to figuring out where to go to school, what to study while you’re there and, finally, what to do for a living once you graduate. Here’s why:

The oppression of too many options

Having a lot to choose from is supposed to be good for you. At least, that’s what North Americans are led to believe. It’s certainly a notion that I’ve always taken for granted. Growing up I was told, “The sky is the limit,” or “You can do anything you want.” So I set about to list everything I wanted to pursue: be an artist, design architecture, fly jets, become an astronaut, write music, do some acting, own my own business, study philosophy, be an astrophysicist, and on and on.

When it came time to choose a college, my options were equally diverse, and I either seriously considered or applied to countless of them: United States military academies, prestigious art schools, non-prestigious art schools, large in-state universities, large out-of-state universities, smaller liberal arts colleges.

I should have been empowered from all that freedom to decide my own path from among so many choices. My teachers told me I was lucky to have the options I did, opportunities that most other students would never get. So, despite my inner discomfort, I agreed. To question their logic would have meant challenging a major pillar of Western civilization.

Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing is a leading researcher on choice and decision-making. In a paper titled When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?, co-authored by Mark Lepper, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, she and Lepper write:

It is a common supposition in modern society that the more choices, the better—that the human ability to manage, and the human desire for, choice is infinite. From classic economic theories of free enterprise, to mundane marketing practices that provide customers with entire aisles devoted to potato chips or soft drinks, to important life decisions in which people contemplate alternative career options or multiple investment opportunities, this belief pervades our institutions, norms, and customs.

The more options available to us, the happier we should be. Problem is, a significant body of research suggests that this is not the case. While having a little bit of choice can be very beneficial, having too much choice brings trouble. Rather than providing our lives with more satisfaction, extensive choice may actually be causing us more stress, anxiety, procrastination, demotivation, dissatisfaction, regret and even depression. It’s a concept that can be hard to grasp. Most of us want a big variety of options, as if just having all that choice is the very thing that will bring us happiness. But what we want and what will make us happy are often not the same.

I’ve never been more miserable than in my last few months of high school. On the face of it, I had it all: a chance to pursue whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted. But trying to make the “right” choice made me feel like a drugged-out contestant playing a reality game show called “Who Can Escape Mr. Blinky’s Booby Trapped Funhouse?” All eyes were on me. Everything I considered seemed very risky. Making a quality decision became a heavy psychological burden.

In the U.S. alone, there are now more than 4,400 post-secondary, degree-granting institutions, including more than 1,600 public schools, more than 1,600 private, not-for-profit schools, and more than 1,100 private, for-profit schools. Then there are the career options: at least 800 possible occupations depending how you classify and group different jobs.

Those are big numbers, and it would be easy to understand going insane from trying to consider all of those schools and careers. Fortunately, nobody really does that. But problems can still emerge, even if you’re able to narrow some of those options.

“You don’t need to be considering every possibility to be driven crazy,” says Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. “People look at schools, and they think there is a right answer to the question, ‘Which one is right for me?’ They think that everything hinges on coming up with that right answer.”

The more options up for grabs, the more likely you are to be paralyzed by them.

In a field experiment, Iyengar and Lepper demonstrated this choice paradox by observing the behavior of people in an upscale grocery store as they came upon a booth with a selection of different gourmet jams. At first, shoppers were offered a display of only six flavors of jam. Then a later group of shoppers had a much more extensive selection of 24 different flavors. The results showed that offering more choice decreased purchases of the jam. Iyengar and Lepper write:

The findings from this study show that an extensive array of options can at first seem highly appealing to consumers, yet can reduce their subsequent motivation to purchase the product. Even though consumers presumably shop at this particular store in part because of the large number of selections available, having “too much” choice seems nonetheless to have hampered their later motivation to buy.

This experiment was not perfect, but later studies done in other contexts and accounting for the limitations also showed a similar phenomenon. So if picking jam from a wide assortment is too difficult for many people, then imagine how hard it is to pick a school or career from all the available options. There’s far more at stake than just a few bucks spent on a jar of marmalade that you can easily pawn off on grandma if you really don’t like it.

“We live in a culture that idolizes and idealizes freedom of choice,” says Schwartz. “So it’s very hard, I find, to convince people, especially young people, that they’re better off with fewer choices.”