College Selection Part 1/3 : Can WSJF help?

Recently, we’ve been grappling with the college selection process and the related decision-making approach. We’ve visited many colleges and universities with my high school senior to help us decide.

Can an agile mindset help in such real life scenario? If so, how do we go about it?

The core challenge is the lack of a common currency for comparison. So, how do we even attempt to prioritize and design a decision-aiding approach? Enter the prioritization technique of WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First).

By collaborating with my high schooler, we morphed WSJF into WCVF (Weighted College Value First). Here are the steps:

1.????? List your colleges: Make a list of all the colleges you’re considering.

2.????? List your categories for evaluation: Consider factors like your career goals, interests, financial situation, and personal preferences. We chose the following five categories:

a.????? Travel Logistics: degree of comfort to & from between home & college

b.????? Program Rank: rank of the college’s program rank & rating

c.????? Weather: degree of comfort that local weather provides

d.????? Interest & Guarantee of the Major: two aspects combined, first choice major and some colleges doesn’t guarantee major until second year

e.????? Job / Co-op / Internship prospects

3.????? Define a weighting factor for each category: We gave equal 20% weight to each category. However, you can define your own weighting factor.

4.????? Have a total cost estimate handy (Tuition + Boarding + Miscellaneous): We considered scholarship as part of the total cost estimate. You may have that as separate category.

Given that college selection is peculiar and unique, pertaining to individual choices, situations, constraints, and preferences, both the categories and their weightage should be flexible for individuals to tweak. We hope this approach will help you in your pursuit of decision-making (or at least decision aiding) for college/university selection, it certainly helped us.

Once we had above four steps defined, it took us less than 30 mins to feed the data points, by relative rating on the scale of 1 to 10 and got guidance from the WCVF formulae as you can see in the above graphic. It’s crucial to leverage the power of relative sizing, as it’s hard to come up with absolute precise value.

If you prefer to have this in Excel, reach out to me and I will be happy to share.

Note: This is my opinion and not my employer’s opinion. Also, college selection is a significant decision. It’s always a good idea to discuss such decisions with a career counselor, academic advisor, and your guardians.