The Composition of Consideration and Choice Sets in Undergraduate University Choice: An Exploratory Study

We examine university choice as a case of consumer decision making and adopt a brand elimination framework. This approach is predicated on the grounds that a large amount of research in consumer behavior has shown that in markets where there are many alternative brands, consumers use phased-decision strategies. In these research studies, the consumer is conceptualized as first filtering the alternative brands using relatively simple criteria and then undertaking a more detailed analysis of the reduced sets of brands. Drawing on this research in consumer behaviour and the relevant college choice literature in the fields of education and sociology, we develop a process model of individual brand choice. The composition of the consideration and choice sets was defined in terms of the proportion of “old” and “new” universities. In order to test our model, we used a sample of undergraduate UK students who had just gone through the process of choosing a university. Overall, the results for both consideration and choice sets tend to support the view that the brands (i.e., type of university) contained in these two sets are dissimilar, i.e., independent. In order of importance, we found that the three variables of ethnic group, age, and university proximity were the most important in predicting the composition of both the consideration and choice sets.