Understanding how prospective students make their final
choices of colleges or universities is important to
students, their parents, and to the institutions. When it
comes to academically advanced students, or Honors students,
there is a question as to whether the same factors are
influential to their higher education decisions. The
purpose of this study was to compare the responses of
Virginia Tech Honors students with current literature to
determine the influences associated with college or
university selection between the two data sets.
The methodology used in this study included qualitative
focus-group interviews of Virginia Tech Honors freshmen who
had been admitted into the Program for the fall semester of
1992 and had remained Honors eligible for the spring
semester of 1993. six interview sessions were arranged for 50 students. An interview protocol was designed to ask six
questions to the participants, focusing on how they made
their final decisions to attend virginia Tech. Thirty-six
students actually participated in the interviews.
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