What is College Xoice™?
A solution to help high school students, especially first-generation students, make the challenging college decision.
Downloadable app:
Browser access: College Xoice Sign-up or Sign-in
Why the College Xoice ™ app helps:
The college decision is too complicated! It is not your fault. Our own brains were not created to make multi-criteria (what is important to me about college) and multi-alternative (what colleges could I attend) decisions. There are simply to many combinations too consider at once.
The college decision often sets the stage for initial career, educational, and financial paths. The college decision includes different college alternatives, which could include different career paths. For example, 4-year undergraduate college, 2-year community college, vocational career path, services industry path, military service path, or many others.
Over a lifetime, the college decision has potentially the most significant financial impact. Starting at age twenty‐two, the long‐term financial impact of substituting debt service for retirement contributions is massive. According to the Education Data Initiative, average monthly student loan payments are $393 and the average loan takes 20 years to pay off. For each young person with the average student loan, the long‐term financial impact of paying back a student loan instead of saving for retirement is over $3.5 million. This is the negative impact of delaying getting on the time value of money wealth-building ladder.
For those in either Low to Moderate Income communities or ethnic minority communities, long- term financial and equity risks maybe greater. For first-generation college students, the U.S distribution is higher in ethnically diverse communities. The first-generation student group potentially has less access to parent-based college experiences, causing less college decision guidance and higher risk for a sub-optimal college decision.
How the College Xoice™ app helps:
The Definitive Social mission is enabled by a smartphone or browser-based app to help people make high-value decisions. The best part about the College Xoice™ app is we make it easy and fun. The “heavy lifting” is done in the background. The app is built on a few key pillars:
- There are several decision criteria and related questions relevant to an important life decision or choice.
- The weighting of the decision criteria is completed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is the leading technique to accurately prioritizing criteria, and is done so in an intuitive and easy‐to‐understand way.
- Ranking of the existing choice alternatives is part of a software assisted process.
- Having the ability to update as you learn is important. This includes separating importanbut mysterious “gut” feelings from objective information.
- Having the convenience of pre-loaded and curated objective information is core to the decision process.
- Having the ability to share criteria, alternatives, and decision recommendations with trusted members of our your community is available.
- Finally, a mechanism to aggregate multiple decision inputs in an intuitive and adaptable way, leading to actionable decision recommendations is provided.
There are 2 ways to get the College Xoice ™ app
1
Your high school counselor. High school counselors across America are in the process of signing up for College Xoice ™. Please ask your counselor if they have access yet.
2
If not, you may use our introductory College Xoice™ app for free. Just go to your app store from the links below. Include the code “Intro” after loading the app on your smartphone.
We are so glad you are using College Xoice™. A better college decision is now in reach!