@eh1234 , your post made me laugh. I am always more surprised by kids who say they want to be engineers, or who want to study communications, or international relations. How do kids know they want to study those things? Who is telling them about those majors? What exactly is involved in those majors? Even I am not sure!
My college D was pretty invested in the process. My son clearly is not, though we have had quite a few conversations about it. I marked pages in a guide book with post it notes for colleges I thought he might be interested in. He barely picked the book up. I am now compiling a literal spreadsheet of ratings on a scale of 1-5 of qualities I think are important to him. (Now admittedly, I actually find this fun, and given how active I am on CC, it is fair to surmise that I am probably doing this more for me than for him.) The plan is that I will then be able to rank these colleges and he will be able to easily see why the college is on the list. Then, when the list is a manageable size, he will (hopefully) do some research of his own.
Your post brings up an interesting point though. We have saved equal amounts of money for our kids’ education. Kid #1 is full-pay at her college. She worked extremely hard and earned it. Kid #2 is a good student, but is not “earning it.” While he definitely has some ideas about college, he doesn’t have true interest. We are now starting to feel reluctant to pay the same kind of money for his education that we pay for hers, which makes us feel a bit guilty. But I feel like you have a very good point, OP. If he isn’t that bothered, should we pay as much as possible? Seems kind of crazy.