This seems to be very similar to the dating problem. Instead of asking students to give preference on college/course combination, maybe they should be asked abo

This seems to be very similar to the dating problem. Instead of asking students to give preference on college/course combination, maybe they should be asked about what matters most to them. Are they looking for a college close to their home, are they looking for a course that has many career options or are they looking for something they are passionate about, etc., Colleges could go through a similar set of questions and then you can build a machine learning algorithm that uses this information to match a college and student. It may not be straightforward but a few iterations of questions (or features in ML terms) can build a pretty robust model.