Choice Compression in International Higher-Education Applications: Information Overload, Effort Costs and Viable-Option Attrition

International higher-education applicants face numerous potential destinations, institutions and programmes, but the applications they ultimately submit may not reflect a stable ranking of preferences. This conceptual article develops an account of choice compression: the progressive reduction of a psychologically active option set through comparison difficulty, administrative effort, simplification and application attrition. Drawing on research on higher-education choice, conditional choice overload, information overload and decision fatigue, it distinguishes deliberate elimination of weak options from the disappearance of viable options that remain substantively attractive. The framework specifies exploration, information processing and compression as analytically observable phases, identifies preference uncertainty and institutional information architecture as moderators, and treats applications started but not submitted as process outcomes requiring explanation rather than automatic evidence of changed preference. Five testable propositions and a prospective research design distinguish overload-driven attrition from ordinary updating, resource constraints and strategic narrowing. The argument extends prior associational work on application abandonment by clarifying the mechanisms, measurement strategy and counterfactual required to investigate why an option drops out of consideration. It does not claim that a larger choice set is inherently harmful or that abandonment is necessarily irrational. Implications concern priority-setting, the use of rankings, programme comparability and application design.