How to Choose a College

It's that time of year again, when the US News rankings come out (confirming my undergrad alma mater as the Best in All the Land) and everybody in academia gets all worked up about What It All Means. There are always a few gems in there with all the pointless hand-wringing, though, and Timothy Burke of Swarthmore has some of the best advice you'll ever read on choosing a college:

I sometimes join a faculty panel to talk to prospective Swarthmore applicants, and one of the first things that I say is that a college applicant and family can only have strong control over a few really basic dimensions of the choice in front of them. You can control the cost of tuition and board by choosing between public and private, near your family or far-away. You can choose between large and small. You can choose between institutions with unusual curricular designs (St. John's, Hampshire, Bob Jones, the U.S. Military Academy) or institutions that are more or less variations on a common approach. An applicant and family can make some rough judgments about selectivity, quality, and resources using rankings systems. An applicant can decide if there's a region or area of the country they really like or dislike.

Beyond that, if (for example) an applicant had decided that they wanted small colleges in the Northeast with a fairly standard curricular philosophy near the top of the selectivity hierarchy, there's a good argument that they should just write out all the names on slips of paper, put them in a Hogwart's hat, and choose six to apply to. The features that will really change your life or matter to you once those major decisions are made are almost impossible to predict: the friends you'll make or lose, the people you'll love or break up with, the professors you'll connect to or be frustrated by, the courses that will excite or bore you, the majors that will grab or repel you, the professional connections you'll make or wish you had, the institutional culture that will satisfy or disgust you.

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It's very hard to do more, roughly as it is hard when you're a first-time home buyer to really understand and examine the things that will make the key differences in your life with a comparative understanding of all the possible choices. I don't think I could actually have ever seen or accurately weighed the stuff that's been good and bad about the home I bought five years ago even if I'd had the best counsel in the world. I don't know even now if the other houses I looked at had better functioning windows or well-installed doorknobs or fewer horrifically stupid DIY jobs lurking under the surface. I don't know if I would have had good neighbors at other houses like I do where we are now, or if my tomatoes would have grown well in other gardens.

It's the same with higher education.

(The rest of the post is also good, though somewhat more specialized, responding to a fairly silly argument at EphBlog.)

This is absolutely dead-on, and if I'm ever asked to do the same sort of panel for Union, I intend to liberally crib from Burke's post. I wouldn't willingly trade my Williams experience for anything, but a large part of what made me experience great was stuff you would never be able to find in course catalogs or glossy college brochures. Playing rugby, bullshitting about politics in dorm rooms and dining halls, drinking far too much and doing ridiculous things, playing Tecmo Bowl until all hours, eating Colonial Pizza freshman year and watching Star Trek senior year-- all of those things played a huge role in my college experience, and none of them could've been predicted in advance.

Don't get me wrong-- the formal educational experience was also terrific. I had great experiences in my physics courses, and in a bunch of social science and humanities electives as well (Peter Frost's classes on Japan and Vietnam were a particular highlight). But that's only part of the picture.

I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, but at the same time, I'm sure that I would've been equally happy with my experience had I opted for Swarthmore instead (my second choice). I had a great time on my visit there, and while it would've been a dramatically different experience, I don't doubt that I would've enjoyed being a student there as well. I'd be a different person today, but the same basic range of personal experiences are available at any college in America.

Why did I pick Williams over Swarthmore? They made me a really sweet financial aid offer, for one thing, but that wasn't the whole story. It was a bunch of intangible stuff-- I like the Berkshires better than the suburbs of Philadelphia, I really liked the people I met (though, ironically, when I got to campus, I had almost nothing to do with any of the people I met on my visit-- totally different social circles), etc. It wasn't anything to do with academic quality, mostly because I wasn't really in a position to be able to evaluate the relative academic quality of the two.

So, I think that in the end, Burke is right: don't overthink the process. Choose the basic type of college or university you're after, and pick a handful of schools of that type to apply to. After that, you've got the same opportunity to have a great experience at pretty much any place you can go. It's not that you can't go wrong-- obviously, there's always the potential to make extremely bad choices, or for factors beyond your control to wreck things-- but that whether things go right or wrong is down to factors that you won't find in any guide book or list of college rankings. Go with whatever feels right to you, and make it the best that you can.