Choosing a College

Income and Career Prospects
The Unthinkable
Financial Aid
A Choice of Futures

After months of waiting and wondering about which college will accept you, the time finally comes when the situation is reversed. After you receive their decisions-and chances are there will be more than one acceptance-you must then decide which of the colleges’ admissions offers you will choose to accept.

An acceptance letter, even from a prestigious institution, is not a trophy but a cross-roads. However much your friends, relatives, and classmates may be impressed by one acceptance letter and unimpressed by others, it is you who will be living with the consequences of your choice, for years-and decades-to come. If you are accepted by Columbia University and by Davidson College, everyone will congratulate you on the first but many may never have heard of the second. However, at that point, if you have done your homework, you will know far more about both institutions than anyone around you. That knowledge—of the schools and of yourself—should decide for you, not the crowd’s reaction.

Income and Career Prospects

Averages are treacherous. Joining a basketball team will not make you any taller, even though the average basketball player is much taller than most people. The average income of its graduates is similarly a very shaky basis for choosing a college.

It would take a complicated analysis-with a very uncertain outcome-to determine how much a given college itself adds to your future income prospects. The field that you major in probably has a much bigger effect. A given individual is unlikely to earn as high an income with a Harvard degree in sociology as with a Georgia Tech degree in engineering.

If your interest is not so much in your prospects immediately after college, but rather in your career after finishing graduate school or medical or law school, then there is even less reason to select a big-name undergraduate institution, as such. The quality and renown of your postgraduate training will undoubtedly have a very real influence on your career prospects-but at that point no one will care where you went to college before you received your M.B.A. from Wharton, your Ph.D. from Stanford, or your M.D. from Johns Hopkins. Perhaps you are concerned about getting into such postgraduate programs and think that a big-name college will help your chances there. But the people who run the leading graduate and professional institutions are unlikely to be dazzled by big names. They know from long personal experience which colleges’ students actually perform well, regardless of whether or not those colleges are known to the general public. It was the deans of law schools who ranked Davidson College ahead of most Ivy League schools for the calibre of its students’ performances in law school. It was the deans of engineering schools who ranked the students from Rose-Hulman Institute ahead of those from Princeton.

The Unthinkable

Most selective colleges notify you of their decision by mid April and require you to notify them of your decision by the beginning of May. There are still some respectable institutions to which you can apply by June 1[st] or later, and still others with “rolling” admissions policies, to which you can apply as long as they have spaces. Among these late-application possibilities are a number of state universities, including California’s UC Riverside, Michigan State, Purdue, the University of Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa; Clemson, Auburn, Colorado State, and others. There are also a number of late-application private institutions, such as Marquette University, Temple University, Wabash College, and Loyola Marymount University. If you are confident that academic credentials will get you in someplace that suits you better next year, perhaps it is better to wait, especially if your problem this year was from applying to too few or too competitive a set of colleges.

If you have not been rejected outright by the college to which you applied, but have been put on the waiting list, then you may need to apply elsewhere to have a fall-back possibility, while sweating out whether you will ultimately be admitted to your preferred college. One of the real dangers in this situation is psychological. If you take being wait-listed personally, you may build up resentments and doubts that may affect your judgement if and when you are finally admitted from the waiting list. Given the chancy nature of the ~admissions game, there is probably no basis for resentments and doubts- certainly not enough to make it sensible to turn down the admissions offer when it comes.

If the college where you were wait-listed was your preferred choice before, and there is no new information about it, then it should still be your preferred choice. Once you are there, you will be like any other student, including those who received early acceptance. And after you have graduated, being wait-listed will be one of the things you can laugh about.

Financial Aid

The financial differences that matter most are those that affect your education while in college. The difference between a campus job and a loan makes a difference in your education. The difference between a loan and a grant does not. Obviously loans will mean that you graduate in debt but being in debt will not affect your life until after graduation-and probably not in a major way even then. The difference between a loan and a grant should not be enough to determine your choice if there is a real difference between colleges.

A Choice of Futures

These are all downside risks. But there are many up sides when you make the right choice. The right college can mean new horizons and a whole new life. Make that choice, not just for the next year or even the next four years, but for the best new life you can find.

Copyright © 1989, Thomas Sowell. Used by permission.