In this post I would like to discuss something more general that I had actually planned to bring up in a later post, but the recent publication of an opinion piece in the NY Times by writer Frank Bruni has compelled me to discuss the issue now (Bruni’s piece was very popular and for a few days was the most emailed story in the NY Times). Whereas my previous posts were more about the SAT and ACT themselves, this post will be more about college itself: why does one go to college, what should one look to get out of college, which college is the right college to choose, and how important is it to attend one of the “elite” colleges?
Especially here in New York there is a tremendous emphasis placed on going to the “right” college and many kids get thrust at a very young age into the high stress, high stakes game of trying to prepare for acceptance to the elite schools. In the aforementioned article Frank Bruni tends to make the case that it doesn’t matter very much what college you attend. I think that view is a little bit extreme and distorted so I don’t want to pretend that it doesn’t matter at all (part of his point is just that so few of the people who we as a society view as hugely “successful” went to one of the “elite” colleges). Having gone to Yale I can say that a degree from one of the very top schools certainly opens some doors in life. That said, I think that that effect is limited to the top 10 schools or so. Having a degree from, say, Notre Dame or UVA (both top 25 schools in the latest US News and World Report Rankings) does not necessarily give you an advantage over having a degree from a lower ranked school, say an Indiana or one of the better SUNY schools (in fact in NY most people recognize the top SUNY schools like Binghamton as being excellent schools that provide a top notch education).
One of Bruni’s points is that it matters less and less what school you went to the further you get from college. What matters more is how you perform in college and more importantly what you do after college. When you are 30 years old and looking for a job, your work experience is much more important that what school you graduated from. And when you are 35 or 40 or 45 your alma mater is virtually insignificant.
Another issue to raise in the discussion is what do you hope to get out of college? Bruni makes the point that college should be viewed as an opportunity, a chance to expand your horizons, try new things, perhaps move away from home, etc. Why choose to go to a school that many of the people you know are going to or that is extremely popular within your community? College really is a unique opportunity in the sense that is a liberating time when you don’t have a ton of responsibility – many people don’t get that chance again in life (after college they take a job, have kids, and then never again get to experience the freedom and possibility that college represents). So to fixate on the big-name schools that most people focus on is really to limit your horizons and possibly miss taking advantage of an opportunity that may only come along once in your life.
Furthermore, college should obviously be about learning and thriving, but that does not necessarily happen best at the top schools. Many would argue that the small liberal arts schools (like Williams and Vassar) provide the best education because the classes are very small and the focus is really on undergraduate education (many of the bigger schools, by comparison, place an emphasis on graduate education). Yet many of these small liberal arts schools are not on the radar screen of high school students because they are not the big-name schools that many people have heard of.
College is largely what you make of it. Again, I wouldn’t dispute that if you go to Harvard or Yale you may always be able to use that very fact to impress people regardless of how you perform at those schools. But that really only applies to the top 5 or 10 schools if it even applies at all. And sometimes it is better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Once you are at college you have a wealth of opportunities in front of you and you might find that you have more opportunities (and less competition perhaps) in a smaller or slightly less well-known school. It is pretty hard to be on a professor’s radar screen at a place like Harvard, where everyone is trying to get on the professor’s radar screen and where all of the students are extremely bright (anecdotally, when I was at Yale I took a seminar on Nazi Germany and there was a student in the class who chose to read all of the books in German even though he was a native-English speaker….I mean, come on!!!). And if you stand out at the school you attend that makes it much easier to catapult into whatever you choose to do when you finish college.
There is one more thing to consider that can really have a great impact on which colleges you get accepted to and which one you choose to attend. Certain schools tend to be very popular among applicants from a certain region and this makes it exceedingly difficult to get into those schools. When I was in high school on Long Island that school was University of North Carolina. For an in-state candidate the school was probably difficult but not impossible to get into, but from Long Island it was almost impossible to get in because so many people applied there and they were only going to accept a certain number of out-of-state candidates and from among that pool only a very small percentage from Long Island. On the flip side, however, there are schools that are really not popular among applicants from a certain region and some of these colleges are top schools. Again when I was in high school my brother was admitted to Vanderbilt, generally considered the Harvard of the South, even though he wasn’t admitted to any other schools of that caliber. The reason is that at the time not many people from Long Island applied there. So there are really excellent, top-notch schools that are relatively easier to get into from a certain areas – one just needs to stop following the herd and obsessing over the handful of schools that are popular within one’s crowd.
Getting back to the original purpose of this post, if you are competing for one of the very few spots at the very top schools (schools that have acceptance rates of around 5%) you are necessarily setting yourself up for a high stress game. If instead you take a step back and try to think about college from a novel perspective and open your mind to all of the possibilities out there, you are likely to reduce your level of stress and be a happier person. And I am in the business of making people happy.