Advice for the Blessed: how to choose a school

What should students do who are lucky enough to have some great choices  of colleges in front of them ? The simple answer is to put down a deposit by May 1. After that it gets more complicated. 

Here is some advice for those who have been offered merit scholarships at a school but may also have been accepted at some schools that are ranked higher in US News (or other sites).

It is important to note that rankings are anything but scientific documents. Studies by people, like Malcolm Gladwell, who know data  have written about this.

Philosophers have long called man ‘the rational animal’. What they leave out is that man is also the only irrational animal too. Animals are driven while we at least think sometimes we are at the wheel. I say all this as many of the decisions parents and students make over he next month will not be rational.

Thought experiment:

 A college has just offered you a merit scholarship worth over 200,000 over 4 years. They invite you to a special weekend for select scholars. Before you go they ask what kind of candy you like and when you get there they hand you the candy and call you by name. They roll out the hotshot professors and tell you in so many ways you will have special access to research and independent study. They talk about helping with great internships and special pre-professional advising. You are a VIP.

A week later a school with a higher US News ranking opens up its website and you see you have been admitted. After a few days you get a letter in the mail. You are invited to visit the campus where you and many others will be given talks in stuffy rooms with faculty and students who say how great the school is. No one calls you by name; you discover that the competition is stiff for internships and independent studies. The waters are wide and deep.

Which school will the student choose? If there are what you think is a significant differences between the reputation between school one and school two I can bet what you will do. If I bet on all the people in this position in the coming weeks I would get get rich. While a few will take the money, most, if given the choice by their parents, will take the higher ranked school.

The thinking goes like this. "The reputation will open doors and the networks of alums will be helpful and the people are just smarter." Data, however, does not back this up. Yet people are willing to turn down huge sums of money betting that a school with a higher ranking will be worth it in outcomes. And maybe 50 years ago this was accurate.

But I work with bright students and all of them have some good choices, and yet when I tell them that they should probably go to a lower ranked school willing to do almost anything to give them what they want, they look at me as if I‘d slapped them. And this is irrational.

Play the odds. Most of you students should go to the place where the stats indicate you are entering the gate near the top. Why? Because at the end of 4 years you will still likely be in the top.  The selection index of law schools and med schools that are highly ranked are almost written in stone. The GPA and mcat/lsat/gre/gmat etc. must be extraordinary or there is virtually no hope of admission to top graduate programs

In a worldwide marketplace graduate schools and employers are looking for the best students: those who have performed exceedingly well in their undergraduate career. Being an honors student at a less selective school predicts academic success. But students often go to the schools where they are in the comfortable middle of the academic pool. And guess what, this is about where the graduate. Is it better to be in the middle of the pack at a more selective school or to be an honors scholar with research and grants and internships? There is a rational answer to this question too.

But our status anxiety is so high that we often choose the school that sounds better when saying it to friends or folks at some dinner party. But is the ability to brag about a name worth 100,000 and a less likely chance to get accepted to top graduate programs? I will leave that for you to answer.

Note: The candy example is a real detail from one school.