<p>How much do you think USNWR affects students' college choices?</p>
<p>For posters on these boards, quite a bit. For most students, not at all.</p>
<p>Considering that almost every single thread on this subforum now is “X or Y or Z” (sigh, the onslaught has begun…), perhaps US News isn’t as important to them as one might think, or else the answer would be obvious to them. ;)</p>
<p>It’s sort of a battle ground between prestige, price, fit, etc.</p>
<p>i’d conjecture price is generally the most important, and then prestige. This is because most students tend to get into similarly tiered universities. It’s unlikely that a student options would be between Stanford and CSU Northridge or something like that. So price factors in. After that, prestige and fit might battle each other, with some picking one, and others picking another. If prestige is similar, and finances are similar, then i’d say it generally falls down to something like “fit” or how much better the program at one university is better than another.</p>
<p>I agree with the above poster that price is more important to most people. I’m really tempted to go to Georgetown or Swarthmore not only because they’re great fits but admittedly also because of the prestige; however, because of financial concerns I’m probably going to UMD instead, which might not be ranked that highly but it’s still reputable enough and the money makes up for it.</p>