Would you rather go to a school that has a great fit & solid academics or great academics and a solid fit. Assume that the costs at each school are identical.
Academic considerations are part of overall fit. So are cost considerations.
that sounds like the chicken and the egg.
round and round and round you go.
Agree with @ucbalumnus – academics is an important consideration in finding a good fit so it is impossible to separate the two.
More often than not, the costs are NOT identical.
People talk about fit all the time in ways that are only minimally academic (i.e. does the relevant school have your proposed major, do you have academic skills to succeed there, and LAC vs. research university), so I understand where the question is coming from.
I’d recommend that, if you’re serious about academics, you look at relevant departmental faculty pages and at requirements for graduation (school and major). Then use the course catalogue to get a rough idea of what you’d be doing when (including things like study abroad if that’s on your list, and taking into account the structure of any honors program you’re interested in). If you do that, what you may see is that schools that look very similar from the fit POV, may be very different from a coursework POV. At which point, you might have strong (or different) preferences. My DC’s likely to be some flavor of bio major, for example, and the schools she’s looking at have very different approaches to undergraduate education in the field.
You may also have more global academic preferences like semester vs. quarter system (which can have implications for how many courses you’re taking at once, how many you take overall, whether exams are always over before vacations, how/when study abroad fits in, etc.) And the number/breadth/diversity of course offerings in (some) fields outside your major may interest you, as well as how accessible some of these courses are to students who aren’t part of the major or the college that offers them.