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Older son was looking for the best computer program. He wanted a place where he was no longer the top science/math kid in the school. Prestigious schools ended up being on the list, but he did turn down Harvard because Carnegie Mellon was nerdier and better in CS. (He did enjoy Harvard’s accepted student weekend much more than he expected to and it was not ultimately an easy decision.) CMU was the perfect fit for him. BTW he graduated in the middle of his class there, but got an internship at Google and has been working there ever since.
Younger son was also looking for a nerdy school, but he’s not a math kid. Applied as undecided - his high school activities were music (but he’s no musician), Science Olympiad (even though he’s no scientist) and Literary Magazine . He knew he might like international relations, but except for taking all the AP History courses had done nothing else that looked like that was where he was headed. He got interested in security studies and ended up in International Relations at Tufts. He wanted a defined campus with a typical quad (hated George Washington!) He said afterwards Tufts didn’t have the right kind of nerds. (They talked politics rather than playing board games.) He spent a full junior year abroad in Jordan and for various reasons never really felt that connected to Tufts. He did some internships and a job at an NGO after graduating and then decided he could make more of a difference in the Navy. Went to officer candidates school and has been serving ever since.
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Fit can and should include tangible factors but it’s important to trust your gut too.
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For us parents “best fit” first meant cost. Our budget was what it was and college needed to be affordable without debt.
After cost, how fit was approached depended on the kid. Two of them had very specific majors in mind and targeted that. Then location and all the other things, like size, internship opportunities in the area of the school, whether family or friends lived anywhere nearby. Their final decisions focused on academic and internship opportunities and ease of travel (some final options were more remote). The big school small school discussion with them centered on whether the big or small school offered the most opportunity or growth. One chose big and one chose small and both found what they needed academically.
The third kid had some social sciences majors in mind but really wanted an LAC. It was hard to “fit” an LAC into our budget requirements so she had a much more geographically broad list with less focus on major and more on the availability of full tuition scholarships. She also wanted a good study abroad program so we researched that as well. Her safeties were our state universities which were not a fit size wise but we’re sure to meet the budget. She could easily have had to give up fit for cost with her application strategy. The final choice was between the LAC that awarded her the needed scholarship and one of the state universities. She went to the LAC, and coincidentally is at the initially rejected state U for her PhD and now it’s a great fit. 
She said later she would likely have been fine at the state U as well but she was happy with her choice.
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This is the reason why i am addicted to boards like CC 
. There are so many diverse and well informed views about a variety of topics and its important for readers to filter the noise from the sound. It does require a good deal of patience to read through such threads to make an informed opinion.
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She/He may be an exception - but I know many of them. And perhaps it’s with that lens the ubiquitous Alabama/UNM/Kansas posts get exceedingly old. There are more than a few posters who I know immediately who they are as they are on a chance me touting these schools. They cannot possibly be a fit for EVERY SINGLE poster - but they are thrown out over and over and over again - honestly way more than any prestige school. It’s not helpful - it’s honestly just a misguided attempt to make their own decision about the right school for their kid seem desirably. Look at the - I would like a New England small school and the same posters - hey you need to go to ALABAMA.
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I think that when there are non-prestige schools that are consistently thrown out it’s because those particular schools are trying to buy students who would otherwise be interested in more prestigious schools. Anyone hanging out on CC for long will quickly learn some of those “buyer” schools’ names. But many people who post their own chance mes may not have been reading chance me thread after chance me thread. Maybe they don’t know that at many colleges that merit aid is given to 99% of students in order to discount the tuition. Or that they can go to a good state flagship for a small fraction of the price of Top X schools and they think about all the money that could be used differently (particularly if the family was going to PLUS loan their way through an expensive option).
I don’t think that the same schools need to be harped on repeatedly in any one thread, but in new threads, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to at least mention to posters that there are options that could cost them significantly less, if they’re interested. If the OP then expresses interest, other options could be presented that are lower cost. If the OP declines interest, then I agree that there’s no need to repeatedly rehash the benefits of a financially less expensive school. I say the last with a caveat…that if an OP has mentioned going into significant debt or raiding retirement funds for the planned undergraduate degree. If something seems financially unwise (not a difference in spending values, but something that could be truly detrimental to the family), then pressing the financial point in those situations I think is a service to the family.
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It does seem that some of the big automatic scholarship schools are more commonly mentioned than others. For example, University of Alabama has long been a forum favorite while University of Arizona has only recently been getting mentions, with University of Mississippi being much further behind in mentions. Among schools that are not state flagships, University of Alabama Huntsville gets a lot more mentions than Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University.
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Like everything else, there’s a full spectrum of views on this issue. The ones who think all colleges are basically indistinguishable and that any one of them can be substituted by any other represent one extreme. The other extreme is represented by ones who have a blind faith in those names often referred by their initials on CC, or their affiliation with some athletic conference, or their top rankings in some publications. I don’t subscribe to either point of view.
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Interesting article about CEOs and the colleges they attended:
I’d start with the proposition that doing really well at a challenging college tends to be quite helpful for the next stage.
But I also think the years in college matter for their own sake, not just for what they lead to next. Fortunately, I think generally people who are excited and happy tend to do better. So a college where you would be excited and having fun is both intrinsically valuable, and practically helpful too.
Finally, it also tends to be really helpful not to be saddled with a lot of debt.
OK, so “best fit”, to me, is something like the college you can comfortably afford, which will be challenging but not so challenging you can’t do really well, and that you will find exciting and fun.
And ideally, there will be more than one school like that. In fact, I think it is ideal to conclude that there are many schools that could be “great fits” for you, and not just one school that is the “best fit” for you.
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The article is behind a paywall for me. Can you gift a link or provide a synopsis of the relevant points?
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But I think the calculation people go through when choosing between a “T20” and a fine but not “T20” for certain targeted careers/professional schools is whether their kid just needs to fall within the top 15% to 25% in school A vs top 1% to 5% in school B. Whether their assumptions on where their kid needs to end up and where their kid will more likely end up may or may not be accurate even in a ball park sense, but I think to just focus on costs without a view on probabilities based on past results and resources available is a mistake for certain paths.
Sorry, I don’t think I can. I don’t subscribe to Fortune, but I get it through my Apple News subscription. Here’s a snippet:
Since 1999, David Kang has pursued a peculiar hobby. That year, after Fortune released its annual Fortune 500 issue, Kang began to wonder about where chief executives of companies on the list had attended college. To keep track, the college professor did some research and manually entered their alma maters into a spreadsheet. After completing the task, Kang, then a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, was shocked by what the data revealed.
“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate. But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.”
Of the 500 CEOs on the list, seven or eight had no undergraduate degree, more than the combined degrees from any other college in the pool, according to Kang, who is now a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California. He presented the results to his Dartmouth graduate students, who tried to explain away the Ivy League’s lack of dominance, he said. But the numbers told all: A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations.
Kang continued to track Fortune 500 CEO education numbers over the following two decades, and said there was little change through the years from the initial findings. The consistent pattern for 20 years has been top leaders attending a diversity of colleges, he said.
“It’s an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to,” Kang said. “It’s a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white-shoe law firms, they’re pharmaceutical, they’re manufacturing, et cetera.”
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I think the concept of T20 itself is a failed one. The schools are quite different. There are many “T20” schools that I’d never send a student to. At some of them classes are giant, there’s a heavy reliance on GAs to teach labs and discussions, and the bureaucratic red tape is endless. One student described his experience as “like going to school at the DMV.” So T20 based on what? I find the whole exercise specious.
It changes yearly, but currently the school with the most CEOs is Wisconsin. Of course this is undergrad. If you include graduate, the business schools dominate the list with HBS at #1.
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That is why I put “T20” in quotes. For certain paths, certain schools seem to have stronger programs with better outcomes. A “T20” in CS may or not be “T20” for pure Math or Econ or placement outcomes in finance or consulting.
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I’d advocate parents consider cost constraints first when selecting colleges, but I wouldn’t suggest that they base their college selections exclusively, or even primarily, on costs, if all those colleges are within their financial means. Most parents don’t know, or can’t accurately predict, in which percentile band their kids would end up at a highly “prestigious” college or in a particular major of that college. Also, whatever percentage of graduates a college sends to a particular industry isn’t the probability that a graduate from that college will likely end up in that industry. There’s just too much variation among the graduates.
Yep – the Engineering T20 doesn’t match the T20 USNews ranking (overall ranking).
The T20 for Engineering includes a bunch of state flagships like Berkeley, Michigan, GA Tech, Illinois, Wisconsin, Purdue, Texas…
I’d also suggest you really need to think about your possible future paths. If your undergraduate Engineering degree is going to be your last degree before starting your career, that might imply one set of preferences. But if you are planning to go on to graduate Engineering programs, that might imply a somewhat different set of preferences.
At a high level, I think this is a fairly common sort of nuance that many HS students overlook. A generally highly-selective college that is not particularly known as a “top” school for a certain area (including because a top college may not be a university, but also even highly-selective universities may not be considered among the “top” universities in everything) may still do an excellent job placing its students in top graduate programs or professional schools in that area.
Indeed, usually if a college is considered a “top” college, it is at least “good enough” in anything it offers to be successful at graduate/professional-school placement. Because that is something they need to do to be a “top” college.
And so if that is your goal, you are not necessarily best off going to the intersection of a highly-selective college where that program is also super-popular with highly-ambitious students. Maybe, but also possibly the road-less-travelled will actually work out equally if not better for you–as long as you are talking about a generally highly-selective college.
But again, if you are looking for placement among highly-selective employers straight out of college, then maybe you do want to focus more on colleges specifically know for your area.
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