<p>It’s a really tough question for me. At the time, being the top student in my class at my school meant that I could go anywhere I wanted, and my parents pretty much made clear that there were only three colleges I would be permitted to want. (Yes, those three. I was explicitly prohibited from considering the S college. If I had shown any real interest in my father’s alma mater, Wesleyan, that would have been OK, too, but my mother did an excellent job of making certain that’s not how I thought.) In the end, I only applied to two of them, and I had a clear preference from the outset, so I never really thought too hard about it. In three of the four fields in which I was interested, one was the center of the academic world and the other not really first rank, and it was easy to justify my choice to anyone who asked. Plus, as a boost, it made me unique in my larger extended family, while going the other way would have made me one of the crowd.</p>
<p>I know it would be a tougher choice today, because I spent several hours last spring with my college best friend and his child talking over the same choice for a student with interests much like mine. In the end, the kid made the same choice I had, but I think it was a knife’s-edge balance. You can still make an argument for academic superiority in the fields we care about, but it’s a much closer competition, and the Other College has the advantage in recognizable-names-on-the-verge-of-retirement. Now it would come down to better social environment (and dorms that have been renovated recently) vs. a better location (something I appreciate much more at 50-something than I did at 17).</p>
<p>In reality, if I were me today I would have had to apply to many more colleges, and I likely would have been just as happy at a whole bunch of them. My kids’ double-legacy status and excellent (though not quite as excellent as mine) stats did not get them into my alma mater, but the college where both of them went provided, if anything, a superior academic experience, though less of a sense of empowerment than my wife and I got at our college.</p>
<p>One important difference: My parents had no accumulated wealth, but between them earned a very good living, in the upper range of the upper middle class. My college, all in, four years of tuition, room, and board, cost less than a quarter of their annual pre-tax earnings at the time. My wife and I aren’t doing that much worse than they did, but each of our children’s college costs represented a much, much higher percentage of our annual income. Today, I might very well fall into that zone where I would be full-pay but full-pay would be an unsustainable burden for my family. The today version of me could easily wind up in a search for the best merit scholarship, not the best X department.</p>