- The daughter of some close friends wound up with her "final four" being -- a public flagship (19,000 undergraduates, 30,000 total) engineering school in a mid-sized city -- a very high-prestige computer science school in a private university (6,500 undergraduates, 14,000 total) in a mid-sized city -- a very high-prestige private university (6,300 undergraduates, 17,000 total) with no engineering department in a large city -- a top-20 liberal arts college (2,000 undergraduates) in a small town They were all obviously very different, but there was something (really some set of things) about each of them that appealed to her (including, for the public university, that it would cost a lot less than any of the others. None of them was her first or second choice -- she wasn't accepted at those schools.
She, too, wound up choosing the outlier – the small-town small LAC. It was a great choice. She did all the things she wanted to do in college, including sophisticated research (at a different university) and a semester of study abroad in India, and she wound up with exactly the job she dreamed about getting when she was applying to college (working alongside graduates of various famous technical schools and Ivies). There is more than one pathway from point A to point B.
- My daughter was pretty certain she wanted to go to a research university in a large city. But she applied to one rural LAC as her "LAC safety" in case April rolled around and she couldn't handle something that was big and non-intimate. As it happened, she didn't need it, but under other circumstances she would have been glad to have kept it alive as an option.