adapted from Loren Pope’s Looking Beyond the Ivy League:  Finding the College That’s Right for You

An Ivy or similar college will absolutely guarantee you a rich, full and successful life.

Soon after college, a person's own qualities will determine whether he/she gets a raise, a promotion, is courted for another job, or has the vision to see opportunities and the imagination to create a new career. Even if the name on his/her diploma helps land the first job, that would be just about the limit of its leverage. Furthermore, little-known colleges have always taken a disproportionate share of academic honors.  Many highly successful people attended relatively unknown schools, and every Ivy alum doesn’t lead the life of their dreams.

If you can't make an Ivy, a prestige college is next best because the name on your diploma will determine whether you get into a good graduate school or do something worthwhile in life. 

What counts is your record and your abilities. You can't get into any medical school with a C+ average from any name school, but you can with a B+ average and good Medical College Aptitude Test scores from Earlham or Knox or a host of other good schools. Furthermore, the graduate department chairman and some of the admissions committee members are as likely as not to be graduates of less “prestigious” colleges.

Eastern institutions are the best and most desirable; forget about that dreary Siberian plain between Pennsylvania and the Colorado ski slopes known as the Midwest. 

A school can be a great institution regardless of its location. Unfortunately, the Midwest has long been a victim of Eastern cultural prejudice and the South suffers a lingering damnation for sins of the past; the truth is quite different. For example, Midwestern colleges have been responsible for many of the most recent innovations for undergraduate institutions, and their student bodies are more diverse and cosmopolitan than their Eastern counterparts.

A big university offers a broader, richer undergraduate experience with better teaching, wider course selection, and a more diverse student body than a college.

Actually, it seems that the opposite is true. Due to its very nature, the university cheats undergraduates because its primary focus is in research, publishing, consulting and graduate teaching. In these areas also lie the rewards for professors. Thus, undergraduates are left with large-sized classes, where there is less student-teacher interaction and fewer and less in-depth measures of performance.

A college you've heard about is better, or at least safer, than one you haven't.

This is one of the worst traps of all. Magazine ratings of colleges are so flawed it would be foolish to risk one's future on their criteria. Furthermore, parents' knowledge is often minimal; even the colleges they attended may not be the same institutions they were then.  Even college presidents' knowledge of other institutions is not just limited, it is insular.

What your friends say about a college is a good indicator. 

This is the weakest reason of all. It is the 'everybody likes vanilla' rationale; they don't. It reflects the adolescent need for peer approval. Similarly, choosing a college to be with a boyfriend or girlfriend is like believing in the tooth fairy. Why? Most college students change major and love interest at least once.

The college catalog will inform you whether or not a school is for you.

Not likely. Read enough of them and they become a blur, because if it's one characteristic they share, it's interchangeability. What one discovers is that with a few notable exceptions, catalogs all say the same thing. Furthermore, education is a status-conscious, follow-the-leader industry in which obvious tub-thumping is bad form, but in which there is always intense competition for students. The catalog and the view book are chiefly sales pitches and often serve as misleading and false advertising.

You should make your college selection early in your senior year and have all your applications in by Christmas or thereabouts.

The application process should be an unhurried and painstaking process of investigation, self-examination, and deliberate, informed decision.  (Note:  the college admission world has changed since this was written—the process has moved earlier.  However, when deliberating about binding Early Decision, especially, you should be sure that you are making a decision based on your sense of fit with a first choice school—not hedging your bets or trying to get a long-shot admission decision. JCS)

Your college should be bigger than your high school.

Contrary to popular opinion, it should be smaller if you're in a large suburban high school. Girls and boys often think ten thousand or twenty thousand bodies will provide a smorgasbord of attractive members of the opposite sex and lots of activity, especially if high school has been a painful, ugly-duckling stage or if they've gone to tiny high schools. The answer lies not in the number but in the kind of people. The smaller institution is likely to provide more diversity for the same reason that it is easier to know everyone in a smaller community than in a great city. The truth is that usually there are more things to do on any good campus than one person could take advantage of.

Going more than 200 miles away from home means a costlier education and probable isolation.

It may in fact be cheaper to go six hundred, eight hundred or a thousand miles away if doing so improves the campus job opportunities or helps get financial aid. Indeed, with some aid packages it can be cheaper to go far away to an expensive college than to live at home and go to a free or low-cost public institution. Furthermore, travel costs may not be nearly as great as parents fear. If the student is in a good school, trips home will be few even in the freshman year, because the library should demand some weekend time. After the freshman year, they may be only two a year. And availability of an airport is often more relevant then the distance in miles from home.

If you're in the top 10 percent of your class in high school and have SATs of 1,400 or better, you belong in an Ivy to get the kind of education you should have.

It is ridiculous to suppose that any group of students has more than a minuscule share of the quality market. The teaching is better at many small colleges than at Harvard and the students have to work harder. The two most intellectual colleges - Reed and St. John's - aren't Ivy; and a lot of colleges that accept students without such statistics have high-achieving alumni. Furthermore, grades and scores by themselves do not open the Ivy or other very selective doors. They can afford to look at the whole person, and mere grade grinds, being a dime a dozen for them, are cast aside.

Ivy League schools are looking for students who don't have excellent grades.

This hardy perennial is a misreading of something every intelligent admissions officer has always tried to do: attract people who have done something. More accurately, the myth should read: Good colleges are looking for students who have something to offer besides good grades. If that something is impressive enough, the grades may not have to be excellent, but they can't be bad.

SAT scores are the most important thing; good ones will get you in a good college and poor ones will keep you out.

Wrong. Most important are good grades in a tough program. Rank is not so important in a class of fifty as in one of five hundred. Then come the SAT scores. What an applicant says about himself or herself in the personal statements and essays can be more important than the SATs.

A Coaching Course will dramatically improve your SAT scores and your chances. 

Such a quick fix is not going to dramatically increase scores. The simple fact that a prep course is only a few weeks long obviously shows that it can not replace years of study habits and school curriculum.  Note:  familiarity with the test can help with your testing comfort level and time management.  It’s advisable to take some practice tests, and some people do benefit from prep courses.  However, the ones that cost several hundred or even thousand dollars are not worth it!

Your choice of major will decide your career path. Therefore, the quality of that department should govern your choice of college. 

This mistake has led many people into the wrong choices. One of the most overrated things about college is the imagined importance of the major. There's only one chance in ten that a person will be doing anything connected with his college major ten or fifteen years out of college. Furthermore, since most eighteen-year-olds know very little about themselves or the world, and nothing about what variety of choices may be open to them a decade ahead, the versatile preparation of a liberal education is the most practical course and early specialization the least. The choice of college should be governed by what the ethos and the intellectual force of that place seem likely to do for you as a person.

Anyone - whether he or she is a poor student, a problem learner, an average or a good student - can have choices of places that will help him or her grow.  (And the flip side—don’t assume that the best college on your list is the most selective one. JCS)

Millions of dollars in unused scholarships are unused every year. 

The truth is that there has never has been more than a fraction of the money needed and applied for every year. At least 95 percent of all aid is channeled through the colleges. Unless one has veteran's benefits or works for a firm with a scholarship program, the chance of finding much money outside the college channels is pretty slim to none. The financial aid office of the college that accepts you is the best place to go for help. That's what those folks want to do, free.

Three more myths from the College Counseling office:

If I want to succeed in the sciences or medicine, I need to attend a major research university-- preferably one with a medical school.

This is one of the most deeply held common myths about education that is also the most inconsistent with reality.  Small, undergraduate oriented schools have the dedicated resources and faculty required to treat their students like graduate students--  offering opportunities to participate firsthand in research in your first couple of years, to work closely with faculty who want to help you, and even to publish.  It’s hard to top that on your resume, and in the med school interview (see the liberal arts myth below).  Three major studies conducted recently (linked to the JCS College Website) have shown that undergraduate-only and master’s granting institutions often surpass PhD-granting universities in the percentage of their alumni who go on to earn doctorates, particularly from top graduate programs.  You may be very surprised to learn that the list of top 25 undergraduate schools for producing PhD-bound grads in the life sciences includes places like St. Olaf, Kalamazoo, Mt. Holyoke and Occidental, which you may never have heard of.   The highest per-capita producer of physics PhD’s is Rhodes College in Memphis.    (For more on this topic, see www.nobel.se and read the autobiographies.)

Women’s colleges and small, rural colleges have nothing to offer socially.

Many of the best women’s colleges belong to college consortia, offering an expanded social environment that, yes, includes men.  These colleges themselves are often vibrant places with active campuses, dynamic classroom interchange, and exceptional graduate school and career placement.   Consider the “rural” college life—you are part of a community centered around the school, you have a great group of close friends, and you can experience a lifestyle that you may never have access to again.  Many of these schools also happen to offer extraordinary educational quality.  Take risks and diversify your life experience...alums of these places express few regrets!

The liberal arts education has nothing to do with me—I want to study business.

This was never true, and as we enter into the Information Age, more and more employers actively seek hires who have the qualities that are the hallmark of the liberal arts education: intellectual breadth and depth,  the ability to tackle steep learning curves and think critically across disciplines (“outside the box”)—and last but not least, good communication skills!  Think about colleges where you can double major with business studies and another field (to set you apart, as well as to broaden your scope), and know that History majors get business jobs and MBA’s, too.

Remember—the college experience is about laying the groundwork for the rest of your life, not just about your first job hire after graduation.  Seek an experience that will make you a fuller, richer person with interests, options and personal relationships that will sustain you for decades.

As far as how competitive you’ll be for that first job or for graduate school admission, undergraduate experiences can really be a great equalizer... students with more competitive “numbers” in high school who choose institutions based on name or reputation alone might find themselves less competitive four years later than students who are not as competitive now but choose colleges that are less known, and not as hard to get into, but which will give them individual attention and offer them unusual opportunities.