College selection

Some factors to consider when choosing which college to attend are:

The prestige of the college that you attend matters

Some people say that you shouldn't worry too much about where you go to college, because it won't matter later on in life. While it's true that where you went to college tends to matter less over time, it still has an impact on your life trajectory: the opportunities that are available to you early in life affect the opportunities that are available to you later on, and more prestigious colleges generally offer better opportunities than less prestigious colleges do.

There's a case to be made for focusing on personal growth during high school rather than getting into a good college: your personal growth during high school also shapes the opportunities that are available to you in the future. But to the extent possible, you should work to grow personally while working on getting into a good college.

Some advantages of going to a prestigious college are:

Higher earnings

Data show that mid-career annual earnings of UC Riverside graduates ~ $81k/year and of UC Berkeley graduates ~ $112k/year. UC Berkeley is generally considered the most prestigious University of California college, and UC Riverside among the least prestigious University of California colleges. This suggests that going to a more prestigious college increases your expected earnings.

The actual increase in earnings is less than the $31k/year difference: UC Berkeley students are probably more ambitious than students at UC Riverside, and also have higher ability even before going to UC Berkeley, so that one would expect a gap even if they all attended the same schools. But the gap partially comes from prestige of school. Employers generally are more likely to hire a student from a prestigious school than a non-prestigious school, because going to a prestigious school signals that you have higher ability than other people do. For example, high paying investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms show a strong preference for graduates of the top 4 ranked universities in the country.

Peer group

Going to a more prestigious college exposes you to stronger students. Ben Kuhn at Harvard describes advantages of being in a peer group with stronger students:

By watching how more competent people work and think, you can often pick up useful study habits and better techniques for the subject you're studying [...] Both more advanced students and instructors can be very useful for the academic advice they provide later. Knowing talented students has given me info about several excellent courses, as well as summer opportunities, I wouldn't otherwise have known about. A professor who can become a good mentor is also invaluable

Making connections with stronger students is also useful for networking later on in life, because stronger students tend to be in positions of greater influence later on than weaker students are.

Information about what a college is like is often unreliable

You should heavily discount a lot of information that's out there about what a given college is like. Some reasons for this are:

Distortionary marketing

A college's promotional materials and admissions officers are generally distortionary: they exaggerate the college's positive qualities while omitting discussion of its negative qualities.

Unrepresentative information in college guidebooks

The Fiske Guide to Colleges 2014 describes its methodology:

Administrators were ... asked to recruit a cross section of students to complete another electronic questionnaire with questions relating to what it is like to be a student at their particular college or university.

College administrators are motivated to portray their universities favorably, and so one would expect them to recruit students who are most likely to say good things about their universities. So one can't trust the students' responses to be representative of what the college is like.

Current students and alumni being biased in favor of their schools

After somebody makes a choice, he or she generally wants to believe that he or she made the right choice. So people who have chosen to attend a college will often exaggerate its virtues and minimize its faults.

Sour grapes

People who are rejected from a given college, or who don't apply because they know they can't get in, will sometimes have a "sour grapes" reaction, and be motivated to believe that the college isn't good.

Diversity gives you more options

Some colleges give you more flexibility with respect to the classes that you take, the classmates you spend time with, and the faculty who you interact with. The more flexibility you have, the more potential you have to make the most out of your college years. Of course, the effect that this will have on your experience depends on your ability to use the flexibility to your advantage.

Some ways in which colleges differ in the flexibility that they offer are:

Differences within a college are often bigger than differences between colleges

• Different academic subjects can have very different flavors, and open up different options for you. What you choose to major in can have a bigger impact on your life than what college you attend.
• Instructor quality within a given department can vary a great deal.
• If you attend a college with 5,000+ students, there will be many different kinds of students, and your social experience will depend heavily on which of them you spend time with.

If you're choosing between two colleges of the same prestige level,