Last night I was supposed to give this talk to a local PTO, but instead I got Covid and am in isolation. I’m publishing it here for them and any other parent. And since the wine here is only metaphorical wine, anyone is welcome to enjoy.
For at least the next few minutes, go back to the beginning. Pretend you know nothing about colleges or the college admission search. For just a few minutes, feel that overwhelming feeling of knowing nothing. You probably know more than nothing; you may already know a lot. But I’ve found that even ambitious, well-informed high school students are often overwhelmed with the search, and somethimes it just helps to go back to the beginning and make sure you’re thinking it all through.
Depending on how you count, there are four to six thousand colleges and universities in the US. Even if you want to narrow it down to “the best” schools, the US News rankings (which aren’t actually an objective measurement of the best) include over 1,400 schools. There are just a lot of choices, and if you don’t know what you’re really looking for, it’s overwhelming. So as a way to think about that overwhelming range of choices, I’d like you to think about another one, something completely different.
Imagine you’re going to buy some wine at a wine shop. So there you are looking for wine, and you know little about wine. Maybe you know nothing about wine. You certainly don’t know what you like. You know some of those bottles are better suited to your taste than others, but you don’t know which ones.
Say you’re in a hurry. You need to pick up one or two bottles of wine for tonight. You’ve been invited to a dinner party and asked to bring wine. But you don’t know anything about wine. A good wine shop will have hundreds of different wines to choose from. How do you choose?
Expert advice. You can ask for advice from a store employee and hope it’s good advice. But it’s difficult for them to give you good advice if you can’t tell them anything about what you like. The most you can hope for is that they’ll tell you what some of their more popular wines are, or maybe some wines that are good places for beginners. But they have no real way of helping you find something you’ll like in a hurry.
Ratings and rankings. There are magazines and websites devoted to giving scores and ratings for wine. Many wine shops will highlight the highly rated wines in their store. If you go with something that was rated highly by the Wine Advocate, then you know you’re getting a wine that somebody likes, though you may end up not liking it. You may have completely different taste than the reviewers.
Pictures. Like a lot of people, you can choose a bottle based on how much you like the label. Wine producers pay a lot of attention to their labels and make them as appealing as possible. You can’t judge a wine by its label any more than you can judge a book by its cover, but both will tell you a little it about what’s inside. But not much. To choose based on the label is essentially to rely on advertising and design, not the wine itself.
Experience. You can go with what you know, however limited that is, by grabbing a bottle that looks familiar. Maybe you see a bottle that you recognize from a restaurant wine list or a friend’s house, and you go with that. Maybe you had a glass of it once and thought it was ok, so you go with that.
Proximity. Why go looking through all the bins if you don’t know anything about them? Instead, just pick one that’s featured up front and get out of there.
Any of these methods for choosing a wine may work out. Most people in this situation will use a combination of several. But even choosing a wine with a good score…that the store employee recommends…with a great label…can still end up being something you hate. You’re kind of relying on luck that the bottle you pick, however you pick it, will be one that you enjoy. You haven’t got time to figure it out.
A lot of high school seniors pick a college the same way. For a variety of reasons, they haven’t given college a lot of thought or attention before 12th grade. They haven’t thought about what they want or need, just what’s “good.” And then they only have a few months to go through the application process. Seniors who want to pick colleges to apply to when they haven’t done a lot of research use the same methods as someone buying wine in a hurry without much research.
Advice. There are plenty of people out there willing to give college advice (including me). But the less they know about you, what you want, and what you need, the less useful that advice can be.
Ratings and rankings. There’s US News and World Report. And Niche. And Forbes. Or you can Google “Best college for ____” and see what you get. I’m not as anti-ranking as many other college admission advisors, but I know that their use is pretty limited. The ranking site’s criteria are not your criteria.
Pictures. Colleges will send you so many pictures: smiling students wearing backpacks walking across campus; crowds at sporting events; extremely small classes held outside. The schools send these pictures because they know they work—many students make very large, expensive, emotional decisions based in some part on the images that marketers send out.
What they’ve heard of. The reason I hear the most often for a student being interested in a particular college is because “I heard it’s a good school.” They can rarely tell me where they heard it.
Proximity. You can narrow down your choices to ones that are nearby. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there are a number of great universities here in town. But it’s a limitation you would only want to impose for reasons beyond limiting the number of colleges you have to think about.
Like with wine, these methods may work. Or they may not. It takes some luck. But there’s another way.
If you’re not necessarily in a hurry to get wine for immediate use, you have time to learn what you like and what works for you. You’ve got time to find the wines that are good for you, not good for the store employee, the wine magazines, or the label designers. To do this takes time and experimentation. If you’re just beginning, try the mixed case method recommended by wine critic Eric Asimov.
“The best way to start out, once you identify a good shop, is to ask for a mixed case of wine. Tell the merchant your budget and parameters, say, half white, half red, with two sparkling wines, or a few rosés. Or, if a case is too much of an investment, just get a bottle or two at a time. As you drink the wines, note which ones you like and which ones you do not. Keep in mind that you can learn something from every bottle as you begin to identify your personal taste.
When you finish, go back to the merchant with your notes, and ask for another mixed case with selections based on your reactions to the first set. Your learning journey has begun.”
With time, you can use this method to experiment and refine. You can figure out what works for you, which may not be what you would have predicted before you began paying attention. You can get advice, but the advice based on your preferences and, more important, your actual experience. The mixed-case approach takes time and upfront investment, but it’s going to get you to a point where you know what you want and where to find it. It’s going to get you to a point where when you walk into a wine store you know what to do and how to get good results.
If you’re a high school student now, in the 9th-11th grade, you have time for a similar approach to college. Begin with a (metaphorical) mixed case. Look at some large public universities, some mid-sized research schools, some smaller liberal arts college. Check out some of the more unique and “quirky” colleges that are out there. Pay attention and take notes as you learn about schools that you may not have heard of. Then use that information to find more of what you’re looking for.
This is essentially what I do with the students I work with. After a few casual meetings getting to know them, I recommend a bunch of colleges to check out. It’s a mixed case, but larger—usually 30-50 colleges to begin with. I ask them to take some time—from several weeks to several months to almost a year, depending on their grade—to get to know those schools and to take notes on what they find appealing about them. Then from there we add and subtract more schools based on their research until we get it down to around 12 schools for applications in the fall of their senior year. The list we make is balanced, and it’s tailored to them.
Even before we get to that point, though, we’ll do a “blind tasting.” I will give them a chart with descriptions and lots of stats for four to six colleges, but I don’t tell them the names of the colleges. That way the students can’t be swayed by the reputations of the colleges and need to look at them more objectively. We walk through the charts for each school, and I pay close attention to what kinds of things really stand out to them. Some really pay attention to student-faculty ratio, and others don’t care about that. Some are more interested in student diversity than others. Some want to know that their chosen major is a popular one, and some look for schools with a wide mix of popular majors. This exercise helps me get a sense of what they like and what’s important to them before I begin recommending anything.
Here’s a generic mixed case to begin with. 12 schools total: three big public universities, three private research schools, three small liberal arts colleges, and three quirky schools. For any of these categories, I could easily choose 30 more. But these will work. Spend some time figuring out which ones you like, and why. It’s not important right now if you think you might apply to any of them. The point is to get a sense of what you’re looking for, and why. Use Niche, Big Future, Fiske, and the college websites. Then, start searching for colleges with similar traits that you’re looking for. Also, your research can help you find similar colleges. The Fiske guide lists overlapping schools for any in the guide, and Niche also lists similar colleges.
Colorado State University. Fort Collins, CO
University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, AL
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Madison, WI
Case Western Reserve University. Cleveland, OH
Duke University. Durham, NC
Rice University. Houston, TX
Occidental College. Los Angeles, CA
Champlain College. Burlington, VT
Knox College. Galesburg, IL
Cooper Union. New York, NY
Colorado College. Colorado Springs, CO
Warren Wilson College. Asheville, NC
Let me give a warning about choosing a college based on your intended major. If you don’t know, don’t make it up. Around a third of college students change their major at least once, so don’t feel too sure of your major unless you’re really, strongly sure. If you’ve got no idea what you might major in, there are schools that are really good for that.
This is just a metaphor, and there are limits to how closely finding the wine you like is similar to finding a good-fit college. You’re not choosing one wine to be THE ONE. You can spend months and years trying many wines and finding a whole range of things you like. Most people, however, will only graduate from one college. That’s why early research is so important.
Also, at a wine shop, the price on the tag is generally the price you will pay. Not so for colleges. You don’t know what you can afford until you apply and are accepted. So while “affordable” has to be one of the final deciding factors, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in your early searches.
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