A Grey Admissions Guide · For students & families

How to Build a College List That Goes Beyond Rankings

A practical framework for identifying colleges where you can thrive.

Reading time
About 40 minutes
Sections
Nine, plus a checklist
Prepared for
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01

The Myth of the “Dream School”

First, we need to kill the idea of the “dream school.” I know. Very inspirational way to start a college guide.

But somewhere along the way, students were sold the idea that there is ONE magical college out there where they are destined to spend four years, meet their best friends, discover their calling, and emerge at age 22 with a fantastic job and an unusually photogenic group of friends.

That is…not how this works.

According to higher education researcher Jeffrey Selingo, author of Dream School, there are more than 3,900 colleges and universities in the United States. Even if we eliminate:

  • two-year colleges
  • highly specialized institutions (art, music, theology, etc.)
  • very small colleges with fewer than 1,000 students

…we're still left with roughly 1,200 four-year colleges that could realistically be part of a student's search.

3,900+
Colleges & universities in the U.S.
~1,200
Four-year colleges realistically in play
30–40
The ones we actually hear about

Which means there isn't one place where you could be happy and successful. There are probably dozens. Maybe hundreds. And that is actually very good news.

The problem is that most of us don't hear about hundreds of colleges. We hear about the same 30 or 40 over and over again. They're on sweatshirts. They're on ESPN. Your uncle went there. Your friend's older sister is applying there. TikTok has apparently decided everyone needs to attend NYU. So those schools start to feel like the “best” schools simply because they're the schools we know.

As Selingo points out, what defines a “dream school” for many families isn't necessarily fit. It's the signal the school's name sends to everyone else. And that's a pretty shaky foundation for deciding where you're going to spend four years of your life (and potentially a truly alarming amount of money).

The goal of the college search should be much simpler: Find places where you can learn, explore, build relationships, access meaningful opportunities, and grow into the person you want to become.

There will almost certainly be more than one.

02

So Why Does College Admissions Feel Completely Insane?

If you've looked at acceptance rates lately and thought, Were colleges always this impossible to get into? the answer is no. Several relatively recent changes have dramatically reshaped the admissions landscape.

Shift one — The test-optional application explosion

At the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of universities, including the entire Ivy League, temporarily dropped SAT and ACT requirements. And applications to highly selective colleges promptly went bananas.

In the admission cycle following that decision, applications to selective universities increased 24% in a single year, surpassing 2 million total applications.

The logic for students was pretty understandable: Harvard doesn't require test scores anymore? Well…I guess I could apply to Harvard. Multiply that thought by several hundred thousand teenagers, and you get the idea.

More applications meant lower acceptance rates, even though the number of seats available didn't suddenly shrink and the applicant pool didn't magically become 24% more brilliant overnight.

Sometimes an acceptance rate drops because a college became harder to get into. Sometimes it drops because a whole lot more people decided to throw their hats in the ring. Those are not quite the same thing.

Shift two — Everyone started applying earlier, too

At the same time, colleges increasingly encouraged students to apply through early programs:

Early Decision (ED)

You apply early and, if admitted, must attend.

Early Action (EA)

You apply early but aren't obligated to enroll.

By fall 2024, early applications submitted through the Common App had reached 2.6 million, an increase of roughly one million early applications in just a few years.

Early programs can be useful for students, but they're also extremely useful for colleges. They help admissions offices predict how many admitted students will actually show up in August. Which brings us to a slightly less glamorous part of college admissions…

Shift three — Colleges are trying to predict you, too

When colleges admit students, they aren't just asking: Who do we want? They're also asking: Who is actually going to come?

Colleges pay close attention to their yield rate, which is the percentage of admitted students who ultimately enroll. They need to predict class size because there are only so many dorm rooms, classroom seats, professors, and tiny twin XL mattresses to go around.

That means admissions offices may:

  • Defer early applicants to the regular decision round to gather more information or see if they demonstrate more interest.
  • Waitlist strong applicants as a way to keep them available if spaces open later.
  • Deny applicants who they believe are unlikely to enroll.

That last one is sometimes called yield protection: a college may deny an extremely qualified student because admissions officers suspect that student is using the school as a backup and will probably enroll somewhere more selective.

Is every surprising rejection “yield protection”? Absolutely not. But the larger point matters: admissions decisions aren't simply rankings of applicants from “best” to “worst.” Colleges are building a class while simultaneously trying to predict human behavior. Welcome to admissions!

03

What Does “Selective” Actually Mean?

We use the word selective as though it means excellent. It doesn't. It literally means a college rejects a lot of applicants. According to Selingo:

<100
colleges accept fewer than 30% of applicants
~25
universities accept fewer than 10%

In other words, the ultra-selective world that dominates so much of the college conversation represents a tiny fraction of American higher education. Most colleges admit far more students than they reject.

And here's the really important part: Acceptance rate tells you almost nothing about the quality of the education you'll receive once you get there. A college can reject 95% of its applicants and still be the wrong environment for you. Another can admit 60% and offer an incredible program in your field, professors who know your name, fantastic internships, undergraduate research, and enough merit aid that your parents suddenly become very enthusiastic about it.

Selectivity is information. It is not a quality rating.

04

Why Rankings Can Be So Misleading

Rankings are appealing for a pretty obvious reason: they take an incredibly complicated decision and turn it into one nice, neat number.

College #12 must be better than College #27. College #27 must be better than College #54. Easy!

Except…not really.

Rankings can absolutely give you some useful information, and I'm not suggesting you need to dramatically throw your U.S. News tab into the trash. But a college education is far too complicated to be captured by a single number, and many of the things rankings measure have surprisingly little to do with what your actual experience as an undergraduate will be like.

That's where things start to get a little weird.

1. Rankings measure institutional prestige, not student fit

Ranking formulas tend to emphasize things like institutional reputation, faculty salaries, endowment size, acceptance rate, and alumni giving rates. Those factors can tell us quite a bit about the institution itself. They tell us much less about what it will actually feel like to be a student there.

A highly ranked university may have
  • enormous lecture classes
  • limited access to professors
  • intense competition for research, leadership, and other opportunities
A lower-ranked school may offer
  • small, discussion-based classes
  • research opportunities beginning freshman or sophomore year
  • professors who know your name
  • close mentorship from faculty

For some students, the second environment may be far better for learning, confidence, and growth. And that's really the problem with rankings: they're trying to answer the question, “Which college is best?”

But the much more useful question is: “Which college is best for me?”

2. Reputation scores are based on…other people's opinions

This is one of my favorite pieces of ranking trivia because it tends to make people look at the whole system a little differently. The single largest factor in the U.S. News rankings, accounting for 30% of the score, is something called the peer assessment score.

Each year, university presidents, provosts, and admissions leaders are asked to rate other colleges. In other words, a substantial portion of a college's ranking comes from people at other colleges essentially being asked: “So…what do you think of this school?”

30%
of the U.S. News score is peer opinion — the single largest factor
There are a few problems with that
  • The survey response rate is typically around 30%
  • Many administrators delegate the survey to staff members
  • Some respondents reportedly spend only 10–15 seconds evaluating each institution

A review conducted by Inside Higher Ed found that some administrators left many institutions blank or rated most of the schools they reviewed as simply “adequate.” Which means a meaningful portion of the rankings is based not on deep, firsthand knowledge of what it is actually like to attend a particular college, but on reputation, familiarity, and very quick impressions.

So when one school is ranked #24 and another is ranked #31, that seven-spot difference may feel extremely precise, but it most certainly isn't.

3. Rankings prioritize research, not teaching

Another important thing to understand is that many of the universities that dominate national rankings are major research institutions. That's not a bad thing. Research universities can offer incredible resources, groundbreaking faculty, and access to work happening at the very edge of a field.

But the ranking system often rewards universities for things like research spending, doctoral degrees awarded, graduate programs, and scholarly output. And those are not the same thing as excellent undergraduate teaching.

At many research universities, faculty hiring and promotion decisions are driven primarily by a professor's publications, research output, grant funding, and reputation within the field. Teaching ability may matter, but it is often not the main thing determining who gets hired, promoted, or tenured. In fact, some universities have reduced spending on undergraduate instruction while increasing spending on research in an effort to improve their standing.

So a university can climb in the rankings because it becomes a more powerful research institution even if the undergraduate classroom experience does not improve at all.

This is why I care much more about questions like
  • Who actually teaches undergraduate classes?
  • How large are those classes?
  • How accessible are professors?
  • Can undergraduates participate in the research happening on campus?

A university producing extraordinary research is exciting. But if all of that research is being done by professors, PhD students, and postdocs while undergraduates are sitting in a 400-person lecture hall, that distinction matters.

4. Rankings reward schools for rejecting students

And now we get to one of the strangest incentives in the whole system. Selectivity has historically played an important role in college prestige and rankings, including factors such as acceptance rate, average test scores, and average high school GPA.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. A college admitting extremely strong students probably is doing something right. But it also creates a slightly ridiculous incentive: A college can become “more selective” simply by attracting more applications and rejecting a larger percentage of them.

Which helps explain why universities spend enormous amounts of money encouraging students to apply through aggressive marketing, fee waivers, simplified applications, and endless emails telling you that you are a perfect fit for a school that has never met you.

More applications→ lower acceptance rate→ greater appearance of selectivity

And here is the important part: Nothing about that equation necessarily improves the education students receive once they enroll.

A college could receive 20,000 more applications next year, reject almost all of those additional students, and suddenly appear significantly more selective. This is why I want you to be very careful about treating selectivity as a proxy for quality.

A school being harder to get into tells you something about demand. It doesn't automatically tell you anything about how well you will be taught, how much support you will receive, or how many opportunities you will actually be able to access once you get there.

05

Why Student Outcomes Data Can Be Misleading

Okay, so rankings clearly have some issues. What about something that feels a little more concrete? Money.

Post-graduation salary is another metric families often use to compare colleges, and understandably so. College is an enormous investment, and wanting to know what happens to students after they graduate is completely reasonable.

One of the biggest sources for this information is the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard. When it launched in 2015, it was pretty groundbreaking because it gave families much easier access to data about college costs, graduation rates, and earnings after graduation.

And this information can absolutely be useful. The problem comes when we look at a salary number and assume it tells us something definitive about the quality of the college that produced it. Because, once again, the data is a little messier than that.

Caveat one — Scorecard data doesn't include everyone

Here's a pretty important limitation that often gets left out of the conversation: The College Scorecard tracks earnings only for students who received federal financial aid. That means roughly one-third of college students aren't represented in the earnings data at all, and many of those missing students come from higher-income families.

Why does that matter? Because your future earnings are influenced by much more than the college you attend. Family income, professional connections, geography, career field, and the opportunities available to you before you ever step onto a college campus can all play a role.

So if we're comparing the salaries of graduates from two universities using a dataset that excludes a significant (and disproportionately affluent) portion of their student populations, we need to be very careful about the conclusions we draw from those numbers.

The data isn't useless. It just isn't telling us the whole story.

Caveat two — Geography can seriously skew salary data

Where graduates live and work matters too. Imagine College A reports average graduate earnings of $90,000, while College B reports $75,000. At first glance: College A wins!

College A
$90,000

Many graduates working in New York and San Francisco

College B
$75,000

Most graduates heading into lower-cost regions

But what if a large percentage of College A graduates work in New York and San Francisco, while College B sends most of its graduates into lower-cost regions? Suddenly that $15,000 difference means something very different.

Salaries tend to be higher in places where employers have to compensate workers for dramatically higher costs of living. A graduate earning $90,000 in Manhattan may actually have less purchasing power than someone earning $75,000 somewhere else.

So higher graduate salaries don't necessarily mean: “This college gives students a better education and launches them into better careers.” Sometimes they mean: “A lot of this college's graduates live in extremely expensive places.”

Useful distinction.

Caveat three — Outcomes often reflect the students a college admits

And this is probably the biggest caveat of all. Highly selective universities admit students who are already disproportionately academically strong, highly motivated, well-connected, and often from higher-income families. In other words, these students were already pretty likely to be successful.

So when graduates of highly selective colleges go on to earn high salaries, attend prestigious graduate programs, or build impressive careers, we have to ask a surprisingly difficult question: How much of that outcome was created by the college, and how much reflects the students the college selected in the first place?

As Selingo points out, much of the success we associate with elite universities may reflect who those universities admit, rather than something magical that happens to students once they arrive.

Put another way, if you take thousands of extremely intelligent, ambitious, motivated teenagers with strong academic records, impressive accomplishments, and often substantial family resources, put them together for four years, and then discover that many of them become successful adults…we probably shouldn't be completely shocked.

In some cases, as Selingo rather memorably suggests, the university's job over those four years is basically not to derail students who were already on very strong trajectories.

That doesn't mean highly selective colleges aren't providing tremendous value. Many offer extraordinary professors, resources, networks, research, and opportunities. It means we have to be careful about assuming: Successful graduates = the college caused the success.

College outcomes are influenced by the institution. They're also influenced by who the students were before they ever got there. And separating those two things is much harder than a salary number makes it look.

06

The Myth of Elite Colleges and Career Success

This is probably one of the biggest assumptions I encounter in the college search: If I attend a more prestigious college, I'll automatically have better career opportunities.

And to be clear, highly selective universities do come with some real advantages. Many have enormous alumni networks, incredible resources, strong name recognition, and established recruiting pipelines into certain industries.

But the leap from “elite colleges offer some advantages” to “attending an elite college is the key to long-term career success” is a pretty enormous one. Research suggests that the relationship between college prestige and career outcomes is far more complicated than most people assume.

So let's tackle a few of the biggest myths.

Myth 01

Your college determines your career trajectory

Reality

There are approximately one bajillion ways to build a successful career, and graduates from a very wide range of colleges manage to do it every year. Alumni from hundreds of different institutions go on to:

  • work at Fortune 500 companies
  • attend highly selective graduate and professional schools
  • serve in government
  • conduct research
  • launch successful businesses
  • build careers in virtually every major industry

This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it gets surprisingly easy to forget during the college admissions process. The workforce is not divided into Ivy League graduates and everyone else.

Where you attend college may influence some of the opportunities available to you, particularly at the beginning of your career. But it does not lock you onto a predetermined trajectory at age 18. Your major, skills, internships, relationships, work experience, graduate education, and approximately four decades of decisions you make after college will also have something to say about how your career turns out.

Myth 02

Being surrounded by the “best and brightest” guarantees success

Reality

Sometimes being a big fish in a slightly smaller pond can be an enormous advantage. There is absolutely value in being surrounded by exceptionally talented, ambitious students. They can challenge you, inspire you, introduce you to ideas you hadn't encountered before, and push you to raise your own game.

But there's another side to that equation: You are also competing with all of those exceptionally talented, ambitious students. At a university where nearly everyone was at the top of their high school class, competition for certain opportunities can be intense.

At another strong university, you may have greater access to:

  • leadership positions
  • research opportunities
  • faculty mentorship
  • competitive programs
  • campus recognition

And those opportunities can compound. A student who gets into a research lab sophomore year may build a close relationship with a professor, take on greater responsibility over time, present their research, and eventually receive an incredibly detailed recommendation letter for graduate school. A student who takes on a meaningful leadership role may develop actual management experience rather than simply adding another club membership to a résumé.

Standing out can create opportunities to keep standing out. So being the strongest student in the room isn't always the goal, but neither is deliberately choosing the room where it will be hardest to distinguish yourself.

Myth 03

National prestige determines career opportunities

Reality

The job market is a lot more regional (and a lot less obsessed with U.S. News) than most high school students realize. Many employers recruit heavily from colleges in the regions where they operate. A university may not have enormous national name recognition but can have an exceptionally strong reputation with employers in its own region or within a particular industry.

And for most students, employers are going to care quite a bit about what you actually did during college. That includes things like:

  • internships
  • research
  • leadership
  • relevant work experience
  • technical or professional skills
  • projects
  • relationships with professors and mentors
  • professional networking

A prestigious name on a diploma can open some doors. But walking through those doors still requires you to have something to offer once you get there.

And a student at a less nationally prestigious university who graduates with multiple internships, meaningful research, leadership experience, and a strong professional network may be in a much stronger position than a student who attended a famous university and assumed the name alone would do the work.

Myth 04

Elite college graduates earn dramatically more

Reality

The salary difference is much less dramatic than most people imagine. On average, graduates from elite universities earn only somewhat more than graduates from other strong colleges. There are some differences at the extreme upper end. Elite-college graduates have somewhat higher odds of eventually becoming multimillionaires, and certain extraordinarily lucrative industries recruit disproportionately from a relatively small group of universities.

But here's the part that tends to get lost: Those outcomes are rare no matter where you go to college. Attending an elite university does not suddenly make becoming a multimillionaire a normal or expected outcome. And for the vast majority of students, the difference between attending an ultra-selective college and another strong university is not the difference between “successful career” and “unsuccessful career.”

The much bigger question is: What opportunities will you actually have access to while you're there, and what will you do with them? Because ultimately, the name on your diploma is only one piece of your career story. What you build during those four years matters a whole lot more than most rankings would have you believe.

07

10 Questions to Ask When Researching a College

Okay, so if rankings aren't going to tell you which colleges are best for you…what will? Better questions.

The goal of college research isn't to figure out which school has accumulated the most prestige. It's to figure out what your life and opportunities might actually look like once you get there. That means getting past the admissions homepage and asking much more specific questions about academics, access to opportunities, career preparation, campus culture, and support.

Here are 10 questions I care about far more than whether a college is ranked #27 or #47.

Open any question to find a checklist you can tick off as you research each school.
1

How strong is the department for my intended major?

Here's something that gets lost surprisingly often in the college search: You're not really going to college at “University X.” You're going to spend a huge portion of your time inside a particular department, school, or program.

And the strength of that specific program can be very different from the university's overall reputation. A university ranked #70 overall might have a top-10 program in your field, while a university ranked #20 might be comparatively unremarkable in it.

This is especially important in fields where individual programs can vary dramatically from one university to another, including:

Computer Science Engineering Business Nursing Architecture Film Design

In these fields, things like faculty expertise, facilities, course offerings, industry connections, and opportunities within the department may have a much greater impact on your education (and eventually your career) than the number next to the university's name on U.S. News.

So don't stop your research at: “Does this college have my major?” Having a major and having a strong program in that major are two very different things.

›Dig deeper into the department

And don't rely entirely on the beautifully designed department webpage telling you that students have access to world-class faculty and transformative experiential learning opportunities. Every college apparently has world-class faculty and transformative experiential learning opportunities. Look for evidence.

Department websites are a good starting point, but course catalogs, undergraduate research pages, career outcome reports, and LinkedIn alumni searches can tell you much more about how strong a program actually is.

For example, search LinkedIn for graduates of the university who studied your intended major. Where are they working? What kinds of internships did they complete as undergraduates? What did they do while they were on campus?

That's the kind of information that helps you move beyond: “This is a highly ranked university.” and toward the much more useful question: “Is this a place where I can get an excellent education in the thing I actually want to study?”

2

When do undergraduates get research opportunities?

A college can conduct incredible, groundbreaking research without undergraduates having much access to it, so when you see a university advertising its enormous research budget, cutting-edge laboratories, or Nobel Prize-winning faculty, don't automatically assume those resources will be available to you as an undergraduate.

At many highly selective research universities, laboratories are staffed primarily by PhD students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who carry out much of the day-to-day work on major research projects. As a result, undergraduate positions may be limited and highly competitive, and at some universities, students don't begin working in labs until their junior or senior year.

At other excellent universities, particularly those with fewer graduate students, professors may rely much more heavily on undergraduates to participate in their research. That can mean:

  • earlier access to research, sometimes beginning freshman or sophomore year
  • more direct mentorship from professors
  • greater responsibility within a research project
  • more opportunities to present or publish research

For students considering graduate school, medical school, or a research career, these experiences can be especially valuable. The goal isn't simply to be able to say you “did research.” Getting involved early gives you time to actually learn how research works, develop meaningful skills, take on greater responsibility, and build relationships with faculty members who know your work well enough to eventually become strong mentors and recommenders.

›Dig deeper into how accessible research really is

This is also one of those areas where talking to current students in your intended major can tell you much more than an admissions website ever will.

A university's website may proudly advertise undergraduate research opportunities, but a current student can tell you whether freshmen and sophomores are routinely joining labs or whether everyone they know has spent a semester emailing professors and hoping someone eventually writes back.

Both schools can technically say they offer undergraduate research. What you really want to know is how realistic it will be for you to participate in it.

3

How big are the classes, and who teaches them?

One of the easiest mistakes to make when researching colleges is looking at the student-to-faculty ratio and assuming it tells you how big your classes will be. It doesn't.

A university can advertise a lovely 10:1 or 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio while still putting 400 students in an introductory biology lecture. At some large universities, introductory courses regularly enroll 300–500 students, with most of the actual interaction happening in smaller discussion or lab sections. At other schools, classes may average 20–40 students, giving students much more opportunity to ask questions, participate in discussions, and interact directly with professors.

Neither model is automatically good or bad. Some students genuinely love the energy and anonymity of a giant lecture hall. Others know they'll learn much better in a classroom where the professor will notice if they haven't spoken in three weeks. The important thing is knowing which environment you're signing up for.

Class size is only half of the equation, though. You also want to know who is actually doing the teaching.

At many large research universities, introductory courses are supported heavily by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). A professor may deliver the main lecture while graduate students lead discussion sections or labs, grade assignments, hold office hours, and sometimes teach portions of the course. At smaller colleges and universities with fewer graduate programs, professors are often more directly involved with undergraduates from the beginning.

Again, having TAs isn't inherently a bad thing. Plenty of graduate students are fantastic teachers, and smaller discussion sections can make enormous lecture courses feel much more manageable. But if one of the things attracting you to a university is its impressive faculty, it's worth figuring out how much access undergraduates actually have to those professors.

›Dig deeper into classes & teaching

This matters for more than whether you'll be able to raise your hand and ask a question during class. Access to professors early in college can shape everything from your academic confidence to the opportunities you find later.

The professor who knows you from a 20-person class may eventually become the person who invites you to join a research project, helps you explore a new academic interest, mentors you through your major, or writes a detailed recommendation letter for graduate school.

4

How easy is it to get into the classes you want?

This is one of those decidedly unglamorous college-search questions that can become very important once you're actually a student.

A university can offer hundreds of fascinating courses, dozens of majors, and seemingly endless academic options. But that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to get into the classes you need (or want) when you need them.

At some universities, students run into course bottlenecks, where required or popular classes fill quickly. This can be especially common with general education requirements that nearly everyone needs to complete and in high-demand majors like:

Computer Science Engineering Business Nursing

If required courses are consistently full, students may have to wait a semester (or several) to take them. Beyond making registration season significantly more annoying than it already is, those delays can make it harder to progress through a major, complete prerequisites for upper-level courses, study abroad, add a minor, or even graduate on time.

This is also an area where the official college website may not tell you very much. A course catalog can show you the hundreds of classes a university offers, but it can't necessarily tell you how difficult it is for an actual undergraduate to register for them. Current students, however, absolutely can.

›Ask a student ambassador or someone in your major

You can also look at a university's four-year graduation rate and the advising resources within your intended department. Neither one will tell you the whole story, but together they can give you some clues about whether students are generally able to move through their programs smoothly.

And if you're interested in something that requires a particularly rigid sequence of courses, like engineering, nursing, or certain pre-professional tracks, this becomes even more important. Missing one prerequisite doesn't always mean simply taking it the following semester; sometimes it can throw off an entire sequence of courses.

The goal isn't to find a college where you'll magically get every class you want at exactly the time you want it. Registration is probably going to be at least mildly annoying everywhere.

“I didn't get my first-choice 10:00 a.m. section”
“I can't get into a required class and now my entire academic plan is being held hostage by Intro to Organic Chemistry.”

There's a big difference between those two. That's worth knowing before you enroll.

5

What kind of career support does the school provide?

Almost every college has a career center. That does not mean every college has a particularly useful career center.

At some schools, career services may primarily consist of résumé reviews, job boards, and the occasional workshop. At others, the career center is much more deeply integrated into the undergraduate experience, helping students explore careers, find internships, build professional networks, connect with alumni, and eventually transition into full-time jobs.

And because we've already established that what you actually do during college can matter enormously for what happens after it, this is a resource worth investigating before senior year when everyone suddenly realizes, Oh right. I eventually have to get a job.

Strong career centers may offer
  • Dedicated career advisors assigned by major or industry, so you're working with someone who actually understands the recruiting landscape for the fields you're considering
  • Structured internship programs or internship-for-credit opportunities that make it easier to gain professional experience while you're still in school
  • On-campus recruiting and employer partnerships connected to specific departments or industries
  • Alumni mentorship programs that connect current students with graduates working in fields they're interested in
  • Career treks and networking trips to major employment hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Washington, D.C., where students can visit companies and meet professionals
  • Funding for unpaid internships, which can make opportunities in government, nonprofits, media, research, or the arts financially possible for students who otherwise couldn't afford to spend a summer working for free

When researching a college, don't just check whether it has a career center (spoiler alert: it does). Look at what that office actually does and how early students are encouraged to use it.

›Ask questions like these

A strong career center isn't going to hand you an internship or a job. You still have to use the resources. But a university that actively helps students find opportunities, build relationships, and gain relevant experience can make that process significantly easier.

And that matters because one of the strongest predictors of what you'll be able to do after college is the experience you manage to build during it.

6

What companies actually hire graduates?

College websites love a good logo wall. Google. Goldman Sachs. Deloitte. Disney. Microsoft. Maybe a few others arranged in a visually pleasing grid under a heading like Where Our Graduates Go.

And those employer connections can absolutely be meaningful. But there is an important distinction between a company recruiting at a university and a company consistently hiring graduates from your particular program.

A company might attend a career fair, host an information session, or hire a handful of students from a university each year. That doesn't necessarily mean students in your major have a strong pipeline into that company or industry.

So rather than asking, “What companies recruit here?”, try to figure out where graduates from your intended major actually end up.

›You can do that by

LinkedIn can be particularly useful here because you're not looking for one impressive graduate who landed at Google. You're looking for patterns.

Do graduates from the program consistently end up at companies or organizations that interest you? Are they working in roles related to what they studied? What internships did they complete before graduating? Where are they five or ten years later?

Those patterns can tell you quite a bit about how well connected a particular program is to the industries you're considering and what kinds of career pathways students are actually building from it.

It's also worth remembering that employers are rarely evaluating candidates based on college name alone. Depending on the industry, they may care enormously about:

  • relevant skills
  • internships and real-world experience
  • research or project work
  • initiative and leadership
  • your ability to actually apply what you've learned

That's why a student who takes advantage of internships, research, leadership, and professional opportunities at a less nationally prestigious university may graduate with significantly more career momentum than someone who attends a famous college and assumes the name on the diploma will do most of the work.

Prestige can open doors. Experience gives you something to talk about once you're in the room.

So don't just look at the impressive employer logos on a college's website. Figure out whether students like you are actually ending up at those companies, and what they did during college to get there.

7

What's the campus culture really like?

This is one of the harder things to figure out from a college website, mostly because every college website appears to feature the same group of suspiciously happy students laughing together on a lawn.

What you actually want to know is: What does it feel like to be a student here?

Some universities have a reputation for being academic pressure cookers, where students are intensely focused on grades, internships, research, and whatever comes next. At others, the culture may be noticeably more collaborative, with students still taking academics seriously but placing more emphasis on friendships, extracurricular activities, and having something resembling a life outside the library.

Neither environment is inherently better. A highly ambitious student may find an intense campus energizing and love being surrounded by people who are constantly pushing themselves. Another student may find that same environment exhausting and perform much better in a community where collaboration is the norm. The goal is to figure out which environment is more likely to bring out the best in you.

And campus culture isn't just about academics. At highly selective universities, competition can extend well beyond the classroom. Hundreds of students may apply for a small number of positions in popular clubs, leadership organizations, consulting groups, publications, or other campus activities. At some colleges, there are student organizations with acceptance rates lower than the university itself.

Yes, you can survive the college admissions process, finally arrive on campus, and then discover that you have to apply to join a club.

This doesn't mean those universities lack extracurricular opportunities. Far from it. But if being deeply involved on campus, taking on leadership roles, or trying lots of new things is important to you, it's worth understanding how accessible those opportunities actually are.

The same goes for Greek life. At some universities, fraternities and sororities are a relatively small part of the social scene. At others, they shape a significant portion of weekend life, housing, friendships, and campus traditions. If a large percentage of students participate, someone who doesn't plan to join may have a very different social experience from someone who does.

This is one of those categories where talking to current students is especially valuable, because you're trying to understand things that don't fit neatly into a statistic.

›Ask questions like these

You can learn a lot by paying attention to how students answer these questions, not just what they say. If you ask five different students what they do for fun and every answer somehow turns into a description of their internship, that is also information.

Campus culture will shape a huge portion of your college experience, from your stress level and friendships to how comfortable you feel trying something new or asking for help. You aren't just choosing where you want to study. You're choosing the community you're going to live in for four years.

8

Where do students spend their time outside class?

You are not going to spend four years exclusively attending classes, studying, and thoughtfully engaging with your professors. At least, I sincerely hope not.

A huge portion of your college experience will happen outside the classroom, and different campuses can have completely different rhythms depending on where students put their time and energy. For example:

  • Some campuses revolve around football games, tailgates, and school traditions, with Saturdays in the fall feeling like a campus-wide event.
  • Others have thriving arts communities, where theater productions, concerts, student publications, and creative projects are a major part of campus life.
  • At some universities, research and academic exploration spill well beyond the classroom, with students spending significant time in labs, libraries, or working with professors.
  • At others, Greek life, student government, club leadership, outdoor recreation, or exploring the surrounding city may play a much bigger role in how students spend their free time.

None of these is inherently better than the others. But they create very different versions of college life, which is why it's worth thinking beyond What will I study? and asking What will I actually do all day?

›Get a sense of a normal week or weekend

This is also something you can learn a lot about simply by paying attention when you visit. Where are students hanging out between classes? Are the common spaces busy? Are people sitting on the quad, working together in the library, practicing with an a cappella group, or sprinting across campus looking deeply concerned about an upcoming midterm?

And if you're talking to a current student, one of the best questions you can ask is simply: “What did you do last weekend?” Not What opportunities are available to students? Not How would you describe campus life? Those questions practically beg for the admissions-tour answer. Ask what they actually did.

Because ultimately, you're not choosing a college brochure. You're choosing the place where you're going to live your regular, random Tuesday afternoons and Saturday nights for the next four years. Understanding how students spend those hours can tell you a lot about whether you can picture yourself spending yours there too.

9

What support systems exist for students?

At some point during college, you are probably going to need help with something. Maybe calculus suddenly stops making sense. Maybe you're overwhelmed by your first semester away from home. Maybe you're trying to choose a major, figure out which classes you need, or simply adjust to having significantly more freedom and significantly fewer adults reminding you what you're supposed to be doing.

That's normal. College is a major transition, and even students who were incredibly independent and academically successful in high school can find the adjustment challenging. The important question isn't whether you'll ever need support. It's what happens when you do.

Look at the systems they have in place
  • First-year experience programs that help new students adjust through orientation courses, advising, peer mentorship, and community-building programs
  • Academic advising that goes beyond handing you a list of graduation requirements and actually helps students choose courses, explore majors, and build a realistic academic plan
  • Tutoring centers and academic support services where students can get help with challenging subjects, writing, study skills, or time management
  • Mental health resources, including counseling services, wellness programs, and other forms of student support
  • Mentorship programs that connect students with faculty, staff members, peer mentors, or upperclassmen who can help them navigate college
  • Living-learning communities, where students with shared academic interests live together and may take courses, attend events, or participate in programming as a group

As with everything else in this guide, though, don't stop at asking whether these resources exist. Almost every college can point you toward a tutoring center, an advising office, and a counseling center. What matters is how easy those resources are to actually use.

›Find out how support works in practice

Their answers can tell you quite a bit about whether support is woven into the culture of the university or simply listed on the website.

Strong support systems aren't about making college easy. They're about making sure students have somewhere to turn when college isn't easy. The best colleges don't just provide students with opportunities and hope they figure everything else out on their own. They create systems that help students find their footing, build relationships, recover when something goes sideways, and ultimately take advantage of everything the university has to offer.

10

Does this school encourage exploration?

Here is a shocking piece of information: you may not have your entire life figured out at 17. In fact, about one-third of undergraduates change their major at least once during college. And even students who stick with their original major often discover new interests, add minors, combine fields they didn't know could be combined, or completely rethink what they want to do after graduation.

That's part of what college is for.

The problem is that some universities make this kind of exploration much easier than others. At one school, you may be able to take classes across departments, add a minor, switch majors, or combine several interests without much difficulty. At another, you may be admitted directly into a particular college or program and discover that transferring into something else later is extremely competitive, complicated, or occasionally impossible.

This is especially important if you're applying to universities with separate undergraduate schools for areas like business, engineering, nursing, architecture, or the arts. You may technically attend a university that offers 100+ majors, but that doesn't necessarily mean all 100+ majors are available to you once you enroll.

So even if you are currently absolutely positive that you know what you want to study, investigate how much room the university gives you to change your mind.

›Look for

The course catalog can tell you a lot here, but this is also an area where it's worth looking at the fine print. Phrases like “students may apply for an internal transfer” do not necessarily mean students routinely transfer. Find out whether there are GPA requirements, prerequisite courses, enrollment caps, separate applications, or programs that simply don't accept internal transfers at all.

And don't underestimate the value of academic flexibility just because you already have a major in mind. You are going to encounter subjects in college that you may never have had the opportunity to study in high school.

Anthropology! Linguistics! Public health! Urban planning! Food science! Behavioral economics! Approximately 47 highly specific varieties of engineering!

You may discover that the field you've been planning to study since eighth grade is exactly where you belong. You may also take one random elective sophomore year and think, Wait. Where has THIS been all my life? A good college education should leave room for both possibilities.

“Exploration is not a luxury of education. It is one of its greatest benefits.”

Jeffrey Selingo

So when you're evaluating a college, don't just ask whether it offers the path you currently plan to follow. Ask how much freedom you'll have to discover a different one.

08

How to Build a Balanced College List

Once you've figured out what actually matters to you in a college and started researching schools more thoughtfully, the next step is turning all of that information into a balanced college list.

For most students, I recommend somewhere around 8–12 schools, divided across four categories.

These categories are not ratings of how “good” a college is, and moving a school from Reach to Match does not make it any less exciting. They simply help us think realistically about your chances of admission and make sure your final list gives you multiple good options when decisions come out.

The goal isn't to build a list with ten dream schools and two places you're hoping you'll never actually have to attend. A balanced list should contain schools you genuinely like in every category.

2–3
Likely
3–5
Target
2–3
Reach
2–3
Super Reach / Wildcard

Likely Schools

2–3 on your list

Likely schools are colleges where admission is very probable based on your academic profile. Typically, your GPA and test scores (if you're submitting them) will fall above the middle 50% range for admitted students, and your course rigor will compare favorably with what the college typically sees from successful applicants.

But there is another requirement for a school to qualify as a true Likely: You have to actually want to go there.

This sounds obvious, and yet every year students add a random “safety” to their list, do approximately eleven minutes of research on it, and then are horrified in March when someone points out that it may, in fact, be one of their options. Please don't do this to Future You.

Likely schools can offer some enormous advantages, including:

  • strong academic programs, sometimes with particular departments that significantly outperform the university's overall ranking
  • honors colleges that provide smaller classes, priority registration, specialized advising, research opportunities, or other perks
  • generous merit scholarships that can make them substantially more affordable
  • smaller classes and greater faculty access
  • earlier access to research, leadership, and other competitive opportunities

In fact, students sometimes discover that their Likely schools offer more of the things they actually care about than the highly selective universities that initially received most of their attention.

A Likely isn't supposed to be the college you reluctantly attend if everything goes wrong. It should be a college where, if an acceptance and a fantastic merit scholarship land in your inbox, you can genuinely think: “Okay…this is a pretty great option.”

Target Schools

3–5 on your list

Target schools are colleges where your academic profile aligns reasonably well with the students the university typically admits. Your GPA, course rigor, and test scores (if submitted) generally fall within the school's typical admitted-student range.

That means you have a realistic chance of admission, but Target absolutely does not mean guaranteed. Admissions decisions depend on much more than GPA and test scores, and your odds can also vary considerably depending on your intended major, residency, application round, and the strength of the applicant pool in a particular year.

This is why Target schools are often some of the most important colleges on your entire list. They sit in a very useful sweet spot: schools where admission is realistically within reach and where you've identified an academic and social environment you'd be genuinely excited to join.

Students sometimes spend so much energy researching their Reaches and Wildcards that their Target schools become an afterthought. I would argue that you should do the opposite. These are some of the schools most likely to become your actual choices in the spring, so choose them carefully.

Reach Schools

2–3 on your list

Reach schools are colleges where admission is unlikely, but still realistically possible. A school might fall into this category because:

  • your GPA, course rigor, or test scores (if submitted) fall slightly below the typical range of admitted students, or
  • the university or your particular major has a highly competitive acceptance rate, even though it doesn't quite fall into the ultra-selective Super Reach category

This is also where it's important to distinguish between being qualified to attend a college and being likely to be admitted to it.

A university may receive applications from thousands of students who are academically capable of succeeding there. It simply doesn't have enough seats for all of them. So you can have strong grades, challenging courses, impressive activities, and a compelling application and still be looking at relatively low odds of admission.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't apply. That's why they're called Reaches rather than Absolutely Not Happening Schools. It just means your college list cannot depend on them working out.

Super Reach Schools (Wildcards)

No more than 2–3

And then we have the category where admissions prediction starts to get a little…squishy. For purposes of building our lists, I generally classify a college as a Super Reach when the acceptance rate relevant to you falls below 15%. That could mean:

  • the school's overall acceptance rate is below 15%
  • the out-of-state acceptance rate is below 15%
  • the acceptance rate for your specific major or program is below 15%

At this level of selectivity, admissions outcomes become extremely difficult to predict.

Every year, these colleges reject students with perfect grades in the most rigorous courses available at their high schools, exceptional test scores, and impressive extracurricular accomplishments. Those students aren't being rejected because they somehow failed to clear an academic bar. There are simply far more students who clear that bar than there are seats available.

Once a college has tens of thousands of highly qualified applicants competing for a relatively small number of spaces, the admissions process becomes much more dependent on things like institutional priorities, the composition of the incoming class, academic interests, geography, talents, background and context, and what the university happens to need in that particular year. Many of those factors are completely outside your control.

That's why I sometimes prefer Wildcard to “Super Reach.” A student with a 4.0 and a 1550 may be an extraordinarily competitive applicant at one of these schools. That still doesn't make the outcome particularly predictable.

And nobody gets to turn a Super Reach into a Target because their stats are really good. Not with a 4.0. Not with a 1600. Not because Naviance has a green checkmark. Not because your cousin got in three years ago. Below a certain acceptance rate, everyone is playing with uncertainty.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't apply to Super Reaches. If you've done your research, the school genuinely offers something you want, and you're excited about the possibility, go for it. But your list needs to work just as well if every single Super Reach says no.

And that's really the test of whether we've built a balanced list: If every Reach and Wildcard disappeared tomorrow, would you still have colleges on your list that you'd be genuinely excited to attend? If the answer is yes, we're in good shape. If the answer is absolutely not, we aren't done building the list yet.

09

The Goal of a College List

At the beginning of this guide, we talked about the myth of the “dream school”: the idea that somewhere out there is one perfect college that will unlock the future you're hoping for.

Hopefully, by now, you're starting to see the college search a little differently.

The goal isn't to assemble the most impressive collection of names possible. It's to identify a range of colleges where you could genuinely thrive: places where you can study things that interest you, find professors and mentors who will invest in you, access meaningful opportunities, build relationships, try things you haven't tried before, and grow into a more capable and confident version of yourself.

Some of those colleges may be highly selective. Some may be schools you had never heard of before you started this process. Some may surprise you by offering more of what you actually want than the college whose sweatshirt you've been picturing yourself wearing since middle school. That's a good thing.

A strong college list isn't one where you have a single “dream school” followed by 11 increasingly disappointing backup plans. It's one where you can imagine multiple versions of your future and feel genuinely excited about more than one of them.

Because there isn't one college where you can be happy, successful, challenged, and transformed. There are many.

Our job is to find them.