Consequences or Truth

All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, world, there are soon-to-be-graduating high school students in a state of paralyzing anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.

For my child, college admittance was a mixed bag, as it is for most kids. The subsequent uncertainty, while different and I guess preferable to the pre-results tension, has yet to subside. Selecting a college seems like a big decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.

Or not. Maybe it's the LEAST important decision. Here's the problem. The consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results for any given person at any given school with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over. 

Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Penn State or Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly assure me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other? 

If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you normally make choices based on expected outcomes, on what basis are you going to evaluate this one? You simply can't, at least not in any scientific kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not. 

Then is this any more important than choosing Diet Coke versus Dr. Pepper? Of course I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for many people. I'm saying WHICH college is inconsequential. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these cases are a small minority.

So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? I hated where I went to college, but maybe I would have been just as immature and miserable anywhere else (though at the time I would have told you I loved it) and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give frequent and often specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

Ultimately, this is a case where, although the position I've taken can be supported by logic, I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion. Late adolescence and early adulthood are important times in personal development and for some, if not all, people, college is a key time of personal growth. Just because you can't know the consequences of a decision doesn't necessarily make it unimportant, but it does mean that maybe people shouldn't be fretting about it as much as they are. Because you never know.