All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, the world, there are soon-to-be-graduating high school students in a state of high 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.
Selecting a college seems like a huge 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 of their life. But how could that be? Think of it this way; the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results of college choice for any given person 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's genetic makeup 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 Ohio State, or the Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly prove to 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're making the choice based on its outcome, on what basis are you going to evaluate it? You simply can't, at least not in any rational 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.
So then is it any more important than deciding what color shirt to wear today? I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for most people. 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 are a small minority and in most cases the opposite is true.
I feel like my own college choice was pretty much a disaster, and my life turned out pretty good in spite of it. Was I miserable for most of the 4 years? Absolutely. Not only did I choose the "wrong college," I chose a bad major as well. I majored in psychology for a ridiculously adolescent, child of the 60's kind of reason- to "find myself." And like all my friends who tried the same thing, I failed to do so and was profoundly disappointed with psychology as a way to understand one's self.
So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? Maybe I would have been just as miserable and immature somewhere else 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 you frequent and very specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.
However, I now look back on my professional life and find that it's been centered around advertising and teaching, two of the most psychology-oriented fields there are. And though it would be hard to find a direct path from my college self to the present, I've maintained some core personal principles and beliefs throughout, and that, I'd argue is the most important thing. Not where I chose to spend the supposedly last 4 years of my adolescence.
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