OLIVIER LAUDE FOR TIME Do Your Own Thing Berkeley student writes; dog plays

How did it get to be like this? You're an intelligent person, 17 or 18 years old; you've had some experience; you're looking for more. But from the time you reached the second half of your junior year in high school, just as you were getting to be the person you intend to be, people suddenly seemed as if they wanted you to smooth your edges, sacrifice your depth, become strictly one dimensional. You could have won the Nobel Prize in physics, composed the logical successor to Beethoven's Ninth, found the cure for cancer or hit the winning basket in the NBA Finals, but they're always asking you the same question, a question so predictable it could be chanted like some weird mantra. Where are you thinking of going to college?

You, wanting to be sociable — or at least to get your questioner to go away — answer with a familiar name, and after barely a beat comes the second part of your inquisitor's chant: Oh, that's a good school!

Related Stories So Many Schools Something for everyone Secrets of Their Success Alma maters of the rich and infamous, plus surprising majors More On Where To Go Which College Is Right For You How to sort through the tons of data The Two-Year Plan Community college can be a good place to start Are You Poltically Correct? Right, left, or center, look for a college that suits your views Faculty Face Time More colleges and universities are making sure students spend quality time with professors A Sporting Chance Strong academics and athletic glory make a great team Wired Ivory Towers Colleges are embracing — and investing in — technology

Now let's stop here for a small question of our own: How do they know? It's remarkable, this instant and ubiquitous expertise. People who have never set foot on a particular campus, who couldn't name three of its faculty members, who even if they could name them know absolutely nothing about the subjects those professors teach or how well they might teach them are suddenly experts, omniscient judges of American higher education.

How do they know? Because people say so — people whose judgment may be based on nothing firmer than memories of similarly vapid conversations 35 years earlier when they were picking a college. You may as well ask someone for an opinion on a restaurant they haven't been to or a book they haven't read.

True professionals in the college-selection racket look at it a little differently. Not long ago, the father of a senior at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City asked director of college counseling Laura Clark whether the school's current seniors could expect to do as well as the previous year's crop. How do we know they did well? Clark asked, and the man responded that several students had been accepted at Harvard, Yale and Stanford. "The only way I would know whether last year's class did well," Clark said, "would be to call all its members and ask them if they're happy where they are."

What Clark knows, and what every other college adviser or admissions officer ought to know, is that choosing a school because of its reputation alone makes as much sense as buying a painting because someone else likes it. Another way of putting it: if your four years of undergraduate life are as important as people claim they are, shouldn't the decisions about how and where to spend them be made with you in mind?

If so, that means spurious ranking methods, arbitrary rating schemes and any other system that presumes to provide a definitive measurement of a school's quality are inherent shams. As Jim Conroy, who heads the post­high school counseling program at New Trier High School just north of Chicago, says, "I think you can rank a car. You can base it on its gas mileage, power, durability. But when you start ranking schools, it's like ranking people. And how can you rank people?"

Even the one remotely plausible claim that can be made for the virtues of a school's reputation in the culture at large — that it may give you a better shot at a particular job, especially a better-paying one — has recently been proved meaningless. Employing highly sophisticated statistical techniques, Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of the Mellon Foundation conducted a study that convincingly established that future earnings correlate with the qualities of the individual far more than with the qualities — real or perceived — of the college he or she attended. Overwhelming evidence proved to Krueger and Berg Dale that students with, say, 1350 SAT scores who went to Harvard did no better in life than students with 1350 sat scores who went to No Name U.

As Krueger wrote not long ago, "Students who attend more selective colleges are likely to have higher earnings [only because of] the very reasons they were admitted to the more selective colleges in the first place." In other words, your post-college life is shaped by who you are, not by the decal in the back window of your mother's minivan. It is possible for apathetic students at élite schools to find other apathetic students with whom to play Nintendo and guzzle beer, Krueger says. By contrast, a good student can get a good education almost anywhere.

That certainly has never been truer than it is today, given the incredibly rich buffet that is the American student's choice of colleges. There are more than 2,000 degree-granting, four-year colleges in the U.S., and if the dedicated searcher can't find something imaginative, distinctive and nearly unique at every one of them — either academically, sociologically or both — he isn't really looking. You can major in aviation at Lewis University in Illinois, in jazz studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, in the great books at an increasingly wide range of colleges that have made a sharp turn back toward classical education. (At Wilbur Wright, a public two-year school in Chicago, Professor Bruce Gans has community-college students writing papers with such titles as "A Politically Incorrect Defense of the Athenian Empire" and on such topics as social codes in Beowulf.) At the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, the only major is human ecology; the school's primary laboratory is the ocean just outside the college's doors.

Irrespective of your intended major, your hoped-for career or any other curriculum-related matter, you can very sensibly make your choice on the issues that matter most to you. Nafeesah Cumming, a sophomore at Clark Atlanta University, chose her school because one of the most important benefits of attending an HBCU (historically black college or university) is that the classroom setting and campus activities are culturally comfortable. Joshua Kalven finds himself productively challenged at Colorado College — where the innovative block plan has students taking one class at a time, full-time, for 3 1ˇ2 weeks — because it allows him to focus more acutely on each subject. For Karen Norcross, a recent graduate of Boston's Suffolk University, "being able to study with students from all over the world made a tremendous difference for me," a difference she could locate at Suffolk, which has some 650 foreign students from 96 different countries. What all these students have found is a school that may or may not have been right for the inexpert experts but was precisely right for each of them.

Northeastern University in Boston emphasizes a celebrated co-op program that assures graduates a specific, career-related occupational experience obtained from one of 2,400 different relationships NU maintains all over the country and in 18 nations around the world. At Warren Wilson College, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, every student must spend 15 hours a week working at an on-campus job — ranging from slopping hogs to re-wiring buildings — effectively eliminating any divisions between wealthy students and the less well-off. Says Eliza Lynn of Evanston, Illinois, a recent Warren Wilson graduate: "I knew that to pay for college, I'd have to work. I wanted to be in a place where everybody had to work, where the person behind the counter wasn't divided [from others] by economic class."

In the end, once you acknowledge that there is no reason to choose a college based on something as insubstantial and probably irrelevant as reputation, the meaningful standards by which to choose begin to burst forth like daffodils in the spring. Career plans, extracurricular interests, study habits, social inclinations — whatever combination of these and a hundred other factors go into your decision, they are likely to lead to a rewarding (in every sense of the word) college experience.

How to choose? It's simple. Ask yourself: Who are you?

Only after you've answered that will you be ready to pick where you'll be spending four of the most rewarding years of your life. "What really matters," says Bruce Stempien, guidance director at Weston High School in Connecticut, "is going to a school that you really want to go to."

Could anything be simpler, or better?

Source: TIME/The Princeton Review's The Best College For You 2001