Who Needs Harvard?

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Students see a strategy: choose intimacy and attention now, and reach for the world-class research university for grad school. Ashley Rufus, 19, gave up a coveted spot on Harvard's waiting list in favor of Truman State University in rural Kirksville, Mo.: "It started out as a financial issue," says Rufus, who got a full ride to Truman. She loved Harvard when she visited, but she hated the idea of eight years of debt if she were to go on to medical school. Truman was closer to home, had a student-faculty ratio of 15:1, and its graduates have a "very impressive" rate of acceptance to medical schools. Carla Valenzuela, 18, who graduated in the spring from Martin Luther King Academic Magnet school in Nashville, Tenn., applied to 13 schools--and wound up picking her last choice. She turned down Amherst, Wellesley and Dartmouth in favor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Part of the draw was being near a big city; part was the offer of a Meyerhoff scholarship, a prestigious, four-year grant for talented high school students studying science and related fields. All 52 Meyerhoff scholars from the class of 2005 went on to graduate schools, 45 of them to M.D., Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. combination programs.

"If I wanted to work right after college, I would have gone to a more 'name school' like Dartmouth," Valenzuela says. But she hopes to become a doctor, so she did some research. "I definitely looked at the medical-acceptance rates of each college and how strong their pre-med programs were, and that helped knock out a lot of colleges." Students with clear professional goals will pay more attention to the reputation of a single department than the whole university. Among the artistically inclined, the Rhode Island School of Design has always been pre-eminent, but schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emerson College and Northeastern University are now attracting kids specifically for their arts curriculums. Gabriel Slavitt, 17, who this spring graduated from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Calif., says his stepsister "basically flipped out" when she heard he was turning down Brown University in favor of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He admits that he applied to Brown for the name, but he concluded that its arts program was not as strong. "For what I want to study, it doesn't mean anything to me to be around students that are going to help me get a job later in life, business students and the like."

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