When It Comes To College, Stop Looking for Fit
As high schoolers whittle their college lists, decide where to apply and work on their applications, the popular advice is to ignore the rankings and instead focus on “fit.”
The idea behind the advice is understandable. One-size-fits-all rankings don’t capture what matters to an individual student, so students should instead choose a college based on their priorities.
But for most teenagers, that advice isn’t just unhelpful—it’s impossible to act on.
Most teenagers can’t define the perfect college for them. But they can usually recognize environments where they’d be unhappy.
That’s why students should stop looking for fit and start looking for misfit—the types of colleges that would be a nonstarter.
Research my colleagues and I conducted for Choosing College found that most high schoolers don’t have a clear sense of why they’re going to college in the first place—or what they really value in a college.
At 17 or 18, they’re still discovering who they are.
Because they are relatively malleable, there are often many environments that would “fit.”
That leaves students with little guidance to navigate the thousands of college options, which is why many default to following rankings or focusing on nearby colleges where they know someone who enrolled.
Yet just because many colleges could be a good fit doesn’t mean all will be. The inability to identify environments where students are likely to struggle is one reason nearly 40 percent fail to complete a four-year degree within six years.
There’s a better, more realistic way to help students make better college choices. It takes advantage of a basic truth about human behavior.
When people lack experience, they’re often poor at describing exactly what they want. But they’re surprisingly good at recognizing what they don’t want.
So what does identifying “misfit” actually look like?
It means digging into the differentiating features of colleges—their geography, size, extracurricular activities, academics, campus life, student body, and purpose—and identifying which ones are personal non-starters.
Some students can’t imagine living in a rural area; others recoil at a large research university or a commuter campus. Some want abundant majors; others find that overwhelming. Greek life is central to the social scene at many colleges but barely exists at others.
When students visit campuses, they often walk away with a vague impression of whether they like it—but rarely understand the features driving those reactions. By visiting a wide array of schools that differ on key dimensions, students can begin noticing patterns: which features are consistently deal breakers, as well as those that don’t seem to matter too much.
Here’s a simplified case. If a student visits a small college in a city and detests it, the next step is to tease apart what caused that reaction. Was it the size or the urban environment? Visiting a large university in a city might reveal the real culprit.
By crossing off colleges where a student is unlikely to thrive—and remaining open to the many other places where they could, they can make better decisions. The goal isn’t to find the one perfect college. It’s to avoid the wrong ones.
Sometimes knowing where you don’t belong is the surest way to discover where you can succeed.
Michael, the misfit idea is a great and novel twist on the idea of fit, one that I think would really resonate with students! I think the tool is a good start; I tested it out. For me, the results were a bit off. I think it had to do with the way "commuter" is defined. It appears schools where a large portion of students live off campus are coded as commuter. True, in the strictest sense of the word, but at many institutions, many students prefer to live in nearby off-campus housing their junior and senior years. It may be that the tool is including this population with what I picture as "commuter" students/schools. I'd have to play around with it a bit more. The two schools that I think may have skewed this way were Gonzaga and Stevens Institute of Tech. But the suggested options for additional schools for me to visit primarily included what I consider true "commuter" schools with little to no on-campus housing and a focus on 2-year technical degrees. What a fun project to do with AI! I think this definitely has potential!
Michael, I like the way you have framed the issue, but I also think you underestimate a teenager's ability to discern where they feel welcome and where they don't. A personal case in point. My son applied to colleges in 2002. After eliminating schools below the Mason-Dixon line and rejecting Oberlin because it was farther away from CT than a similar school, he settled on the 5 Bs: Bowdoin, Bates. Brandeis, Bucknell, and Bard (he also immediately rejected Cornell because we had to park in a parking garage).
He made two visits to each of the five schools and did the traditional tour, interview, and information session during the first visit. We then returned and walked the campus without any escorts. After each visit, my son either said "No" or "I could live with that" for each of the five except Bard, where he said, "This is the school I'm going to." His decision was made based on the emphasis on academics rather than amenities, and a chance encounter with a professor. The professor was the head of the Physics Department, and stopped us on a path, asking if he could help in any way. My son introduced himself and stated he would be an English major. The professor said that he was biased toward Physics, but that my son might consider being a science fiction writer. It was a telling statement.
Jacob attended Bard, and after 2 years of putting up with English professors who were the only beings on this planet who truly understood the novels they read, Jacob decided to become a Physics major after completing a cosmology course. He went on to teach Physics and Math at Kiski and St. Marks (MA), left education for reasons I don't need to explain, and is now a cybersecurity officer at Babson College.
He recognized "fit" at Bard because the school went out of its way to welcome him before he applied. But you're right: if you are applying to the University of Michigan or the University of Texas, you don't stand a chance of determining fit.