Getting into College

I was talking to my friend Rachel, a rabbinical student trying to figure out which camp she wanted to work at this summer. She was torn between two, one of which she had been attending for years, the other of which seemed like a really good fit for her and had recruited her very hard for. The amount that she agonized over her decision led me to compare it to the dilemmas that high school students feel when choosing a college. I told her the same thing that I've told any high school senior who asks me for input: the decision is basically much ado about nothing. People generally get out of college whatever they put into it, regardless of where they go. Furthermore, pretty much everybody who goes to college has a good time and learns a thing or two, so it just doesn't matter where people end up in college.

Sounds logical, right? It is, but I realized halfway through my argument to Rachel that I was only half right. While it's true that most people have a good time wherever they end up going to college, it's definitively not true that it "doesn't matter" where people end up attending college. In fact, thinking more about it, I was hard-pressed to come up with a decision that had a greater impact on one's life. For many people, those four years determine their eventual spouses, their career aspirations, their lifelong friends, their religious and political beliefs, their geographical location, and many other aspects of their futures. It's certainly not outlandish to suggest that at least one aspect of everyone's future is in some way affected by his/her choice of college.

For all the times I have played the "What if?" game in which I second-guess my own decisions and figure out what would have happened had I decided differently, I can't play it when it comes to my decision to attend Brandeis University. The degree to which my life would be different is so high that it is literally inconceivable to me. And I use the word "literally" correctly. (Ever heard somebody say that he "literally" died? Or that he was "literally" beside himself? Those always crack me up.) Would I have joined a sketch comedy group at a different school, and prepared myself for a lifetime of making fun of improv groups for presenting an inherently inferior brand of comedy? Would I have still majored in music? Would I have started my hobby of choral singing? The hypothetical questions are endless, which only proves the point that my choice of Brandeis was critical to the formation of me in my current form. Therefore, I was foolish to suggest that the college decision doesn't matter. Right?

Well, not so fast, Kowalski. The truth is, there are two distinct but related questions at play here. The first question is, does one's choice of university has an impact on one's future endeavors? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. The second aspect, however, is the one that high-school students tend to focus on, which is, which school is the best for them? At which school will the quality of the experience be highest? The answer to that question is the key to this whole thing. Because the answer is, quite simply, nobody knows. It is impossible to know whether I would have enjoyed myself more at, say, University of Washington (which is located in my "hometown" of Seattle), as opposed to Brandeis. (Obviously, some students transfer out of a particular school because they are miserable, but this situation is rare.) If I had to speculate, I would say that I would have had an equivalent amount of fun, and an equivalent education, because I continue to believe that one gets out of college what one puts into it. I would think that this is true for most people.

The point of all this is that the college decision may be the most important decision in one's life, but it is also one of the most arbitrary. From now on, if somebody asks me whether it matters where he/she goes to school, I'll be forced to respond, "Yes and no."