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.”

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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.

Want to try this approach?

I built a free prototype that helps students identify which college features are deal breakers—and which ones consistently attract them. I’d love your feedback.

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.