Playing Dice with the Future

Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they're coming here next year, and we've had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We've also had a couple "Open House" events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to see the school, sit in on classes, and have lunch with members of the faculty.

In talking with the students at these events, I'm always struck by how apparently random the college decision process is. We spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars trying to draw the best students to campus, on some sort of mad-economist vision of high-school seniors as rational decision-makers, when the criteria they use for deciding where to go are so nebulous as to be essentially random. A lot of the students don't even seem to have a clear idea what type of school they want-- when I ask them where else they've applied, I'm as likely to hear the names of local commuter schools and huge state universities as other elite liberal arts colleges.

Of course, it's always been thus. My own decision process, lo these many years ago, was also highly influenced by random factors.

For illustrative purposes, some reflections on my long-ago college decision are below the fold.

In the end, I was accepted by four colleges: Williams, Swarthmore, MIT, and Cornell. I was wait-listed at a fifth (Princeton-- the letter is still taped to the back of my bedroom door at my parents' house). Just cutting it down to those five was the result of some fairly random elements. We looked at some other schools (Colgate, Amherst), but rejected those for various reasons-- I remember that Amherst got dumped in large part because the tour guide was really flaky.

Cornell was very much the "local option" being less than an hour from my hometown, and the one school in the pool that would accept some of the in-state scholarships I won. I was pretty sure I didn't want to go there, though, and getting a parking ticket when I went to sit in on a class didn't help any. In the end, I had better financial offers from the others, and they were farther from home, so that carried the day.

I made overnight visits to the other three, to get a sense of the places. They were three very different visits: at one, I wound up playing computer games for a good while, at another, I sat up late bullshitting with my hosts, and at the third, I went out to a party and got drunk.

The computer games one is easy to guess-- that was MIT. I was already a little dubious about them because of the sheer size of the place, and the insane system they had for assigning first-year housing. The people I was hosted with were just a little too intense, and actually ditched me in order to study for a while. I wound up playing "Battle Chess" on somebody's dorm-room computer for a few hours, which is about the only thing I remember about the visit.

Anyone who knew me in college would probably assume that Williams was the school where I went out and got drunk, but they'd be wrong. That was Swarthmore. I remember being there on a Wednesday night, and that the roommate of my assigned host was friends with the organizers of some regular Wednesday-night keg party that the school had ordered cancelled because of the prospective students on campus. That just pushed the party underground, of course, and he knew where it was, so I tagged along and got mildly drunk. I remember a lot of people singing along to "Bertha" by the Grateful Dead, but I've never found a version that sounds like exactly the one I remember from that night.

Lest you think that I was a complete lush, or think less of Timothy Burke's fine institution, I did also check out some academic matters. In particular, I sat in on a Psychology 101 lecture-- I had planned to go to a physics class, but my host and his rommate both insisted that I needed to hear this particular psych prof. I remember it as including both the Milgram experiment movie and a hilarious discussion about Freud, and what a lunatic he was, though that seems a little improbable. Anyway, it was a great class, easily the best I sat in on as a prospective student.

Williams was the school where I wound up hanging around late into the evening, having a bullshit dorm-room conversation. As I recall, the guy hosting me and a couple of his friends were plotting out their own version of This Is Spinal Tap, and it was hilariously funny. I narrowly missed meeting a rugby player during the visit-- at one point, there was some crashing and banging outside, and everybody got really quiet. "What's that?" I asked. "Oh, that's Darnell," they replied, "Keep quiet, and he'll go away."

Weirdly, when I was actually a student, I spent more time with Darnell than I did in conversations of the sort I remember from that visit. I'm sure there were prospective students shushed on hearing me crashing and banging down a dorm hallway, too.

All in all, I would say that the visits to both Williams and Swarthmore were positive experiences. What tipped the balance in favor of Williams? Financial matters played a big part (I got a sweet deal from Williams), but there were a host of random factors as well-- the view from the hairpin turn as I rode the bus up from Boston, my small-town upbringing making Williamstown feel more comfortable than Philly, the fact that it was the last stop on my tour, the fact that it was an hour or two closer to home, the admissions officer who several months earlier had responded to a comment about the high cost of applying to numerous colleges by telling me "Save your money, only apply to a few places. You'll be fine." I'm not sure I could point to a single deciding factor, and the only one that involved any rational analysis at all was the financial aid package.

What the point, here? The point is really that for all the importance placed on the decision, it really doesn't matter from the student end-- they can decide on the basis of random factors, and everything will still work out. I would've been perfectly happy at Swarthmore, I'm sure, or at any of the schools I rejected earlier in the process. I'd be a somewhat different person than I am today, but I don't think I'd look back on my college days any less fondly.

Of course, the decision is critically important from the institutional side-- when we get good students, life is much happier for faculty and administrators, and when the quality of the entering class dips, everybody gets cranky. Which is why we spend tens of thousands of dollars on events that attempt to influence the decision processes of a bunch of 17 and 18-year-olds, who will ultimately choose a college based on the sports team mascot, or the weather on the one weekend they happen to spend on campus, or the personality of the student volunteer giving them a campus tour.

And somehow, in the end, it all works out all right. How? It's a mystery.

Anyway, good luck to any students currently deciding where to go to college. And remember: the above paragraphs aside, you really don't want to go to Amherst.