Samantha Stainburn

(The New York Times, 02 August 2013)

FOR 18-year-old consumers, financial decisions escalate exponentially. Tall latte or a grande splurge? Lucky Brand or True Religion? State U. or N.Y.U.? Statistics or psych or maybe social work?

It’s not hard for a student today, facing an average single-year college bill of $21,657, to unwittingly take on a life-altering amount of debt. Pick a college or field that doesn’t set you up for a job that’s lucrative enough to pay back loans and you could spend years just scraping by.

To help students make informed decisions about whether it’s worth paying a premium for a certain college or degree, advocates and entrepreneurs have created online tools to compare graduates’ income.

“In the last few years, there’s been a fairly strong push to have colleges report to students when they pick a major what the labor market performance has been,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “Do graduates get a job in their field, earn enough money to pay their loans?”

Most colleges don’t have the research staff, or desire, to chase down graduates and find out what they’re making. But states have been collecting income data for years, and some — Virginia, Maryland, Nevada and Florida — have passed laws requiring their education departments to compile and release it, or post it voluntarily. Other free sites help students calculate R.O.I., or return on investment: the cost of attending set against future earnings.

Unfortunately, not one of these tools is based on complete or particularly good data. And no site allows students to do what most probably want to do: pick a handful of colleges across the country and compare earnings achieved by graduates in various majors.

The institution most obviously suited to reporting what students earn after college is the federal government. The United States Department of Education already collects graduation data from all states, and the Internal Revenue Service tracks earnings. But the law prevents matching individuals’ transcript information to employment data. A bill introduced in the Senate, the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, is seeking to overturn that ban. It wants the government to publish earnings and employment metrics sorted by major, degree, college and state up to 15 years after graduation.

While the predictive value of currently available salary tools is limited, they can reveal patterns that might inspire students to consider different choices. Earnings data show that “two-year technical degrees from community colleges can be incredibly valuable,” said Mark Schneider, president of College Measures, which developed a tool, with funds from the Lumina Foundation, that some states are using to compare incomes. For example, Texas students with two-year technical degrees have average first-year median earnings of about $50,000 — $11,000 more than graduates with bachelor’s degrees. In Colorado, students with associate degrees in applied science earn a starting salary almost $7,000 more, on average, than that of graduates with B.A.’s.“So if you’re on the fence about getting a bachelor’s degree,” Mr. Schneider said, “these technical degrees are something you should explore.”

Another takeaway: “You want to go to the flagship public college because it has a better football team,” Mr. Schneider said. “But in every state we’ve worked in, many students graduating from the regional campuses end up just as well off. Sometimes they even beat them.” Health profession majors at the University of Tennessee’s flagship in Knoxville, for example, fall behind those at the Martin campus, $46,770 to $58,592.

Of course, there are factors to consider besides earnings when picking a career or college. But middle- and low-income students who can’t afford to make mistakes, and students considering low-paying professions like social work or art, may want to figure in R.O.I. “The qualitative benefits of college, such as how fun the dorm life is, are temporary,” said Katie Bardaro, lead economist for PayScale, a Web site that reports compensation. “Your after-graduation earnings are permanent.”

PayScale

At PayScale.com, students can compare earnings for graduates of 1,058 colleges and universities as well as national median starting and midcareer salaries for 130 majors. Who knew: The starting salary in nursing beats business $54,100 to $41,400. More useful, the gap narrows midcareer: $70,200 to $70,000. Data can be sorted by region or type of school, including public, private or, as defined by the Princeton Review, party school. (Lowest-paid partiers come from the University of Mississippi; highest from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.) And using its own algorithm, PayScale calculates return on investment for colleges and popular majors. It may surprise that in-state engineering majors from George Mason University enjoy a higher R.O.I. over 30 years ($1,937,000) than engineers do from M.I.T. ($1,794,000). PayScale also publishes an attention-grabbing list of schools offering the worst returns.

Strengths: PayScale provides median midcareer salaries (10 years plus), which is a more realistic measure of how much liberal arts degrees pay off, since degree holders often work at coffee shops in the early years.

Weaknesses: Earnings are self-reported. Because the compensation survey is completed by PayScale.com visitors (1.5 million did so last year), results are biased toward workers who are researching salaries online — younger, white collar and not yet running Fortune 500 companies. The reports also exclude graduates who went on for an advanced degree and who attended college part time.

State By State

Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado and Texas post first-year earnings for graduates of all their two- and four-year public institutions on CollegeMeasures.org. Virginia and Colorado also track private colleges. A math geek who wants to study and work in Virginia can home in on average earnings for computer science majors at the University of Virginia ($59,739), William & Mary ($56,809) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute ($54,917), or compare U.Va.’s computer science majors to its math majors ($45,777) and mechanical engineers ($50,917). Or zoom out to see which schools graduate the highest earners in general; in Virginia, it’s Jefferson College of Health Sciences followed by University of Richmond.

Strengths: Statistics are based on state education and employment records, so the experience of every single public-school graduate who works in the state is factored in. Earnings are available for just about every degree and certificate program in each state.

Weaknesses: Nothing from outside the state, including graduates who take jobs elsewhere, is calculated in. Neither are the self-employed.

College Reality Check

Produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CollegeRealityCheck.com allows students to compare earnings, monthly payments on student loans, graduation rates and average net price for up to five colleges at a time.

Strengths: There’s a lot of guidance on what terms like net price actually mean and how to interpret different types of data, along with links to relevant sites and articles. A stylish interface generates graphics like what a graduate’s monthly debt payments might look like over 10 years compared with monthly pay depending on the school attended.

Weaknesses: Earnings figures come from PayScale (see above). There’s no information at all on specific programs.

How to Look at All the Data

• Focus on figures for different majors rather than different colleges, said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “What really matters in your career is much less the college and much more the major. If you go to Harvard and become a schoolteacher, you won’t make more than other schoolteachers.”
• Look at the sample size on which an average or median salary is based, said James Leipold, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, which has reported on lawyers’ salaries for decades. “The bigger the number, the better the data.”
• Don’t assume you’ll end up in the top half of the earnings median; half the population is below it. Students “always sort themselves to the high side,” Mr. Leipold said. “That’s why they borrow more than they can afford. There’s such optimism about success.”

Read this article at the New York Times.

(The New York Times, 30 July 2006)

Some states suffer student brain drain while others are magnets. Tuition, state policies and even skiing conditions factor into the collegiate popularity contest. A new report from the Department of Education shows how many first-time students left—and how many entered—each state to study for a degree or certificate in fall 2004.

ARIZONA

Students in: 15,369 Students out: 4,195

Indications that cactus is the new ivy: 11,200 more first-time students entered Arizona than left. The appeal? Great weather, a hot economy and relatively low tuition (at the University of Arizona, $4,764 for residents, $14,970 for non). Students who reside in one of the 15 states participating in the Western Undergraduate Exchange pay only one-and-a-half times the in-state tuition.

CALIFORNIA

Students in: 32,057 Students out: 23,588

”The University of California attracts the best and the brightest because it was designed for the best and the brightest,” says David A. Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. So a large proportion of Californians stay home. But while the number pouring into the state in 2004 remained high, it was down 47 percent from 2000. The state has coped with a budget crisis and overcrowding with a series of increases in out-of-state rates, to about $25,000 a year at Davis, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles. That matches private college prices.

CONNECTICUT

Students in: 9,722 Students out: 14,580

Students in the state with the second highest median income–$86,000 for a family of four, slightly less than in New Jersey—can shop the nation for the perfect college, then load their books into their BMW’s and go. What about Yale, you say? About 350 Connecticut undergraduates enrolled at Yale last school year, half as many as from New York. ”Some students just want to get away from home and try to fly on their own,” observes Edward M. Elmendorf, an official with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

FLORIDA

Students in: 25,525 * Students out: 12,513

The average high temperature in Gainesville in February: 70 degrees. The average number of sunny days per year: 210. Any more questions?

* The report says in-migration is 32,299; the state says that number is based on incorrect data it submitted.

ILLINOIS

Students in: 13,380 Students out: 23,841

A lack of choices drives out Illinois students, says Diane R. Dean, an assistant professor at Illinois State University in Normal and a principal investigator for a state study on student migration due out this fall. ”Everything revolves around Chicago or Champaign-Urbana.” Also, she says, ”There is a steadily declining number of choices for the average student, because institutions below the top tier are increasing their selectivity to increase their rankings, and students aren’t getting in.” Neighboring states actively recruit Illinois’s average students, and some offer tuition reciprocity, Ms. Dean says. In May, the University of Illinois at Urbana dropped a plan to let in more out-of-state students after parents and guidance counselors objected to taking places away from Illinois students.

MASSACHUSETTS

Students in: 27,300 Students out: 18,499

Iconic colleges like Harvard and Wellesley don’t go out of style, making Massachusetts—a state that educates more students in private than public colleges—a perennial importer. But it’s not the Athens of America any longer. ”We do not have as many students from other states coming to private colleges here, and it’s in part because of what some of those other states are doing in keeping students home,” says Richard Doherty, president of the state’s Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have improved their grant aid, while Massachusetts has done the opposite, prompting its own to defect to other states, he says.

MISSISSIPPI

Students in: 5,010 Students out: 2,247

Mississippi holds onto 93 percent of its students, the highest percentage in the country, partly because the median income for a family of four is $46,570, and many can’t afford to leave. Fifteen community colleges and eight public universities around the state offer rock bottom tuition ($4,110 at Ole Miss) and live-at-home opportunities, and educate about 70 percent of resident students.

NEW JERSEY

Students in: 5,624 Students out: 32,208

Geography may be responsible for the sound of students being sucked out of New Jersey, in the largest outflow in the country. With hundreds of colleges on its fringes, out-of-state institutions can be closer than in-state ones. The University of Delaware captures most of New Jersey’s departing high school seniors, followed by New York University, Drexel, Penn State and Boston University. Not everyone is alarmed. ”A lot of people don’t feel it’s a major problem because we are among the highest in the nation in the number of bachelor’s degrees” held by residents, explains Jeanne M. Oswald, deputy executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education. ”It’s not as if we don’t have a highly educated workforce,” she says, noting that there’s no shortage of graduates wanting to live and work in New Jersey or commute to Philadelphia or New York. All this might be just as well considering that the state university system is bursting at the seams. Last year, about 20,000 students applied for 10,000 slots at New Jersey’s public colleges. Montclair State University and William Paterson University have had to house students in motels. The State Senate is considering a $2.7 billion bond initiative to finance expansion at both public and private colleges.

NEW YORK

Students in: 36,633 Students out: 30,816

In the 1990’s, two factors helped New York outstrip Massachusetts as the state that attracts the most out-of-state students. ”’Sex and the City’ and ‘Seinfeld’ basically said that if you’re not in New York City, you’re nowhere,” says Abraham M. Lackman, president of the state’s Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. And Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s cleanup efforts emboldened college-seekers. ”People started to look at New York as an out-of-state destination,” Mr. Lackman says, ”and when they went to the Barron’s guide, they discovered the Hamiltons, the Colgates, the Marists.” New York’s 147 private colleges absorb most of the surge, awarding 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the state and about 70 percent of all master’s and doctorates.

NORTH CAROLINA

Students in: 16,716 Students out: 6,856

Local colleges with national recognition like Duke and Wake Forest draw out-of-staters. Cheap public tuition–$4,600 a year for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—keeps North Carolinians home. ”Many states have provisions in their constitutions that say that tuition should be as close to free as possible,” says Travis Reindl, director for state policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. ”Nobody takes it seriously anymore except North Carolina.”

OHIO

Students in: 14,238 Students out: 15,458

Turn-offs to would-be Ohio students: steadily increasing out-of-state rates ($19,018 for its flagship university) and Ohio’s image as an old economy state struggling to find its way in the 21st century (read: a poor location to begin a career). Some 8,000 fewer out-of-state students enrolled in 2004 than in 2000. Yet 87 percent of residents stay for college because, says Darrell Glenn, director of performance reporting for the Ohio Board of Regents, ”we’re a big state, and you don’t have to leave to see something different.” Internal enrollment is actually increasing slightly as two-year colleges grow and Ohio State improves its academic reputation.

PENNSYLVANIA

Students in: 31,880 Students out: 19,034

This popular state has something for everyone: 102 private colleges (elite ones like the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore, or mid-tier liberal arts cocoons like Allegheny College and Ursinus College), 19 state colleges, 14 community colleges and 16 theological seminaries.

TEXAS

Students in: 17,624 Students out: 19,081

Out-of-state enrollment is down in a big way: 38 percent fewer first-timers in 2004 than in 2000. They may have been deterred by tuition increases of almost $7,000 at flagship campuses, thanks to budget cuts and legislation in 2003 that made public colleges free to set their own prices. More Texans are leaving, too. Graduates in the top 10 percent of their high school class get first dibs at state schools. That means less room for strong students from good schools who rank lower—or at least the perception that their chances are diminished.

VERMONT

Students in: 4,336 Students out: 2,849

With about half of all Vermonters originally from somewhere else, locals think nationally when it comes to selecting a college: 58 percent go out of state. How does under-populated Vermont lure replacements? ”Skiing is one thing,” says Donald R. Vickers, president of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation.

Read this article at the New York Times.

(The New York Times, 30 December 2009)

THE REALITY

If you’ve written a few five-figure tuition checks or taken on 10 years’ of debt, you probably think you’re paying to be taught by full-time professors. But it’s entirely possible that most of your teachers are freelancers.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”

THE PROBLEM

While many adjuncts are talented teachers with the same degrees as tenured professors, they’re treated as second-class citizens on most campuses, and that affects students.

It’s sometimes harder to track down adjuncts outside of class, because they rarely have offices or even their own departmental mailboxes.

Many patch together jobs at different colleges to make ends meet, and with commuting, there’s less time to confer with students or prepare for class. It’s not unusual for adjuncts to be hired at the last minute to teach courses they’ve never taught. And with no job security, they may consider it advantageous to tailor classes for student approval.

HOW TO

Colleges tend to play down the increasingly central role of adjuncts. This fall, the American Federation of Teachers complained that some top-ranked universities exaggerated the percentage of full-time faculty to U.S. News & World Report for its rankings. U.S. News declined to investigate.

Another source is the “Compare Higher Education Institutions” search tool at A.F.T.’s Higher Education Data Center (highereddata.aft.org). These are the stats that colleges report to the federal government.

Ask admissions officers point-blank: what percentage of classes and discussion sections are taught by part-timers and graduate assistants, and are they required to hold office hours?

For entry-level classes — the ones tenured faculty famously don’t want to teach — the squeaky wheel often gets a full-time professor, says Harlan Cohen, author of “The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College.” “If you’re not thrilled with your adjunct professor,” he says, “go to the head of the department and see what options are available. They may put you in a different section.”

CAVEATS

If you take a strict anti-adjunct stance, you may miss out on some star instructors — Barack Obama taught a seminar on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School as an adjunct. Professoring part-time is a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.

“Before making assumptions that an adjunct is bad, Google them,” Mr. Cohen says. “You may find that real estate teacher is one step removed from Donald Trump’s V.P. on LinkedIn, and these are the types of people you want to meet.”

Read this article at the New York Times.

(The New York Times, 15 April 2011)

ABOUT a third of students change campuses on their way to a degree, but it’s often a bumpier ride than they expect.

Most application deadlines for transfer students are in March or April, and some as late as summer — July 1 for the University of Albany, for example. Applicants won’t find out if they’ve won a place until the dust settles on returning students, usually mid-May or later.

That puts transfers behind the curve of returning students, who have already registered for the most popular classes or populated the best rooms in the spring housing lottery.

How can you avoid feeling as if you’re last in line when you change schools?

FINANCIAL AID: DON’T GET GYPPED

Twenty-three percent of colleges don’t provide merit aid for transfer students, according to a 2010 report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Those that do often give them less — especially if the transferring is in January, when coffers tend to be depleted. And colleges that pledge to meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for freshmen don’t always make the same assurances to transfer applicants. In fact, there’s a greater chance that needing aid as a transfer will influence whether a college admits you. That’s the case at Brown and Wesleyan, even though they are need-blind when considering freshmen.

The picture isn’t grim across the board, though: there are universities — Smith College and Syracuse University are two — that commit to providing transfer students with equal funds. Syracuse, a private university with up to 15 percent of undergraduates having made a switch, considers itself transfer friendly. In addition to articulation agreements it has with community colleges to ease the transition, the university in November signed dual admission agreements with Onondaga Community College in Syracuse and Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta, its state’s largest public two-year institution.

Such “2+2 programs” are a growing trend: freshmen who want to start at a two-year college — either because of money or academic concerns — are guaranteed admission to the four-year institution as juniors if they maintain certain grades. And as part of those agreements, Syracuse will estimate aid packages for potential transfers two years in advance.

Donald A. Saleh, vice president for enrollment management at Syracuse, says it doesn’t hurt for other applicants to ask for a similarly detailed estimate before applying: “If a student were to approach us and ask us for help in understanding their financial aid, we would be ready to do the same thing for them.”

Public institutions inundated by applications may not be so accommodating. In these cases, transfers won’t learn what financial aid they will get until they’ve been accepted, which might not be until summer.

The City University of New York, for example, saw 27,800 transfer applications for fall 2010, almost 24 percent more than the year before. By the time the admissions office had processed its Feb. 1 priority deadline applications, CUNY’s senior colleges were at capacity. Forty percent of transfer applications arrived after that deadline, and qualified students were, atypically, waitlisted. Some weren’t admitted until two weeks before classes started, in August.

Apply early and to more than one place. “You need to build choices for yourself,” Mr. Saleh says. “If you apply to four colleges and get into three, you can go for the best fit academically, socially and financially.”

CREDITS: MAKE THEM COUNT

A big appeal of transferring is getting to take classes not available at your current college. But transfer students can find themselves toiling at required courses instead because courses already taken don’t match up with the academic program at the campus they want to go to.

“You’ve got to keep your eye on what is transferable and what requirements are being covered by the courses you’ve already taken,” says Eric J. Furda, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re coming in absolutely cold on foreign language, right there you’re going to have to take four classes at Penn because we have a foreign language requirement.”

Very often, credits at one institution don’t apply toward a major or fulfill core requirements at another. Colleges won’t give the official word on what they will accept until they have an enrollment deposit in hand. Applicants can ask transfer admissions advisers for a sense of what additional work is needed to complete a particular major. If facing too many required courses, consider somewhere else.

“We have conversations with prospective students all the time,” says Curtis Rodgers, dean of enrollment management at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, for nontraditional-age students. “Often the problems that transfer students face have to do with not having reviewed their options.”

A community college that has an articulation agreement with a state university spells out what courses count for its degree. Still, study the fine print.

Brianne Giger, an acting major who recently transferred to the University of Arizona, took a computer science class because it fulfilled a math requirement at her community college. “The book was $300, and it was really hard,” she says. “As soon as I got here, they told me it was only going to count as an elective.”

Articulation agreements change and are confusing enough that even advisers are known to give students misinformation, says Peter Riley Bahr, an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. So, he urges, always get a second opinion on whether your course schedule puts you on track to transfer into the program you want.

“Talk to your community college counselor,” he says, “then call the four-year institution you want to transfer to and speak with an adviser there as well.”

HOUSING: DIG HARD FOR NEW DIGS

Many universities — the University of Vermont and the University of Pittsburgh, for example — guarantee on-campus housing for upperclassmen but not for transfers. Or transfers end up in less desirable dorms. Penn State automatically places students from other universities in “supplemental housing,” one oversize room for four to eight students.

When you must live off-campus, go to the transfer orientation. Flagship publics that bring in a thousand or more transfer students a year typically schedule several orientations throughout the summer. For the most housing choices, “attend the earliest orientation you can,” says Eva Rivas, executive director of the Transfer, Re-entry and Student Parent Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Landlords will publicize their buildings through the transfer center, and transfer counselors and other students can let you know how close to campus different places are.”

ACCLIMATION: ENGAGE

Once on campus, be prepared to advocate for the experience you want.

“When you’re a transfer student, everyone in your grade is feeling settled in,” says Elizabeth Daly, director of orientation and parent programs at Northwestern University. “So you have to be the kind of person who reaches out and introduces yourself.”

Becky Keith transferred to the University of Virginia from Georgetown University in 2008, but her new life didn’t fall into place instantly. Virginia officials told Ms. Keith, a biochemistry major aiming for med school, that she would have to take a first-year biology lab class even though she had already taken one. (At Georgetown, Intro to Bio includes labs; at Virginia, it’s two separate courses.)

She felt invisible in Virginia’s large science classes. And she ended up in a dorm with five other transfers that was “not the best experience,” she says, because it didn’t help her meet other students.

But she made the effort. She brought her Georgetown biology syllabus to the dean’s office and won credit for the labs she had taken there. She visited professors during office hours, and met new friends volunteering with an emergency medical technician unit.

This year, she’s living in a dorm that mixes transfers and returning students, a new housing setup Virginia is trying. Now, she says, “I’ve found my niche.”

Read this article at the New York Times.

(The New York Times, 07 February 2014)

CONGRATULATIONS. You’ve been accepted to more than one college. Now comes the hard part: deciding which to go to. Make a mistake and you could be repeating the whole application process again next year — to transfer out.

Let’s say the cost is similar. How to choose between two good options?

Look to the Future

Remember this, says David Montesano, founder of the consulting company College Match: “College is just a tool to help you achieve your life goals.”

If your goal is to make money, don’t assume the more prestigious the institution, the more earnings. Equally smart students make about the same whether they attend a top school or not, according to the economists Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger. But Hispanic, black and low-income students, they found, can expect to earn more if they graduate from an elite school. Data at Payscale.com can give you a sense of what graduates of individual colleges earn.

If your goal is grad school, investigate which colleges produce healthy numbers of master’s and doctoral students. Some colleges post comparative lists on their sites crunched from federal surveys. The National Science Foundation also lists feeder schools for science and engineering Ph.D.’s. The percentage from Reed College, by the way, is higher than from Princeton or Harvard.

Steer Clear of Colleges in Crisis

Reading student newspapers online will tell you whether students approve of how officials respond to problems, like hazing or sexual assault. Are students protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline or problems with the school itself, like too many adjunct teachers or disappearing services? And pay attention to public funding of state schools. Budget cuts can increase class size and make it harder to get the courses you need to finish your degree in four years.

Reviews on websites like unigo.com, collegeprowler.com and studentsreview.com can give you a sense of what each school’s students complain about ­ — ­at Cornell, for example, students grouse about being graded on a curve, while Rutgers students bemoan feeling like a number. But the best way to determine the weak points of a particular school is to ask students or recent alumni.

Go Where You’ll Shine

“One of the most important things a person can get out of college is confidence based on success,” says Jane K. Klemmer, an educational consultant in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. Look for a place where the learning environment and social scene will give you the most opportunities to succeed, she says. “If there are a lot of fancy cars in the parking lot that are going to make you feel poorer and somehow inferior, that could be a problem.”

Matthew Baker of Riley Baker Educational Consulting suggests that you gauge whether you will fit in by asking, “Would I want to hang out with these people on weekends?”

School traditions might also indicate where you belong. Take Colgate University and Grinnell College, two rural liberal arts colleges on pretty campuses that accept students with similar SAT scores and grades. Colgate students begin and end their college careers with a torchlight procession to a bonfire where they sing the school song. A big tradition at Grinnell is the annual Mary B. James cross-dressing ball. It should be no surprise that Colgate is beloved by preppy scholar-athletes while Grinnell is a haven for hipsters who discuss Derrida into the wee hours.

Some relish a challenge. Daniel Surman, a political science student active in Republican politics, ended up at Macalester College, which had offered him the most financial aid. But Macalester topped the Princeton Review’s list of most liberal colleges in 2011. “I was intrigued by the idea of being the iconoclast in the class,” says Mr. Surman. “Being at Macalester, I’ve definitely gotten better at defending my views.”

And he started a student group. Membership: 5 to 15 Republicans.

Read this article at the New York Times.