Let’s talk about (college) fit

While procrastinating on work, I perused some dark corners of the internet and came across a BuzzFeed personality quiz promising me to “Reveal The College You Were Literally Born To Attend,” so obviously I had no choice but to slip into the mindset of my 17-year-old self and find out. I was a bit annoyed to find out that I’m a perfect fit for NYU, since I wasted all of those years at Wellesley, Cambridge and Columbia, but I digress. What jumped out to me were the kinds of questions the quiz asked: What kind of weather I like, what I like to do on a Friday night, whether I’m an introvert or an extrovert. The quiz assumed that matching my preferences with a university was the same thing as understanding where I would thrive.

There is perhaps no more overused word in the college admissions game than “fit.” But we use it to mean two quite different things. The first is a student’s perceived likelihood of being accepted by a particular university (think: safety, match, reach). Am I enough of a fit for this university to accept me? Am I “good” enough? We’ll call these admissions fit. The second turns the question around: Is this university enough of a fit for me to actually go there? We’ll call this educational fit. Whether consciously or not, we often conflate the two. That’s a problem, because a university can be an excellent admissions fit and a terrible educational fit.

The internet can be a dark place. Image credit: BuzzFeed

Even when we do mean educational fit, we tend to assess it using surprisingly superficial criteria: location (rural, suburban, urban), size, cost, academic offerings. None of these are irrelevant (cost, in particular, is extremely relevant). But on their own, they don't answer the fundamental question: Will I thrive there—personally, academically, socially? Will I be happy there?

But most students don’t even go that far. Most get stuck in the other kind of “fit,” namely: Am I likely to be admitted by this university? Putting this question first often leads to students pretzeling themselves into the kind of student we imagine a certain university might want to admit, inadvertently putting selectivity and marketing above all else, most of all their own well-being.

In my experience, there is an irony here: students who answer the second question truthfully and thoughtfully often end up presenting stronger applications. Students who understand where they will thrive present self-awareness, authentic motivation, informed interest, and maturity. They demonstrate that they have delved beyond glossy pamphlets and social media shots of Georgian architecture and New England foliage to figure out why they, specifically, would thrive in this particular learning community.

If “fit” isn't just Can I get in?, and it isn't adequately captured by big/small, city/country, warm/cold, what actually predicts whether a student will thrive in a particular educational environment?

To me, “good fit” isn’t an observable characteristic of a university. It's a relationship between a particular student and a particular environment. Before we can identify that relationship, though, we need to decide what we mean by thriving.

Academic achievement is obviously part of the picture, but it isn’t synonymous for a successful college experience as a whole. High-achieving students do not automatically have high well-being, and lower-achieving students don't necessarily have low well-being, as a large meta-analysis found. Research on the effects of college writ large similarly suggests that higher education shapes students across multiple dimensions, not only academically, but intellectually, socially and psychologically.

In this essay, then, I use thriving as an intentionally complex term: doing reasonably well academically and developing intellectually, but also experiencing psychological well-being, engaging meaningfully with one’s educational journey and community, building meaningful relationships, and wanting and being able to persist toward one’s goals.

What conditions, then, make thriving more likely?

1) Engagement

One of the clearest findings in the higher-education literature is that what students do once they arrive on campus matters enormously. On their own, the caliber of a university’s faculty, the quality of its programmes, and the breadth of resources offered tell us little about an individual student’s expected outcomes. They only become meaningful if a student actually participates in learning and makes use of the opportunities on offer. From the perspective of fit, then, the important question isn't simply What does this university offer? but Is this an environment in which this particular student is likely to engage?

Ask yourself: When have you been most engaged in learning—not necessarily when you received your best grades, but when you found yourself wanting to participate, think, read, discuss, experiment, or keep working? What was it about that environment that drew you in?

2) Belonging and social connection

Meaningful human relationships matter; connection matters; community matters. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis found that belonging was positively associated with both academic outcomes and, even more strongly, student well-being. In other words, asking whether a student is likely to feel accepted, valued and connected within a particular learning community may tell us considerably more about their potential to thrive than whether they prefer a university with 5,000 students or 15,000.

Ask yourself: What kinds of communities have made you feel that you belong in the past? What about these communities produced that feeling?

And then size might become relevant. If you discover that close, recurring interactions are important to your sense of belonging, certain structural characteristics of a university suddenly matter. Size isn't itself fit; it's potentially one environmental feature that helps produce the conditions you need. Don't mistake the proxy for the thing you're actually looking for.

3) Autonomy and competence

Self-determination theory identifies autonomy (the experience of acting from genuine choice rather than external pressure) and competence (the sense that we can successfully take on meaningful challenges) as fundamental psychological needs. Research applying these ideas to higher education has found that students whose reasons for attending college were associated with autonomy and competence tended to have higher GPAs and stronger intentions to persist.

For educational fit, then, the question is whether its curriculum, expectations and opportunities allow this particular student to pursue goals that feel genuinely their own while developing a sense that they can meet increasingly difficult challenges.

Furthermore: Attending a university simply because it’s prestigious, or because it’s where your parents want you to go, is not enough. The desire to be there and to do the work it will ask of you has to become your own.

Ask yourself: When do you feel most in charge of your own learning? What makes you want to work hard at something even when nobody is making you do it? What about learning makes you genuinely excited?

4) Challenge and support

Some students thrive in discussion-heavy seminars; others do their best thinking independently. Some flourish with considerable freedom, while others benefit from structure and frequent feedback. Some are energized by an intensely demanding academic environment; others struggle to engage when the gap between what is expected of them and what they are prepared to do becomes too great.

This raises an uncomfortable question in a culture that tends to treat academic rigor as an unqualified good: Can a university be too challenging for a particular student? There is a difference between being stretched and being perpetually outmatched.

I experienced this rather painfully in graduate school. I entered quantitative methods courses without enough of the mathematical foundation some of my classmates already had. More rigor, in that particular context, did not produce more learning; I spent so much energy trying to catch up that I rarely reached the point where I could become genuinely engaged with the material. There was no meaningful support offered—or at least not in a way that felt accessible to me at the time.

Ask yourself: When have you done your best learning? What was it about the way you were taught, challenged and supported that made you want to engage?

Once you know the answers to questions like these, traditional college-search criteria become much more useful. Class size matters if discussion and faculty interaction matter to you. Curriculum structure matters if you know how much independence you need. Academic-support systems matter if you know how and when you tend to struggle.

The point isn't to stop looking at the characteristics of universities. It's to understand why those characteristics matter to you.

So instead of beginning with Do I want urban or rural? Big or small?, start somewhere else:

What conditions allow me to do my best work?
When have I felt most engaged in learning?
What makes me feel that I belong in a community?
How much structure and support do I need?
What kind of challenge motivates rather than overwhelms me?
What kinds of relationships with teachers and peers help me grow?

Then go looking for the universities that might provide them.