Jeff Selingo argues the idea of a single dream school is a myth. There's no perfect college that fits everyone. Instead, families should recognize multiple viable options exist and focus on understanding their actual priorities rather than chasing an ideal.
As you know, I've argued that trade offs aren't a negative. They're actually a great way to really understand your priorities when you can't have it all, which is the case most of the time. But then you talk about how you were super intrigued by the New York Times personalization, if you will, ranking system that they came out with, and you could personalize around your priorities, but you make the point that it's perhaps not as useful as you had hoped because a lot of people actually don't know what their priorities actually are, likely because they haven't untangled their true why for college from a lot of the noise and social proof and herd mentality at play. Or maybe it's because you just don't know until you're a little bit later in the timeline, like right against the choosing process itself. But I guess given all of that insight, how do you recommend families actually make these trade offs as they wrestle through the college? Like, how do you figure out what you're going to do? Well.
And I think this gets back to the title of the book, right? We think there's a single dream school. And that's not the purpose of the book, as I explained in the introduction. Right. Dream school is not a single entity. It's not a type of school. And what I come to realize in this process, especially in trying to put together that dream school list at the end, is there is no perfect choice.
