The book is a bid to reorient the college search, encouraging students and families to look beyond rankings for schools that genuinely satisfy a well-thought-out set of Selingo’s curated criteria. He blends data, interviews, and his own professional experience to present a list of colleges (at the back of the book), all the while emphasizing that success depends less on where you go than on how you go to college. For example, he highlights schools with strong student engagement, including internship assistance, skill development, and structured mentoring. He also notes with some nostalgia that college has shifted from being a time of exploration to being primarily considered as a springboard to a career.
Many of his observations align with what we see in our own work. We especially appreciated the data on how many students often cling to overly aspirational college lists filled with too many reach schools, a tendency fueled by overconfidence bias and grade inflation. One of the strengths of our business is the ability to help families course-correct earlier than they might otherwise. He also affirms our view that, despite the coming demographic cliff, top universities are unlikely to struggle. Rising cost of attendance, particularly for “donut hole” families (middle to upper-middle-class households), are leading more families to trade prestige for merit aid.
Beyond endowments, the author offers additional ways to assess a college’s financial health. Birmingham-Southern College serves as the opening example in Chapter 9, and his summary provided a fuller picture than we had previously known. We also learned that Moody’s Investors Service gives credit ratings to colleges. He cites that net revenue is falling at 36% of private colleges and 27% of public universities. Smaller private schools often rely on higher charges for room and board as an additional revenue stream, which explains why many require students to live on campus. Of course, heavy merit aid offerings can sometimes indicate financial instability. Public universities, he argues, enjoy an advantage in this area because state funding can serve as a stabilizing force. Persistent deficits and drawing on endowments for daily operations, by contrast, are red flags. On page 211, he even shows how to approximate net tuition revenue per student (an indication of financial health) using the Common Data Set.
Though perhaps a stretch to recommend to our families, Selingo suggests combing through LinkedIn data on college graduates by major to gauge job placement from a particular school. He also reminds readers that while technical degrees often yield higher starting salaries, those skills can lose relevance if not kept current, whereas liberal arts graduates often see steady, long-term salary growth, and are eventually able to catch. At various points, he seems reluctant to swallow the fact that the economic payoff of a bachelor’s degree still tends to be highest from very prestigious institutions.
Selingo argues in favor of internships and obtaining marketable skills, sometimes gained through certificate programs completed alongside a degree, as two of the most effective ways to maximize the career value of college. These points may sound obvious, but he provides good evidence to back them up.
We felt validated to see Santa Clara, Bentley University, Berry College, and Denison on his Hidden Values List. We were less impressed with his breakout regionals list (George Mason, Georgia Southern), but depending on where you live and plan to work, they could make sense. His Large Leaders list was pretty extensive and included colleges that routinely make MCA college lists, such as Clemson, Colorado State, Miami of Ohio, SMU, Kentucky, VA Tech, and Oklahoma.