Hi!

Lately I’ve been having the same conversation with a lot of families. Junior year is ramping up, list-building season is here, and the question I keep hearing is some version of: “Is this school good enough?”

Good enough by whose measure?

A study published in Harvard Business Review tracked 28,000 students from 294 universities across 79 countries and measured their actual job performance. The finding: university rank is a poor predictor of how well someone performs at work. Employers get a better return on investment by hiring the “right” student from a lower-ranked school than just “anyone” from a prestigious one.

Who’s the “right” student? One with technical skills, yes. But also cooperation, leadership, emotional intelligence, creativity. Motivation and work ethic - which showed no difference at all between students from top-ranked and lower-ranked schools - are traits that students from any educational background can develop and will ensure their success.

So what should we actually be optimizing for when putting the right list together?

College-level learning matters enormously. But what shapes your kid’s future most is what they did while they were there, and who they did it with. The peer environment - the culture of the place - is the variable a lot of families skip right over. By attending a college where they can easily develop close bonds of support with others who are both alike and different from them, your kid can truly level up on the skills that matter most to employers.

It's just how two sailors can train in the same waters with the same boat and come out completely different sailors depending on who’s in the fleet with them or who coaches them. Some sailors respond well to being pushed competitively. Some respond better to the social bonds and benefits of being on a team. College works exactly the same way.

“Selective” isn’t a monolith either. MIT and Dartmouth are both highly selective. MIT is labs-at-midnight intensity, deeply technical, collaborative in a build-things way. Dartmouth is outdoorsy, relationship-driven, has a tight alumni network and strong sense of school identity. Same "tier". Entirely different four years. Choosing the wrong culture for your kid is its own kind of mistake - one that doesn’t show up in any ranking.

The question worth asking isn’t “what’s the best school?” It’s “what environment is going to push my kid to become who they’re capable of being?”

If you want more on this - I did a free webinar on college admissions and sailing last week with coaches from the top high school and college programs in the US. It's live on SteveHuntSailing.com and you can use the code FIRSTMONTHFREE when you sign up and access it for no charge. Over 500 others found it a helpful watch, so go check it out!

Until next time...

Nikki