To Whom Does Attending a Prestigious College Really Matter?

Jeff Selingo’s new book “Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You” is being released today, September 9, 2025. For those of you who don’t know Jeff (although I think most of you do), he is an insightful and sought after author, speaker, and prognosticator on all things related to higher education, but particularly issues of college choice. I’ve known Jeff for many years, and we’ve worked on several projects together during that time. One such project is related to this new book.

When he was writing the book, Jeff wanted to gather information from parents that would inform his thinking, particularly on how parents viewed so called “prestigious” colleges. He came to me, and after some discussion we created a survey that would get at some of the questions he had. In his book, and in talks coming up to its release, Jeff wanted to highlight one result in particular that he thought would be useful for parents of students making college-choice decisions.

When creating surveys, I’m particularly drawn towards questions that are comparative. In this case, comparing what parents though versus what they perceived their child though versus what they believed they community though. This is one way to uncover misperceptions that people have,

In his book Jeff describes how we asked parents (in this case, 1,116 parents across the United States) how important they thought it was to parents in their community that their child attend a prestigious college. Almost 2 out of 3 (61%) parents thought that other parents in their community felt it was “extremely” or “very” important that their child attends a prestigious college. But when asked how important it was to them that their child attend a prestigious college, only 16% personally thought it was important.

So, in reality, only 16% of parents think attending a presitigious college was really important, because that IS the community. It’s all those parents who gave us their personal view. But they vastly misunderstand the importance that other parents assign to prestige.

This is a remarkable mismatch. And unfortunately, misperceptions can drive behavior.

Jeff talks about how even though parents, almost overwhelmingly, do not feel it is very important that their child attend a “prestigious” college, there is societal pressure where these same parents think that many parents in their community feel the opposite: that they do need to send their child to such a college. In fact, when we looked at factors that parents thought were important (a future blog), “prestige” was, rightfully, way down the list of things that matter.

Oh, and, by the way, only 27% of these parents thought that prestige of a college mattered to their children applying to college.

So, the message that I, and Jeff, and others have been saying seems to be sinking in to parents and students looking at colleges. Prestige doesn’t really matter. Some parents think that chasing the Ivy League is the most important thing for their child. But more and more parents are looking beyond these brands and their price tags and focusing on other factors that they think are more important to prepare their child for the future.