Your major is just the starting point

Why a college list built on a major isn’t finished

In nearly every Family Strategy Session, the families come to me with the major set and a list of five to ten schools built around it.

The first thing I do is talk about that list.

Part of that is the essay coach in me. I get that no student wants to write one paragraph, much less an entire supplemental essay for the wrong school. So we want their college list as close to right as possible from the start.

But I've also learned that a list is fluid, even when a family initially sounds certain about their plan.

I don't pull any schools off it. (Though I'm honest about why one might be a poor fit, if they're open to hearing it.) And almost every time, I hand back a few more colleges for them to consider.

A list built on the major alone is a great place to start. But it’s not finished.

Let me show you what I mean.

Start with internships

When a student tells me their major, my next question is what they actually want to do with it after college.

Once we've got a little clarity, I consider regions. Certain fields cluster in certain places (banking in NYC + Charlotte, tech in the Bay Area, film in LA), and a school out in the middle of a cornfield, however strong its program, makes it more challenging for students to secure key internships. They just decide to go home for the summer, while still paying for their now-vacant apartment.

Alongside overall fit, I look for schools close to where their best internships might be — and that's often how I surface schools the family never would have found on their own.

So, for the student eyeing international business, I bring up SKEMA — a prestigious school almost no family has heard of, with an American campus in the Raleigh area, a built-in year or two abroad (always in English, always in business), and great internships nearby.

When Ellie told me she wanted law, I asked what kind. Animal rights, she said. So we found the top animal-rights firms in the country and looked for schools nearby — places where she could easily intern, at the kind of place she might actually want to work one day.

And when a teen has an interest in medicine, I pull up Rice — sitting right across from the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world. [Take the 90-second tour →]

Look at it from the employer's side. Eight in ten employers say internships are their highest-ROI way to hire. They aren't finding your teen at a campus job fair. And schools differ wildly in helping students land them: around 90% of Penn State students do an internship; at City College of New York, it's under 40%.

Future-proof the college list

My favorite supplemental essay is called the “Why Us” essay. It's really a research project, and when done right, the student falls in love with the school and understands, at a much deeper level, why it's a match for them. That research turns up things looking at the major alone never would.

Like who's teaching their courses. RateMyProfessor.com or Reddit will hand you the inside story a brochure never will. And great professors can open future doors, spark real joy for the subject, and become a mentor for years to come.

Size is also its own kind of insurance. The NCES finds about 1-in-3 students change their major at least once, and 1-in-10 change it twice or more (which, we covered in depth in our last essay on majors). At a big school, a change of major is easy — you shift and lose almost nothing. At a small one, it can mean a full transfer, and sometimes a fifth or sixth year of tuition and time.

Beyond academics: location, distance, and daily life

Some of the best fit considerations have nothing to do with the major at all.

Lola's family ran a French patisserie in southwest Florida, and she told me straight out she was a total foodie. Her research leaned hard on the food scene around each campus. She wanted real, good food, not a ring of fast-food chains.

And then there's distance. My oldest daughter wanted so badly to go away for school, and she chose Utah State. At the start of semester one, we told her: we won't see you until Christmas. And at Christmas, it was: we'll see you this summer.

For some families, that sort of arrangement just doesn't work, and it belongs in the conversation about where every bit as much as the major does.

The Three Fits behind every college list

Darragh is the reason my college-list AI guide exists (more on it later). When we first talked, he wasn't sure about what colleges interested him — so we built the process that became that guide, just to get his "big three" clear:

To study exercise science, with room for a minor like entrepreneurship because he planned to open his own gym someday.
A metro big enough for a nonstop flight home to Vermont.
Skiing in the winter and hiking the rest of the year.

From there, we researched schools against those three and found a Denver school with strong exercise science and entrepreneurship programs, within an hour of the ski slopes.

On his big three, the college delivered.

The one thing it didn't have, but which he didn't realize until freshman year, was rigor. But that had never been on Darragh's list, though it might well have been on his mom's, since she knew how robust his high school education was.

And that's what building a college list really comes down to: your teen has a big three, and so do you. Your teen might lead with a location by the shore and opportunity to play club volleyball. You might lead with the price tag and whether the work will actually stretch them. Neither list is better, but a list built on only one of them is only half a list.

Every college list balances three fits — academic, financial, and family. Picture each one as a slider, running from flexible to firm:

Academic fit — major, local internships, academic rigor
Financial fit — tuition, housing & fees, scholarships & merit, your budget
Family fit — location, distance & travel, your family's must-haves

Maybe a strong major is crucial to your family, and the location is more flexible. Maybe the price ceiling is non-negotiable, and the size of the school has more wiggle room.

You and your teen won't rate each fit in the same way. So the work isn't finding a school that wins all three — it's getting everyone's non-negotiables on the table, yours and theirs, and deciding together which fit (or fits) should lead.

I have a student right now who isn't thrilled with the social scene at his school. No D1 football, but he's there anyway, and glad of it, because the major and big-city location are strong enough to launch his whole career. Academics and access to internships were the non-negotiables. The social scene was the give. (Meanwhile, for the family down the street, the firm one might be the price, an Orthodox community, or a direct-admit medical school program. Same three fits, weighed uniquely, based on each family.)

A college list is a working hypothesis — your family's best current guess at the arrangement that truly serves both your teen's needs and your own. And when new information shows up, such as an unexpected move or an employment change, the current working hypothesis gets updated.

Starting with the major is a fine start. It's just one fit of three — and all deserve consideration from both your perspective and that of your teen.

So let's sort it into two piles: what to stop giving weight to, and what actually matters as you build — and keep tending — that list.

WHAT DOESN’T MATTERS

► The rankings

Columbia got sued after falsifying the data it fed U.S. News. They got caught, but it’s a window into how much the numbers get gamed. (Sadly, since so many families trust them — even without knowing what they're based on — it’s worth the risk to an institution.)

Same with the shiny "98% of our graduates are employed" claim. Dig in, and most of those are built on an email survey that fewer than 50% of students answer — and plenty of schools can't even locate half their alumni. Guess which half tends to write back? Don't let a ranking pick your teen's school.

► Promises of support

Study abroad, co-ops, services for learning differences — schools love to promise them. But most study abroad programs aren't even run by the school; they're subcontracted to companies that work nationwide. And nearly everything else has to be driven by the student. The school won't chase it down for them, and you won't be in the dorm to make it happen.

A brilliant student of mine with some learning differences chose computer engineering at RIT over his in-state options, largely for the promised co-op and internship support. The school talked big, but the support wasn't there for him, and he struggled. He finally left and transferred to a much more affordable school closer to home.

Promising isn't the same as delivering.

► The six-year graduation rate

Most schools publish a six-year number. Go find the four-year one — the national average is about 43%. The gap isn't trivial: two extra years is two more years of tuition, and an overall education price tag that climbs 50% or more.

WHAT MATTERS

Here's the one guarantee on this path: there will be surprises. The major will change. Health concerns can arise. Your family might move cross-country (and suddenly, the in-state tuition won't be in-state anymore).

So hold the list loosely. Set your intention on being flexible and supportive through whatever twists come — that foundation is worth more than some “perfect list.”

One of those twists can come in late fall of senior year. A student gets everything submitted during early season, then stumbles onto a program in November or December and applies to one more school in the regular round. And sometimes that one becomes the top choice. Leave room for it, whatever “it” may be.

The goal is never a perfect, final list. It's a list with enough give in it — so that when a plot twist arrives, you can adjust as gracefully as possible.

Your move this week

Working with the three fits is exactly why I built Build Your College List with AI — my most popular free guide, which I've just updated.

If you've never used AI before, I walk you through getting started (free, in minutes, step by step). Then I hand you 57 elements you might weigh in a college search, so you're not staring at a blank page wondering where to start — I just lay out the whole territory so nothing important slips past. At the end, I show you why running this search with AI is one of the smartest moves you can make: you can keep updating it all season long. Oh, and I'll point you to a brand-new Google tool for exploring a major even further.

GRAB THE FREE GUIDE - NO EMAIL REQUIRED

Then take 20 minutes and run the first prompt together. Let your teen drive — really drive. (And don't be surprised if they love impressing you with their tech savvy.) But ride along with your own list: your non-negotiables go into the prompt too — the budget, the rigor, the distance you can live with.

The strongest list is the one that carries both your big threes.

This conversation is a low-risk place where your teen can practice clarifying their fits — and where you get to name yours out loud, together.

Nearly every real decision your teen will make from here is some version of this — a few things that matter, weighed against each other. The fits themselves will change; next time it might be money, friendship, and time.

This is a big part of growing up: not landing on the "right" answer — there usually isn't one — but seeing the choice isn't black and white, and getting clear on what you won't bend on. That's the skill.

And the college list is just the first place they get to practice it.