Deciding which college to attend is a long process. You make a lot of decisions, narrowing down the choices and finally apply to a handful of schools. Of those schools, you may be accepted to a few and will need to make a final choice. Often, it boils down to just two schools.

At that point, a student may think that it’s impossible to decide between the final options. The reason for this isn’t because one school is "right" and the other is "wrong". Instead, it is because the student knows that the decision is going to impact the rest of her life. The educational, professional and social opportunities that the student will experience in the upcoming years will take her on a particular path.

The reason that making this decision is so difficult is because the student can’t see into the future as to what this path may be. If the student could say, "okay, college A will allow me to meet these friends and get this job and college B will take me to this other set of friends and jobs" then it would be easy to decide which one was the right choice. Since we don’t have that crystal ball, we have to guess as to which school is the right one.

The answer is to use a combination of intuition and rational decision-making to select that ultimate school. You’ll never know for sure what might have happened if you chose differently, but you’ll know as time goes on whether you’re happy with the choice you made.