Last week, I wrote about why families are turning down liberal arts college acceptances, and what I think they’re getting wrong. The short version: the seminar of fifteen where the professor knows your name is a completely different environment than the 300-person lecture, and families are choosing the latter on the basis of optics rather than fit. My friend Brian, who went to Vassar and has the quiet confidence of someone who made the right call, has been saying some version of this for twenty years.
This week, The Atlantic published a piece by Rose Horowitch that adds the economic research to what I was arguing on intuition. And because it landed right after one of the strongest admissions cycles KFT has ever had, I want to sit with it a little longer than I usually would.
First, the results, because they deserve to be named.
This cycle, KFT students received acceptances to Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Michigan, among others. Those are the headline names, and I won’t pretend they’re not worth celebrating. But what I want to say about them is less about the schools and more about the students, because the list doesn’t capture what actually happened.
These are kids I’ve watched work. Not for a few months before a test, but across years. Through score plateaus and disappointing practice tests. Through the particular discouragement of a student who is genuinely capable but not yet performing at the level they know they can reach. Through the moment something clicks and suddenly it does. Our Ivy Day acceptances to Penn, Harvard, and Princeton alone represent relationships spanning multiple years and test cycles. The students who got into those schools didn’t just get lucky on a good testing day. They built something, and I had a close view of it.
That’s what KFT actually does. Not test prep in the transactional sense, not a score bump before a deadline. Sustained, relationship-based academic support that compounds over time. This cycle’s results are the clearest version of that I’ve seen.
Now, the Atlantic piece.
Horowitch reports on a growing body of economic research trying to isolate what elite college attendance actually does for future income. The answer is more specific than most families assume. It’s not the credential or the alumni network in the abstract or even the instruction. It’s sustained proximity to other highly driven, ambitious people. The peer effect, meaning who you sit next to, who challenges your argument in seminar, who holds themselves to a standard you start to internalize, shapes professional trajectories in ways that persist for decades. The diploma opens the door. The room changes you.
This is why the peer effect argument matters for how families build college lists, not just for how they think about Ivies.
If concentrated time with exceptional people is the actual product, if that’s what elite institutions are selling and what the research suggests is doing the most work on future outcomes, then the relevant question is which schools optimize for that most effectively. The answer is not always the school with the biggest name.
A highly selective liberal arts college with 2,000 students is structurally different from a research university that admitted the same percentage of applicants across twelve schools within the university. The selectivity numbers can look identical on a spreadsheet. The rooms are not the same. At Williams or Amherst or Vassar, the peer group is dense and undiluted in a way that large campuses can’t replicate. There’s no anonymity in a seminar of twelve. The faculty member knows what you argued last week. The student next to you chose to be there, specifically, for reasons that probably have something to do with wanting that conversation. That calibration to a different sense of what’s possible, which is what the economists are actually measuring, happens at a concentration that a 300-person lecture section can’t produce.
I wrote in the earlier piece about two of our students who were admitted to Williams and Wesleyan and chose to go elsewhere. I understand the reasoning. Seventeen-year-olds and their parents are navigating enormous pressure, and the calculus that makes Penn or Cornell feel like the safer bet is not irrational. It’s a response to a real set of cultural signals. But the research is a useful pressure test. If what you’re actually chasing is the peer effect, it’s worth honestly asking whether the school with the better-known name is the one that delivers it most directly.
One more thing about this cycle’s results: I don’t think the Ivy acceptances and the liberal arts argument are in tension.
The students who got into Penn, Harvard, and Princeton are going to experience exactly the peer effect Horowitch’s economists are describing. Those schools are genuinely exceptional environments, and the students who earned those spots through years of real work are ready for them. That’s worth being proud of.
But the students who go to Williams or Wesleyan or Vassar this fall aren’t having a lesser version of that experience. They’re getting a different delivery of the same thing: a room full of people who chose to be there, with faculty whose only job is to teach them, in an environment small enough that no one disappears. The peer effect operates in a Harvard seminar and a Williams one. The research doesn’t distinguish between them on that dimension.
What it does distinguish is the presence or absence of the effect. For families who dismiss liberal arts colleges before they’ve seriously considered them, the risk isn’t choosing wrong between two good options. It’s optimizing for a signal instead of the thing the signal is supposed to represent.
The goal was always the room.
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