Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

By SARA LIPKA

A new survey finds that the student experience varies less among institutions than it does for individuals on the same campus

Viewbooks, rankings, and accountability measures cast colleges as distinctive and readily comparable. But the average student experience doesn't differ that markedly among institutions, says this year's National Survey of Student Engagement. Rather, the survey found, more than 90 percent of the variation in educational quality occurs among individual students on