Dr. Dana Cummings, CFRE | May 2026
It’s graduation season in our house.
Tomorrow, our oldest child will walk across a stage and receive his high school diploma before heading off to DePauw University in the fall. As you might imagine, this season has me reflecting on all sorts of things—not only as a parent, but also as someone who has spent more than twenty years working in higher education.
And lately, one thought keeps surfacing for me:
Somewhere along the way, the college search process became extraordinarily high-stakes.
Over the past several years, I have watched friends, colleagues, and families pour incredible amounts of time, energy, emotion, and money into the search for the “perfect” college. Families fly all over the country visiting campuses. Students apply to 15 or 20 schools. Parents spend thousands of dollars on applications, travel, hotels, and consulting services—all in pursuit of finding the one place that is supposedly the exact right fit.
And honestly?
I think we may have overcomplicated this.
Now, to be clear, I say this as someone who deeply values higher education. I have devoted much of my professional life to colleges and universities, and I believe wholeheartedly in the transformational power of a great educational experience.
But I also believe something else:
There are many great schools.
And perhaps more importantly, there are many places where a student can thrive.
One phrase I have come back to often during this season is this:
“It’s not the decision you make, but what you make of the decision.”
That feels deeply true to me.
Yes, there are differences between large universities and small liberal arts colleges. Yes, some students flourish close to home while others crave adventure and distance. Of course those distinctions matter.
But I think we have unintentionally sold American families the idea that there is one singular “perfect” choice out there—and that if they do not identify it correctly, somehow their child’s future hangs in the balance.
I simply do not believe that is true.
Our son’s experience was unusually straightforward by today’s standards. When we lived on DePauw’s campus years ago, he decided—at about nine years old—that he wanted to attend DePauw someday. My husband and I assumed he would eventually change his mind. Most kids do.
But he never did.
He applied to one school: DePauw.
That was it.
Thankfully, he was admitted and received a generous scholarship. But the larger point here is not that every student should apply to one school. The point is that there are many paths to a meaningful college experience, and not every family needs to turn the process into an exhaustive national search.
I also think we have quietly created another cultural assumption around college—that bigger distance somehow equals bigger growth.
For some students, going far away absolutely is the right decision. It can be exciting, transformative, and deeply formative.
But I am not convinced we give enough credit to the value of staying closer to home, either.
Especially here in Indiana, where we are fortunate to have such an extraordinary range of higher education options, students can access exceptional opportunities without necessarily traveling across the country to find them. We have large public universities, small liberal arts colleges, faith-based institutions, urban campuses, rural campuses, specialized programs, research opportunities, strong alumni networks, and the list goes on. Indiana truly offers an incredible higher education landscape.
And particularly for a generation of students shaped by COVID and years of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with remaining connected to the people, places, and communities that have supported them well.
Growth does not only happen far away from home.
As both a higher education professional and now the parent of a graduating senior, I find myself wishing families felt a little less pressure around all of this: less pressure to find perfection, less pressure to manufacture some idealized experience, and less pressure to believe that one decision at age eighteen will determine the trajectory of an entire life.
Because ultimately, what matters most is not whether a student found the mythical “perfect fit.”
What matters most is whether students engage fully in the experience before them, build meaningful relationships, discover new strengths and interests, and ultimately grow into the people they are becoming.
There are many colleges where that can happen.
And maybe that truth is more freeing than we realize.
