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Intelligence has nothing to do with it. There are tons of 17 year olds out there who are smarter than I am, you are, or anyone else in this thread is, but it doesn’t mean they can evaluate a college’s academic departments better than any of us. It’s about having the tools and experience needed to evaluate the various aspects of college, from social dynamic to academic department strengths, to the intellectual quality of students and professors. There is no easy way to do any of this, and it’s virtually impossible for high school students (and their parents) to be able to make great judgments about academic departments and professors. It simply takes too much time being involved with those entities to be able to really evaluate them. As such, incoming students are better off trying to judge the quality of the students and look at the school’s social and academic atmosphere and base their decision on where to attend on those things. There is probably no one on the planet who can say with objective certainty, for instance, that Swarthmore or Haverford has a better biology department. This includes 16-17 year olds, even if they’re extremely intelligent.</p>