You can have quite a lot of what you want in a college, but you can’t really have it all.

Forbes reports.

Developing Priorities During The College Search

One of the first students I ever advised about college told me at our first meeting that he wanted a “small liberal arts college in the woods” with a “library like Regenstein.” He was one of the brightest students in his class at our highly competitive private high school and he certainly was eligible for admission to any small college or large research university. The problem was that most small colleges, no matter how good they are, will not have the kind of massive research library possessed by the University of Chicago.

From that point, he had to decide which of these competing characteristics was more important. As we went through the process, one or the other rose and fell according to how he considered related characteristics such as majors, class sizes, relationships with professors, being “in the woods” versus being in an urban environment and so on. As he soon realized, a search for perfection was really a search for the best available options. You can have quite a lot of what you want in a college, but you can’t really have it all.