Some years ago on a soccer sideline somewhere, or maybe in the chatty pre-show moments of a high school theatre performance, a mom or dad started the dreadful rumor that one must complete hundreds of hours of community service in order to even be considered for admission to the top colleges and universities in the country. Since that day, this misinformation has been taken as gospel by college-bound high school students and their parents. But they’re wrong.

Let’s all pause for a moment and say this together: there is nothing extra special about community service.

The Bowdoin supplement asks applicants to first identify which of the lines from “The Offer of the College,” a poem written in 1906 by Bowdoin president William DeWitt Hyde, most resonate with them. Applicants are then invited to provide an optional short essay of 250 words to reflect on their chosen line and how it has meaning for them.

Over the years, I’ve found it hard to articulate the response that past students have had to Chapman University in Orange, California. My brother used to live down the street from campus, and I once spent a week there for a conference, enjoying the sunny weather and brunching in their cute little downtown. It’s a beautiful campus in a part of Southern California that students don’t often consider, and it has a really strong program in film and screenwriting. It’s small but not too small; big but not too big, at just under 10,000 students. But the most striking aspect of Chapman, from where I sit, is that there are some students that go to visit and come back to proclaim that they just love it there.

One of the hardest things for students—for people!—to do is separate the quality of their process from the randomness or disappointment of challenging outcomes. This is why Deal or No Deal always drove me nuts: You didn’t make the right choice because the next case was worth $.01; it was either the right choice in the moment or it wasn’t! All we can ever do is the best we can with the information we have available to us; we can’t justify bad decisions by good outcomes, just as we can’t condemn good decisions that resulted in bad outcomes.

Love Reed. It’s a phrase that is sprinkled throughout campus, adorning buttons you’ll find on student backpacks in the fall and senior laurels in the spring. In order to Love Reed, however, you must first get to know it. The experience at Reed is different from the experience elsewhere on measures of intellectual engagement, academic rigor, and closely held traditions of weirdness. As an applicant, this is something for you to make a serious effort to learn before you apply, both because it’ll make you a better informed applicant and because it’ll help you craft a thoughtful response to your essay.

You might assume that college essay supplements are merely an opportunity for a college to learn more about its applicants; that they are known to students only after they’ve made a decision to apply to a particular university; that they are rooted in some important academic or cultural aspect of the institution with which they are associated. For nearly every college, you’d be right.

But not so for the University of Chicago.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal and Time Higher Education released their second annual college rankings. While I appreciate some differences in their methodology from what we see each year from the US News & World Report, I didn’t have to look much further than their page introducing the Top 10 to be reminded of the many reasons I feel frustrated by college rankings in general. The way university rankings are covered as a horse race—MIT moves up to second, Stanford falls to sixth—belies the reality that colleges and universities move much more like oil tankers than thoroughbreds; they stay on a course without much change except over very long periods of time. Annual rankings, which purport to show changes in institutional quality year over year, can’t really say a whole lot when the methodology draws heavily on factors that are largely fixed, except for microscopic changes in hiring or from student survey responses. This is why schools in the Top 10 are nearly always in the Top 10, and why you’ll never see a school jump 20 slots in a single year.

The Common Application opened up for the new school year on August 1, so, rising high school seniors, you can apply for college.

Right.

Now.

I studied philosophy in college. And if my degree isn’t the punchline to a joke about useless college majors, it’s almost certainly a part of the set up. For years, I’ve had to field questions about what I could possibly do with that, aside from having plenty to think about while mixing a latté. Even Marco Rubio took some of his speaking time in a 2015 presidential debate to proclaim that what we need in this country is “more welders and less philosophers.” For many of us in the humanities, it can feel like an uphill battle to convince the world of the value of our degree, with skeptics everywhere questioning the practical value of an English, history, or religion major.

Summer is rapidly approaching, and, for rising high school seniors, that means getting serious about your college list. The college application season heats up immediately upon the return to school in the fall, so summer is a great time to take that list of schools you’re vaguely interested in and narrow that group down to a focused list you actually intend to apply to. How many colleges should be on that final list?” you ask. Five? Ten? Twenty? Former Reed College admissions officer, Ian Fisher, lets us know in the latest installment of the College Coach video series, Ask the College Admissions Expert. Ian answers the question, “How many colleges should I apply to?”