I see several people telling you to definitely choose a first rank university. I'm not sure I agree.
Here's my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MIT's waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmark's multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my "career" than the MIT name or what I might have learned there.
So if you are someone who can use free time productively, you might want to consider going to a college where you don't have to spend too much effort on your classes, where, face it, a lot of the stuff you learn will ultimately turn out to be not very useful for what you end up doing.
I endorse this but would modify this slightly: if you are someone who can use free time productively and who is unlikely to benefit from a community of intelligent and highly educated peers and mentors (for example, if your interests are narrow and not widely shared, or if you prefer to work on your own rather than consult others, or if you're so many sigmas out on the right side of the bell curve that other people just slow you down, etc.), then that's probably true.
If you're able to benefit from the community, it can be a pretty compelling factor though.
I, and a lot of other people my age, are currently facing a pretty big life decision -- where to go to college. Since this is probably going to have a pretty big impact on my life, I'd like to get some more information on this.
Seeing as a lot of people here have probably made this choice already, gone through with some of the consequences of it, and are rational, I decided to ask here.
My current considerations are: