I'm a freshman IT student, but I'm currently in India so I might not be able to give you useful advice about which college to join, but I can tell you this - for Pete's sake, choose wisely. I could have taken an year off to prepare for the college entrance exams (college is a big deal in India, so we have too much competition) and got much better marks, but I chose to just join whichever college I could get into, reputation or no reputation. Now I regret it. My college is more like a 4-year crash course in getting a 9-to-5 job, my teachers care only about academic performance and my peers think I'm a nutjob. Not that it's a bad college, it's just that they don't really get education. You know, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

The environment of your college matters. Your peers matter. In college, a bad crowd will not just slow you down, they'll take you down.