Why did Gogol choose to attend graduate school at Columbia rather than MIT?

From the text:

They had been disappointed that he'd gone to Columbia. They'd hoped he would choose MIT, the other architecture program to which he'd been accepted. But after four years in New Haven he didn't want to move back to Massachusetts, to the one city in America his parents know. He didn't want to attend his father's alma mater, and live in an apartment in Central Square as his parents once had, and revisit the streets about which his parents speak nostalgically. He didn't want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world.

He prefers New York, a place which his parents do not know well, whose beauty they are blind to, which they fear