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[quote=Anonymous]I am going to commit DCUM heresy and say it's not worth it.  I did not put my kids through this for college. My advice to them has been to save their hustle for the long haul. It's not where you go. It's who you are.  It's a crazy grind to get most kids ready to apply to an Ivy with even a small chance of getting in, and even then its a lottery.  It's not worth it to work that hard in high school for what is essentially a lottery ticket chance of getting in. The education is not substantially better than the education at hundreds of other schools.  Career opportunities (except for Wall Street and Big Law) are not substantially better for kids who go to a T20.  The networking is nice, but it doesn't improve your career opportunities that much, especially after your initial career entry.  The impact on earnings for college selectivity is zero (See Kruger and Dale's work:   https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159)

Schools that are T30 - T50 are competitive to get into, but not insanely so.  Good scores and good grades and decent extracurriculars will do for those schools.

Anything below T50 is not that hard to get into.  Any kid that wants to go to medical school is well served by finding a respectable undergrad program in chemistry or biology and working hard.  Save the big guns for medical school. I wouldn't have my premed kid on the college admissions grind for undergrad because they are likely to burn out.  Undergrad to medical school to residency is a long, LONG slog.  My premed kid worked reasonably hard in high school (but did not do the crazy pre-Ivy grind) and is now doing well in our state flagshp university.  People get into medical school from all sorts of schools. It's not necessary to go to a T20 school to go to medical school.

For business, it just depends.  What kind of business? Do they want to start their own firm?  Join a tech start up?  Go to work for corporate America?  Even then, you can do that without doing the crazy pre-Ivy grind.  I went to a no-name LAC.  My friend did a semester in Prague in college then went in the Peace Corp after she graduated. Then she got an international CPA. She's now a VP at a Fortune 100 company.

My brother was a C student in high school and went to the same no name LAC. He then got a job at a tech start up. The company did well and he made a lot of money.

Another friend from the same no name LAC and got her PhD in midlife and is now a faculty member at a state school and is ranked in the top 1% of her field for research.  [/quote]

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