What really irritates me about this whole issue is how rankings, the Common App and the schools all conspire to yank our chains. Quite frankly, most kids are going to do well or not based on their own abilities, and not based on anything about the school. A decent state school, as long as it has the major your child wants, is usually going to be just fine.
I was at Pomona with my daughter and they said, “Over 90% of our students who apply to medical school get in.” That really made me laugh. The students there are all at the tippy top academically, that’s how they got into Pomona in the first place- OF COURSE they’re going to get in med school! They’d get in if they went to Cal Poly Pomona.
There have even been studies proving this, and articles about said studies written in the NYT and other places. But we still all get sucked into the prestige thing. Why, for example, would I pay and shed blood sweat and tears for a spot in the Ivies when my kid wants to be an engineer. MIT or Caltech I could see (only if my child wanted to be an academician, but they don’t). Now, if my kid wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice some day, it might be worth it. If he needed to meet the right people and become a Fortune 500 CEO, I could see it. The prestige factor really can help you out there.
The real problem isn’t the Ivies or Stanford, though. The real problem is that the vast majority of expensive private schools don’t have the name recognition of an Ivy, and the vast majority of kids don’t want to be Supreme Court Justices or Fortune 500 CEOs. But parents are still running up the same amount of debt as if those things applied. Schools are not magic. We need to have more faith in our children- they make the school, not the other way around.