As “a functioning adult over half a decade out of college,” writer Toria Sheffield rests somewhere in between the age of a college applicant and the parent of one. She’s young enough to have experienced today’s college admissions stresses but old enough to have a sense of what the real world is like after living in a dormitory on campus. In this article, she offers advice for parents of high school students:

“So this is my plea to parents: Please, please do not drink the Kool-Aid. Do not be a part of the mass hysteria when it comes to the college admissions process. I have friends who went to Ivys, to a slew of elite liberal arts colleges, to large public universities, and to tiny unknown state schools that were the only places they could afford — and happiness and life satisfaction do not seem to correlate to college choice in the slightest. In fact, it’s my friends who were raised in the pressure-cooker environments of my own childhood who are often the least happy, the least able to enjoy life, and the most likely to be neurotic.”