Seth Godin nailed it with his post this week, especially this portion:
“While a high-status college admission confers a measure of status, it doesn’t automatically grant a great education. Sometimes, a student gets both, but not always. Because learning is taken as much as given. Along the way, many of us have conflated the status with the learning.”
The better your family understands that the more prestigious colleges don’t offer inherently better educations, the more emphasis you’ll take off what is never entirely in the student’s control (which colleges say yes) and place it back on what students do control (what they do once they’re in college).