We got a question here from a frustrated mom who is asking about college admissions hysteria and the selectivity of colleges for future employment. Let me excerpt this question a little bit. But this querier says, my teenager is utterly unmotivated and likely has an undiagnosed learning disability because she seems quite intelligent outside of academics.

I'm in California, where kids seem to take an average of eight AP exams and seem to have weighted GPAs over four. I worry for her future, and it upsets me when people point to examples like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison and claim a college degree is not important to succeed.

If this were true, then please tell me why companies aren't lining up to hire out of high school or community college or second tier schools but all make a beeline to hire from the Ivies. And she says, what about kids who need to work or can't handle the pressure of doing it all?

If college was so optional, then why the hiring queues outside of Harvard and Princeton and why the sentencing of teens who didn't do it all at an already vulnerable time in their lives? All right, so frustrated mom, this is something I used to do a lot of work on, college admissions stress.

When I was a graduate student in the first decade of the 2000s, there was a huge issue with college student stress because of two things that occurred during this period. One was demographics. So I'm a part of the millennial generation, which is the children of the baby boomers. It's a very large demographic group.

I'm at the very older end of the millennials, right? So I'm one of the first millennials. So when I was just arriving at graduate school, you had a huge number of millennials entering college admission season. So there was suddenly this huge strain on college admissions. And then at the same time, they introduced the common application.

So it used to be, like when I applied to school, when I wanted to apply, I applied to Dartmouth. There was an application for Dartmouth. And I had to go use a typewriter at my dad's office because you had to typewrite in information in the fields. And for your essays, you would write your essays and print them.

And I vaguely remember pasting them into this thing. I mean, the application was a physical booklet you would send away for. You would send them money. And they would send you back this thing. And it was a huge pain. So you were pretty selective. I'm applying to three schools.

And it took me a while. But the common app, it was, oh, I'd fill out all this information on the website once. And I can apply to anywhere I want just by clicking a button. And now suddenly, people were applying to 20, 30 schools. And everyone who was at least a little bit smart would say, well, I might as well just do Harvard.

I might as well do Princeton. I might as well do Yale. You never know. And suddenly, they had these admissions percentages that just seemed like they were plummeting, when in reality, it was just you had a bunch more people applying who never would have before because they already knew they weren't going to get in.

Anyways, it caused a huge issue. College admission stress became a problem. There was a bunch of national cases, case studies that were drawing national attention, like Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, where they had a string of suicides. This was starting to happen with high school students. Which is all to say I wrote a book eventually called How to Become a High School Superstar.

And it was all about defusing college admissions stress. So I feel your pain. Let me give you a few points before I just say read that book, which, by the way, I think you're going to like. But let me give you a few points. Yes, college matters. Ignore the Silicon Valley types that say Steve Jobs didn't go to college.

Because your kid's not Steve Jobs. And your kid's not Larry Ellison. And so yes, if you want to do a knowledge sector type job, like an office job, for better or for worse, you have to go to college. There are obviously other types of work. Read Matt Crawford's book, Shop Classes, Soul Craft, that there's a lot of other really good work that has to do with skilled manual trades, which I think we definitely overlook.

But I think the people for which that is well suited know that. It doesn't sound like this is your daughter. Like there's some people that know, like I want to repair things and fix things or work on a ranch. And the people who want to do that know they want to do that.

And I think we need to normalize that more. And that's not your path. Yeah, college matters. So yes, I agree. You can't just skip colleges. I also agree, yes, it's true that the very selective colleges open up a lot more opportunities, especially for very high paying elite jobs. They go to the very selective colleges to do that type of recruiting.

There was this famous study that everyone kept talking about during that first wave of college stress. There's this famous study that people are talking about that said, aha, it doesn't matter what school you go to. See, we did this study where we looked at students who got into good schools, but also to less good schools, and went to the less good school, and some went to the better school, and it didn't matter.

In the end, they both did as well. So it's the person, not the school that really matters. This study was really popular because people like that idea. Don't over sweat the school you go to. It doesn't really matter. I wrote an article about this way back when, like in 2008.

That's a crazy interpretation of the data. If you actually look at this study, it turned out to matter quite a bit, actually. If you went to a better school, you made more money out of it. It was crazy the interpretations that media outlets were making of that study. And I don't mean to go on a tangent here, but basically there was one way you could rank schools by which you could show that effect went away.

That's something to do with the median SAT score. But if you looked at the most natural way to rank schools, which was looking at their ranking in a-- it wasn't US News, might have been Barron's, but whatever. Just looking at their ranking, it made a big difference. In these dyads, the students who went to the higher ranked school versus the lowest ranked school made more money.

OK, so that's true. There's jobs that are open to people in the Ivy leagues that aren't open otherwise. You can't do much about that. Can't do much about that. That's true. But I'm going to try to make you feel better here frustrated, mom. I don't think you want most of those jobs.

Yes, you can be a derivatives trader. You can be a management consultant. And you can get into really good law schools. But I don't know that you-- so? So where does that end you? That you have a very expensive penthouse apartment in New York. You're also completely stressed out and alienated from your family because you're a managing director at a big bank.

Some people want to do that. Most people don't. So that's my first point. So what? And then two, I would say, don't think about that hype. Go to a good school. Go to the best school you can get into. Do well when you're at that school. Find an interesting job that gives you options.

Do career capital theory and lifestyle-centric career planning. Make yourself an awesome life. That's the recipe. And California is crazy about this stuff. DC is kind of bad about it. California is crazy about this type of college stuff. And they really-- and I can see it in your question, so I have so much empathy here.

But they really get under your skin and make it seem like, well, if you're not going to Yale or University of Chicago, dot, dot, dot. But you know what? Follow out that dot, dot, dot. What happens? Yeah, I don't get to go work for Goldman Sachs. I would say congratulations.

You don't want to do that anyways, right? I mean, what happens? So you focus on your grades. Get the best grades you can. Go to a good school. My advice is typically go to your state school unless you can get into a small number of very elite schools that are much, much better than your state school.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon on this. I'm not a big believer in shopping for random private schools that are nowhere near you just because you like the look of the campus. I mean this with respect, teenagers, because I'm talking about myself at that age. But 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds are idiots.

How much do we really want to give them weight to their decision of, no, I definitely need to go to this random school halfway across the country? I was like, go to your state school probably unless you can get into a fantastic school. OK, if you're really into government and politics and get into Georgetown, go to Georgetown.

But don't go to a random private school halfway around the country because you like something in their brochure about their gym and the campus look nice. Go to your state school unless you get into an elite school. Don't overschedule. Do really well in your major. Get good grades. This will open up job opportunities.

Build a cool life. I think that's the takeaway message. So to bring that back to my book, what I did in that book, How to Become a High School Superstar, is I profiled a bunch of kids that did fine in college admissions but weren't at all stressed out. And I kind of walked through what their life was like, what matters, what doesn't.

And spoiler alert, they're not overscheduled. They wander and stumble into interesting things. They're pretty smart about their study habits, so they get good grades without having to study all the time. And that's kind of it. So I am giving you permission, frustrated mom, to not get too caught up in this selective college hysteria.

You should help your daughter with good study habits. Don't overschedule her. Let her live up to her academic potential. Go to the good school, maybe one of the great UC system schools. Don't pay twice as much to go to a school across the country. And let them do well there.

Read my type of advice. Find themselves. Find their flow. Do good work. And then lifestyle-centered career planning, build a really cool, interesting life. I think that is what most people should be doing. And we need to stop obsessing about this dream that, I don't know, you're going to go to Harvard and then the Yale Law School and be like a senator at 30 or something like that.

Hey, spoiler alert, that's not going to happen to you. It's going to happen to a small number of people. But don't build your whole life around that's what you need to do, I guess. Jesse, did you have that pressure? How do you remember that college? Because we were the same age.

It's funny you bring up the Common Application. Because it got worse right after we went through this whole thing. Yeah, I mean, the Common Application was key to me because I never would have applied to Tufts if they didn't take it. I just submitted it at the last minute and ended up getting accepted.

And then once I weighed other schools, I selected it and ended up having a great time and loved it. But I didn't think about the admission rates with the Common Application until you just mentioned it. It makes a lot of sense. It inflated them. So it made it seem super impossible.

I mean, the point I make in that book is the key thing about college admissions is that it is a vanishingly small number of schools and students for which things like your extracurricular activities or whatever matters. For the vast majority of colleges and the vast majority of kids, what's your grades?

What's your SAT scores? Are they in the range of our accepted students? Yes, you get to come here. That's the vast majority of colleges, the vast majority of kids. So get the best grades you can. Get good SAT scores. Find schools that you're in the middle of that range.

Go to those schools. Don't even sweat it. It's such a small subset of people for which you're applying to a school in which they're like, we have so many students who have grades that are pegged at the top of our range that now we have to start differentiating among other factors.

But even then, that's not most students, because a lot of those slots are reserved for various sports or for the orchestra needs someone. So now we're down to a really small number of students. And then there's some shoo-ins, because these type of colleges want as interesting as a possible of class.

So there's just some really interesting people. And then there's people who are daughters of presidents. So they need to come here too, because we're trying to create a whatever. And now we're down to a very small number of slots at a very small number of schools where you have an admissions officer saying, what activities do you do?

So I think we definitely overblow that. Everyone is obsessed with what are my activities. And they're wrong about it. That's the whole point in that book. One of the big points in my book is that people are wrong in terms of what they think is important when it comes to activities.

They focus way too much on quantity, thinking somehow that raw quantity of activities is somehow impressive. It's not. Or they fall into the trap of looking for activities that have incredibly clear competitive structures, like am I the first chair of the state orchestra? Only one person in your state gets to be that for the instrument.

So it's not necessarily a great place to be competing. So I don't mean to rant. But I just want to give more people permission to say, I'm going to get the grades that-- I'm going to work hard, get good grades, see what schools that opens up, go to that school, have a good experience in that school, build a cool life.

And we-- and of course, I'm saying this as someone who went to an Ivy League school and trained at MIT. So maybe it's easy for me to say. But I don't know that my school opened up for the vast majority of my peers really cool, interesting, happy lives. They all just went to Harvard Law School.

Everyone I know just went to Harvard Law School and are all law partners now and are tired. So congratulations. They have nice houses, though.