Parents: What Percentage Did Social Engineering Play Into Your Child's Choice of College?

not a lot. my father was involved.

None. I’m going to try to push my kids to go to the University of Florida. It’s ranked #6 for state schools and #30 overall in the US. My wife and I are alumni and I already prepaid my daughters 4 year tuition for ~$8K when she was 2 years old.

It doesn’t guarantee admission, and even though I had a full academic ride in the late 90s it’s extremely difficult to get into now. If either of my kids want to go to out of state I won’t stop them, but we’ve been brainwashing them to be future Gators by the time they could walk.

When I went there, it was a school with all walks of life. It’s probably a little more upper class now, but with 40K students it’s still really diverse.

None. I went to a D2 state school for a running scholarship.

I think you are reading too much into the link between going to a highly rated or prestigious college and your long term success in life. My daughter had a perfect ACT score and solid grades from a reasonably good public high school. She applied to 20 colleges and picked by herself from the 15 or so that admitted her knowing that we'd pay the full cost for any of them. She chose Notre Dame not really realizing that an atheist that does not like organized sports might not really have a "tribe." She then applied to law schools and realized that all she really needed was a super high GPA from undergraduate and where she had gone was of minimal impact. I think she realizes that we could have saved $150K by her going to U.Illinois which would have paid for her to go to Columbia vs. Duke for law school as the net cost differential after scholarships was about this amount. Certainly where you go to college influences your first job but really after that companies care about what you can do not what school you went to. Hopefully you form friendships in college some of whom you will keep in touch with but it is really naive to assume that someone who went to "community college" won't run rings around you in the workplace

Reading through, I think the question is not so much, does going to a big nice school mean you will succeed, it's about whether the type of people you want your now young adult associating with while they are in college, since different colleges attract different types of people.

Obviously the very rich and powerful have their institutions, and I think most everyone would wish their kid could hobknob with those super elite families. If you have a daughter maybe she lands her one of these men as her future mate.

None? You admit that you are brainwashing your kids to go to the same school that you and Mrs. Rainy Day attended.