Yes. That’s all true. It’s just my theory of why many top kids want to go to highly selective schools because they view all their AP Classmates/friends and think it’ll just be an extension of that except on steroids. Kids talk about the “vibe” and I think that perception is a big part of the “vibe”.
Of course some kids may want nothing to do with that and go a completely different route.
But I don’t think people are gunning for selective schools because they are winnowing out the “best students”. That is certainly one reason. But other reasons are that the name opens more doors (not just for employers btw), has the best alumni network, is the best resourced, is filled with kids that are not only smart, but who are going to go on and make a big impact on the world.
I think these public schools are different from each other too. Some of them have more restriction on OOS than others. U Mich may be most open to OOS (revenue driven??).
Some top public HS in northern NJ have >10 acceptances for U Mich, such as Millburn and Livingston.
I think U Mich is extremely popular in NY and northern Jersey. My sister lives in Westchester county and those kids love Michigan.
I think it’s both revenue and the ability to take better students.
IMO, if UNC and UT Austin were able to take more OOS kids, their rankings would go up but of course their primary mission is to educate the kids from their state.
The whole ‘steel sharpens steel’ belief is a thing to be sure. What students tend not to consider when going to the ‘most selective’ school they can get into is the level of competition, where they will fall in that class, how they will respond to constant competition, and what will it take to succeed where they matriculate.
Some downsides to choosing an environment of ‘achievers’ (or whatever term one wants to use) include:
-Mental health impact. The constant pressure to compete, typically at a higher level than at one’s HS (not talking about the highly competitive HSs out there), can be a toxic environment for some…and an environment some students haven’t experienced yet.
-Relentless competition can result in a decrease in performance, rather than an increase
-Collaboration can be an afterthought for some who sought out a ‘steel sharpens steel’ situation. A lack of collaboration skills is a notable weakness in many jobs.
IMO students should be looking at their holistic development during their college years, not just an academic one. Many who want a highly rejective experience because of ‘steel sharpens steel’ are operating from a competitive mindset rather than having a love of learning.
Obviously, people can choose whatever school they want for the reasons that are important to them, but when someone tells me they want to be around other ‘high achievers’, I don’t see that as necessarily a positive. And don’t ever write that in a college essay 
ETA:
I can speak to UIUC…yes, plenty of students (and their parents) at my kids’ large, affluent, highly ranked suburban Chicago HS do not see UIUC as prestigious. Even engineering, CS, and business.
Isn’t anyone going to bring up Assortative Mating?
No. Because the last three couples I know who are divorcing/have just divorced all met in college!
They won’t unless… AI says to do it.
I wonder if that’s still a thing? Millenial and Gen Z marriage rates are relatively low, which also makes their child bearing rates low.
And of course, don’t forget the peer pressure. The intense peer pressure from classmates, teachers, school administration, family, etc…
But those super selective schools aren’t cutthroat, are they? Imho it’s the schools a few levels down where not everyone will get what they want that the competition is more intense. Williams students (for example) don’t have to sabotage classmates, or not share notes, or whatever, to end up with a great job or impressive graduate school placement.
I went to what is now the #1 ranked law school. It was deeply uncool to look like you were trying hard (although just about everyone was). All classmates were supportive and close. And they were the smartest people, as were the lawyers at the firm where I worked, that I have ever been around. And yes, I went from being a top student to one in the middle of the pack!
It may depend on career goals and your major. It can be cut throat for IB and consulting, probably not for classics.
I don’t think they are, and I didn’t say that. Competitive is not the same as cutthroat IMO. I define cutthroat as purposely sabotaging others. I don’t know any college like that, but of course there are probably some bad apple students out there, and they aren’t limited to highly rejective schools.
If not cutthroat, extremely competitive not only for jobs, but for entry into the various clubs on these campuses that have single digit acceptance rates.
ETA:
Just to talk about it, when I look at career outcomes for many of the highly rejective schools (not including MIT and CalTech), their salary ranges at whatever point you want to measure tend to be similar to many less selective schools.
But everyone at those super selective schools knows that while they may not get their first choice job, they can and will get a good job. Someone at a much less selective school does not have that confidence.
At my law school every student was able to get an excellent job, every one. No one was worried about unemployment or underemployment. But there are too many lawyers! If you go to a school down in the selectivity scale, you absolutely might not get hired as a lawyer at a decent salary, unless you are at the very top of your class.
Again, I think there are appropriately nuanced versions of all that which can play a valid role in choosing colleges for an application list, and then in choosing an offer.
But the idea there is some generic ranking of colleges by selectivity that provides a reliable answer as to all those factors for all kids is obviously not realistic.
This is a common sort of situation in decision making in general. Sometimes when you don’t have much time to make a decision, you need to use shortcuts, including proxies and simple rules of thumb and such. But when you have the time to better investigate and reflect on a really important decision, it typically makes sense to stop using proxies for things you can more directly investigate, stop using simple rules of thumb and instead work up more complex and individualized analyses, and so on.
In my view, this is such an obvious point, the mystery is why anyone would still cling to clearly crude and inferior ways of making college decisions. And to be fair, I think most people don’t.
But when some people keep insisting on thinking that way, despite having plenty of time to do better, I begin to suspect what is really going on is something else. And it does seem to me that often insisting on this crude approach is being used for rationalization, and not so much primary analysis.
Yep, and I think this is often bundled into sort of one thing. In their social settings, peer status is often determined by winning competitions, and college admissions can be treated as a massive competition between peers. Of course it doesn’t have to be treated that way, but it can.
And of course parents can get into that mindset too, seeing their kids’ college admissions as a way of competing with their own peers for status.
Of course a good competition needs to have some sort of scorekeeping mechanism. Otherwise, how do you know who has done better?
And that is a need which can be filled by these various crude measures. You can use the US News National Universities rankings to keep score. You can use the list of colleges that play football with Yale and Harvard to keep score. You can use admissions rates to keep score. Whatever is easily ascertainable and provides some sort of list of relative winners/losers.
The fact a lot of this is going on in certain social circles isn’t very hidden. Kids, and sometimes parents, sometimes talk about it openly here, and other college admissions forums. And humans being social animals, none of this is really a surprise.
But we don’t have to treat it as a complete fait accompli. We can explain to such kids, and parents, there are different ways of thinking about college admissions. We can’t make them choose those alternatives, but we can at least demonstrate what it can look like.
And in my experience, sometimes some kids and parents respond positively, even grasp these alternatives like you have thrown them the proverbial life line.
And sometimes they don’t, and carry on trying to win that peer competition.
Law school prestige / ranking is somewhat different from undergraduate in effects. Law school has only one major, and law school students largely all have the same career goal (practice law).
There has been quite a bit of study recently involving the actual mindset of students at these colleges these days. A couple times recently here we discussed a Mother Jones article that was based on some of that research.
I think logically, it is true these kids could relax quite a bit, and some do.
But what those studies have documented is a lot of kids struggling to do that, indeed instead finding new ways of competing for something else. Like, they will actually reject possible next steps that would be too easy to get in favor of things that are hard to get, in part because they have internalized the idea that things which are too easy to get are not worthy of them.
I do think it is important to understand this may not be just a function of their institution per se, indeed I think it may mostly be a function of their peers, their families, and so on. And given that, for these individuals, it may in fact sometimes not help that much to be at a different college. Indeed, some of the familiar logic about “finding your people” at college may apply in an unfortunate way to such kids.
Still, I personally think this is something worth some consideration. Like, I don’t think every academic peer institution necessarily has as many kids feeling like this, and I do think peer mentorship, and just leading by example, can sometimes make a difference for some of these kids.
A huge part of human interactions revolves around “signaling effects”, which is precisely what you have identified in your comment. This is a well-studied social phenomenon, and led to a Nobel Prize about 25 years ago. See the first two bullets below.
Key Insights from Signaling Theory
Education as a Signal: In his 1973 paper, Spence proposed that education is not only about learning skills but also serves as a signal to employers about a worker’s productivity, intelligence, and reliability.
Credible Signaling: For a signal to be effective, it must be costly and hard to imitate by lower-quality individuals, such as the effort and expense required to obtain a degree.
Market Efficiency: The theory helps explain how markets function when one party has more information than another, such as in labor markets (employee quality), product warranties (product quality), or financial markets.
I think that prestige is based on a mix of factors, like:
ETA:
While the Ivy League comprises a set of top-quality, rich schools, there are plenty such private schools outside of that league. And I think most people are aware of that. Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke, Northwestern, Caltech, Hopkins, and maybe the GTown/Rice/Vandy/WashU/CMU/ND/Emory septuplets are all generally considered (by interested and learned folks like us) to be of Ivy quality academically, and also quite rich (according to endowment).
And the same can be said for NESCAC and the many other high-quality LACs.
So while the Ivy League and NESCAC carry prestige with their names, many private schools of equal caliber exist apart from them.