<p>^ Second the previous post. I especially like BDM’s ten steps guide.</p>
<p>Wonder whether this has been mentioned there. Depending on your parents’ income and assets and which top school you get into, going to some top college may not necessarily cost your family much more. Not all “top” schools are created equal even though many of them claim that they offer need-based scholarship.</p>
<p>No matter which school you attend, you need to excel there. The only difference may be that you need to be in the top X percents at one school, or in the top Y percents at another school. Maybe the lower tiered your school is, the attrition rate in the prereq classes may be higher. In other word, if a school does not weed out students at the time of college admission, they weed out the students in the freshman or sophomore year – and many students find the college classes are so much harder at such a school than the classes in their high schools (if their high school is not one of those magnet high school whose admission rate is in the low single digit percents.)</p>