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Not surprising to me, though it will probably surprise those who say “it is not what college you get into, it is what you do in college that matters”. Whether or not it is wrong is not really the point…
However, it does mean that, for some career directions, it is not just how well you do in the last school that matters – how well you do in the second to last school can be highly important. To the extent that some such careers that one enters after earning a bachelor’s degree consider the prestige of your college, that means that your high school performance is highly important*, and that (and other college choice factors) is heavily influenced by parental actions. So perhaps the tiger parents are correct in their motivations, even if their methods are faulty (or abusive in more extreme cases) and their measures (often grades and test scores only) are not the correct ones for the goals.
*In another recent thread, a poster mentioned that some employers hiring college students about to graduate ask for SAT scores – that seems to be another (much more explicit) example of judging a college applicant by something that s/he did while in high school.
I was last asked my SAT scores when I was looking for a job about 10 years ago, and I was nearly 40 years old at the time. Now perhaps part of the reason was that my SAT was pre-1995 when it was much more of an IQ test than it is now, but it was still a surprise to me.
The job was in the finance industry. My scores were fine, but the hiring manager flat out said that there was no way he was hiring someone with an SAT Math score in the 600s.
In the UK it’s common to administer SAT-like math tests (though they are actually long tail tests more like the Oxford TSA so you will never get 100%) even for those who are many years out of college. My sister-in-law who is in her mid-40s (and has a Cambridge math degree!) was asked to do one recently as part of the interview process for a CEO level job.
“it will probably surprise those who say “it is not what college you get into, it is what you do in college that matters”.”
Except that in many fields, it is indeed true that what you do in college is what matters. And even for those fields where being at a target is important, as I’ve shown, you can get there other ways so long as you show you are stellar somewhere along the way. The legal field being the only possible exception I can think of.
"In another recent thread, a poster mentioned that some employers hiring college students about to graduate ask for SAT scores – that seems to be another (much more explicit) example of judging a college applicant by something that s/he did while in high school. "
Yes, but that would also be a way to remove the influence of college prestige.