"There's a whole industry devoted to prepping and packaging students, to festooning them with all the right ribbons and all the prettiest bows. For too many parents and their children, getting into a highly selective school isn't just another challenge, just another goal. A yes or no from Amherst or Dartmouth or Duke or Northwestern is seen as the conclusive measure of a young person's worth, a binding verdict on the life that he or she has led up until that point, an uncontestable harbinger of the successes or disappointments to come. Winner or loser: This is when the judgment is made. This is the great, brutal culling.

"What madness. And what nonsense.

"For one thing, the admissions game is too flawed and too rigged to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student's college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the skills that he or she picks up, the self-examination that's undertaken, the resourcefulness that's honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves, convinced that they have ground to make up, a disadvantage to compensate for. Or, freed somewhat from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it. In any case, there's only so much living and learning that take place inside a lecture hall, a science lab or a dormitory. Education is indeed everything, but it happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways. It starts well before college. It continues long after college. College has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional success or for a life well lived.

"I know many wildly accomplished people who attended Ivy League schools and other highly selective private colleges and benefited in precisely the ways that alumni of these institutions are supposed to. I know more who attended public universities and schools without major reputations, and in this book I'll introduce some of them, describing their paths, letting them reflect on their achievements and putting college in a saner, healthier, more accurate perspective. I even know a fair number of distinguished overachievers who never graduated from college. I wouldn't recommend that last route, but my reasons aren't solely practical. They're intellectual, philosophical, spiritual. College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to give your brain a vigorous workout and your soul a thorough investigation, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that's being lost in the admissions mania, which sends the message that college is a sanctum to be breached — a border to be crossed — rather than a land to be inhabited and tilled for all that it's worth."