Myth -- Elite colleges seem to lead to elite jobs, and in turn, elite money. College is sold in the marketing materials and on the tours as a celebratory rite of passage. We spend so much money, time, and attention on choosing a college and getting into a college. Perhaps we could take just a bit of that and put it toward understanding how much college is going to cost, how we are going to pay for it, and what we might do once we get there. So I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter whether you end up at the Rochester Institute of Technology instead of Yale, but the differences are a lot less stark than we like to believe. Does going to Yale help? Sure. But there are so many other factors contributing to your ultimate path to success that focusing exclusively on this one narrow stretch of it seems out of whack. Are you majoring in the right thing? Have you pursued the right internship? Did your parents let you “fail” enough as a teenager to build resiliency and the ability to navigate the uncertainty of a changing workforce? Do you know the right people at the firm where you’re applying for your first job? In the end, college is a staging ground. It’s one of many stops you’ll make throughout life, but it’s not the only one, and certainly not the last. [[Success in college is about how you go, not just where you go]]