if you are a decently well-to-do parent worried about which school your kid is going to attend, here are the four words you need to hear: it will not matter AT ALL.
not kindergarten. not middle school. not high school. and definitely not college.
there is one caveat. if you are poor, school matters. a great school can massively change the trajectory of a kid whose house does not have books on the shelves or a parent who finishes work after midnight.
BUT if you are decently well-off (making over $100,000 a year), have a stable family, and read bedtime stories to your 3-year old -- it will not matter.
in a room full of the most interesting people in the country (founders, executives, doctors, professors, writers, fund managers) -- the #1 topic of conversation is not interesting books, movies, history, music, politics, religion, or AI. not even money.
the #1 topic is schools. everything about them, around them, and in between.
how do i get my kid in. how do i help the school. how do i help a friend’s kid get in.
there is not a close #2. it is schools all the way down.
the time and energy of the conversation would suggest the school decision is one of the most important parental choices you make. but it is not. the data all points the same direction. it almost certainly does NOT matter.
there are four things that actually matter
do you give your kid deep love and warmth?
do you have a loving relationship with your partner?
do you read to your kid when they were young?
do you try to be healthy?
if you can answer yes to those four, congrats! your kid is in the top 1%. on every measure that has ever been studied -- income, education, longevity, marital stability, mental health -- those four inputs swamp almost everything else. they are not in the same league as the school question.
is it possible that the right school takes your kid from the 99th percentile to the 99.8th? maybe. the parental freakout treats schools as a 30-point intervention. they are, at best, a half-point one and most parents have never actually checked.
good schools are good because they have good kids
the most sought-after private kindergartens select the best kids. and the best families. they screen out everything else. they keep the high-readiness five year olds whose parents read to them every night and model emotional regulation and have a stable home. then those kids do great and everyone will credit the school.
it is not at all clear those schools would still be great if they had to pull kids randomly from the community. they are good because they have great kids.
the most sought-after charter schools are lotteries -- which actually lets you run the experiment. they generally serve disadvantaged communities, which is the population where the marginal benefit of a great school should be highest. and even there, the jury is still out on how much better the lottery winners do than the lottery losers. when you control for who ACTUALLY showed up, the gap shrinks very fast.
for colleges it is even more true
going to a top college gives you smarter peers and a better resume brand. those advantages are real (but declining fast). but you doubtfully learn more. having a Nobel laureate teach you physics (I had two in college) -- does not mean they have any ability to teach undergraduates. they certainly did not at UC Berkeley.
the actual teaching at a state school is often much better than at the elite school. the elite school’s professors are optimized for research output. the state school’s professors are optimized for teaching their students.
economists actually tried to measure the value of going to a more selective college. the most famous study (Krueger and Dale) compared students who got into elite schools and went versus students who got in and chose less selective schools. on income outcomes, the gap was basically zero. the kid was the kid.
parents are buying selection NOT education
this is what the school decision is actually about.
most parents do not actually pick the school that would teach their kid the most. that school would be the one where their kid grows the most in skill and in character. most parents instead pick the school with the highest absolute achievement of the other kids.
school A: the average kid enters at a 9 and leaves at a 9.2. school B: the average kid enters at a 4 and leaves at a 7.
school B is OBJECTIVELY better at teaching. school A is more prestigious. parents pick school A every time.
charter schools with high absolute achievement get flooded with applicants. charter schools with high student improvement -- which is the actual education metric -- get a fraction of the demand. parents are not buying education. they are buying selection.
(yes, if your kid is honestly starting at a 9, school A might still be better because school B will bore them. picking the right school is complicated. but the volume of parents thinking about it this way is close to zero.)
schools are the best signaling currency
the reason why wealthy parents pick schools is that schools are, for the moment, still a signaling currency.
most professionals still put their university on their resume. at my last company we hung pendants of everyone’s colleges on the wall. it really should not matter what school a 50-year-old went to. that was 30 years ago and they have a full career of evidence on the other side of it.
and yet.
K-12 has become signaling currency too, though not for the kid. almost nobody puts their elementary school on their resume. counterintuitively, going to a prestigious high school actually makes it HARDER for a kid to get into a prestigious college, because class rank matters and rank is harder to win when your peers are strong.
the K-12 signaling is not for the kid. it is for the parents.
parents get into a different social circle based on their kid’s school. parents take pride in the school’s name. they make new parent friends through the pickup line. they get to drop the school’s name at dinner parties and watch the response register on the faces of the other adults.
some of these schools are amazing. the very best K-12 schools are MUCH BETTER than the very best universities at producing actual learning and growth. there are real teachers doing real work changing real lives in these places.
but a primary reason a lot of parents want their kid in those schools is to signal to other parents.
and it is the secret reason a lot of parents want their kid in a good college too.
bragging about your kids is the last legal brag
parents get enormous pleasure from bragging about their kids and it is one of the last socially acceptable forms of bragging left. you cannot brag about your big house anymore. you cannot brag about your salary. you cannot brag about your watch. it is uncool and gauche.
but bragging about your kid IS still allowed. encouraged even. so a generation of high-achieving parents concentrate all their unspent bragging into their kid’s resume. the kid’s school is the most visible line on that resume.
the school decision is not a child development decision. it is a parental status decision that is wearing a child development costume.
cost of the obsession
if the school decision is mostly status signaling and not actually moving the kid’s outcomes much, a whole industry built around it is a status tax on the wealthy.
the elite kindergarten consulting business of people charging $50,000 to coach a family through a five year old’s admissions interview has no underlying economic case. the kid would be fine at the second-choice school. and the third, and the fourth.
the SAT prep industrial complex sells the same lie one rung up. spending $300/hour to push a kid’s SAT from 1450 to 1500 to get into a more selective school with unclear ROI does not change adult outcomes. it changes which school name gets dropped at dinner.
the most expensive cost is parental time. a generation of high-earning parents is burning the most productive years of their professional and family lives on the school question. that is hours, attention, sleep, all being redirected to a decision that does not move the dial even a little bit.
do i do this too? yes, absolutely guilty. we are all hypocrites.
there is a meta-problem
the four things that ACTUALLY matter -- love, marriage, reading, health -- get less time and attention when the school decision is consuming everything.
a generation later, the same wealthy parent will brag at the dinner party about their kid getting into the prestigious college. they will not brag about family dinners they protected, bedtime stories they read, or the relationship they kept warm with their partner across decades. that stuff does not signal at the dinner party but it is the stuff that actually built the kid.
the bottom line
and yes i am a hypocrite. i did not write this piece before my family had gone through the private school process. we made the well-to-do parent choice and played the game. and for the record, we absolutely love our kids’ school.
a lot of you are about to spend the next decade lying awake at night about a decision that matters far less than you think.
if you give your kid deep love. if you have a loving relationship with your partner. if you read to them. if you try to be healthy.
you are giving them 99% of what they need.
the school will get the credit because it always does but the credit really belongs to you. it will not matter.
stop stressing.
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This isn't true.
Schools are different, and there indeed is a mistake parents make where they think there is a fixed rank of schools and your acceptance into a school reflects the fixed rank of your child. That gunner culture is lame.
But differences abound! Schools being different matters to give them the experience and peers you want as a parent. Some top bay area schools love AP tests, and others think they can do better without them. Some have excellent sports programs, and some are pretty pathetic. Some have a strong drug-use culture, but even that varies with pot vs adderall. Some have a huge emphasis on sexual exploration others are socially conservative. Some emphasize a revolutionary spirit of social justice. Some cost a lot, and some are free (except for your taxes). Some have 120 per class and others have 500+. Even the private schools vary by their high wealth cultures. Some have more parent participation. Some have advanced programs for gifted students, and others pretend gifted students don't need anything or even that the word is a dog whistle. Some kids need support for real learning differences like dyslexia, and schools vary wildly in their accommodations.
I think you're actually confusing the research in two ways. First it's clear that peers influence kids a lot. What you're missing is that a school (and town) is peer selection, making the parents the prime mover for the peer influence. The second is that the studies around school influence vs selection effects aren't done in private schools. There is no randomized lottery like charter schools, and the schools themselves never run the experiment (just like the Ivy League). The best we can say is it's probably a mix of both.
You're older than me, but I think I started my family before you did, so I write this with a sophomore in college, a junior in high school, and an 8th grader, living in the Bay Area. Do you think my kids would be the same if we were in rural Utah or Dublin Ohio or if I left the US?
Very well stated, Auren, and so relevant especially in these hi tech days. Your highlighting some human basics is valueable.