Last spring, we lost out on five or six bids for houses in Fancytown, New Jersey. We wanted Fancytown because there were a lot of over educated types there, like us, and a highly regarded school system. Problem is that every New York City expat also wanted to live in that town and we couldn’t afford the house of the crazy old man who had a thing for Elvis.

Instead, we moved to Bighair, New Jersey. Bighair is up and coming, but it’s not there yet. My block is especially blue collar. My neighbor, Linda, hollers out her window, “Dylan stop biting your bruddah!” And the men leave in their PSEG and constructive trucks every morning.

Steve and I have worried that our kids will be very different from their classmates and that they won’t have the same opportunities as the kids in Fancytown. We worried that Bighair High School wouldn’t funnel our kids into the most prestigious colleges. Russell Arben Fox posted his concerns about his daughter’s education recently.

Gregg Easterbrook just made me feel a little better. InWho Needs Harvard?, Easterbrook writes,

Today almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young people’s lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them. Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a super-selective college or university has never been greater.

But Easterbrook says that this fixation with the Ivies is misplaced. Studies have shown that kids who were accepted at the Ivies, but went to the next tier of schools (including SUNY-Binghamton, Kenyon, Oberlin, and several other of my favorite schools) did equally well. All the hasty pudding clubs and celebrity humor clubs of the Ivies did not buy their alums any greater financial success.

Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income “varied little, no matter which type of college they attended.” In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success.

Read the whole thing.