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Zvi comments on High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions - Less Wrong
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It surprises me how much my attitude to this post is "15 years from now, is it really going to matter that much what you did in high school to get into college?" AFAICT, academics are not that strongly related to long term career success, and that in the longer term, traits like conscientiousness and skills like working with others end up being more important. I wouldn't recommend to my child that they try to signal their worthiness to colleges and universities at the expense of actually acquiring skills.
Then again, I speak as someone in a field (nursing) where it really doesn't matter where you did your schooling; nobody cares. I get the impression that there are fields where it matters a bit more (like engineering) and fields where it might matter a lot more (like business, where most of the value of a prestigious college is in networking and building human capital anyway).
As JonahSinick notes, many high school students and their parents believe this both by stated and revealed preference, and I think they are correct although the magnitude of the effect is hard to pin down. If nothing else, however, if you greatly surpass the academic standards of a college, they will give you merit scholarships in order to get you to pick their college, and the amounts here can be very large especially if the alternative was being forced to borrow money at interest! Thus, signaling is at a minimum a paying job.