it really doesn't matter what you do in high school, as long as you get into the college you're aiming to get into.

That's a bit my point, but not entirely. I think that 10 or 20 years later, the specifics of what high schoolers did will almost never matter. (General high school work ethic and direction/ambition in life likely does matter, if only because it will correlate, in most people, with adult work ethic and ambition). To a lesser degree, 10 or 20 years down the road, it probably doesn't matter whether a student got into their top choice or second-or-third choice college. College admissions depend on a lot of random factors, like whether you were sick on the day of a high school exam worth 40% of your grade, and more time passing flattens out this randomness. Students with good work ethic and a strong direction in life will probably end up where they want to be anyway, once 10-20 years have passed. Students who don't really know what they want to do still won't know in 10 years even if they went to a prestigious college. Good work ethic and ambition is correlated with getting into prestigious colleges, but I would argue that there's less causation there than this article seems to imply.

This is just my impression, though, and I'm generally not that ambitious. It might be different for people at higher level of driven-ness and/or with different, more academic-based goals.

Vaniver: I said "it surprises me how much..." because I expect to agree with most LW posts, and I'm slightly surprised every time I don't agree. It's a good surprise.