Last week, I took Dayu to a college admissions presentation. On the way home, I asked what he remembered. He said: "Harvard's acceptance rate is only 4%."

I asked him: "When you hear that Harvard's acceptance rate is only 4%, what do you think?"

He said: I want to work hard.

"Wanting to work hard is a good thing," I said. "But let me ask you one more question: have you ever thought about the other 96% — what are they like?"

I told Dayu: most people will be in that 96%. But that doesn't mean they're not excellent. It doesn't mean they didn't work hard. And it doesn't mean they can't do what they're genuinely capable of.

I also told him: I'm not going to raise you by trying to improve your chances at any particular school. My first hope is that you become a kind person. That you can genuinely feel happy for a friend who gets into Harvard — happy for them becoming part of that 4%. And second, I hope you become someone with real ability — someone who actively solves problems, who creates value for others and for the world. When that happens, an acceptance letter won't define who you are, won't determine how far you go, and won't limit how high you can fly.

He said he also remembered the impressive accomplishments of the students featured in the presentation. I asked him: "Did you notice that all those kids were already extraordinary before they ever met an advisor? An advisor can add wings — but you have to be the tiger first. A rabbit, even with wings attached, can't carry the weight of the king of beasts."

Don't misunderstand — I'm not saying "don't aim for elite schools." Elite schools aren't useless; their value depends on who you are and where you're starting from. For first-generation college students, for families without connections or networks, the relationships and platforms that elite schools provide are real and tangible returns. Research has confirmed this repeatedly. For those families, reaching for a better school is entirely rational.

Take my own story. I built everything from scratch — funded my own education in the US, stayed to build a career entirely on my own. Dayu is a second-generation student in America. After years of building a life in a foreign country, investing everything I have in my own and Dayu's education, it's natural that the goal I've set for Dayu is a school at Harvard's level. I don't think wanting elite schools is mercenary, and I'm not embarrassed to say it — it's a topic Dayu and I discuss openly. But I'm not anxious about it. Because I'm clear on one thing: I'm reaching for the network that lasts a lifetime, not a school name to post on social media.

Then I asked Dayu: So what is your college goal?

He said: My goal is definitely an elite school at Harvard's level. But I won't put my expectations there — I'll just put my effort there. That way, if I get in, I'll be genuinely surprised. And if I don't, I won't be disappointed, because I worked hard and my abilities will have reached that level.

I didn't teach him to say that. It grew naturally — from one conversation after another, slow and steady, the way things quietly take root and become one's own way of seeing the world.

Many years ago, I tried to reassure a parent who was anxious about her child's admissions. She said: you can talk like this now because your child is still young. When it's your turn, you'll be just as anxious. I smiled and let it go.

Without quite realizing it, I've been in education for more than 25 years. My first students have long since grown up, graduated, entered the workforce. I'm more and more certain: a child who is built on a solid foundation rarely goes wrong. Those who accomplish great things have character; those who dream big and aim high — the path shows itself beneath their feet.

Besides these things, there are other reasons I'm not anxious about whether Dayu makes it into an elite school. They don't come from intuition — they come from decades of empirical research.

01 Elite Schools and Rankings May Not Be What You Think

Here's a finding that might also bring you some relief.

An organization called Gallup tracked more than 30,000 college graduates to figure out what actually determines whether someone thrives years after graduation — whether they're engaged in their work and living well. The results surprised many people. Whether you attended an elite school, or how highly ranked that school was, had almost no relationship with these outcomes. What actually doubled a person's chances of "thriving" after graduation came down to a few other things:

• In college, they encountered a professor who genuinely cared about them and lit a spark in them.
• They had a mentor who guided them.
• They worked on a long-term project.
• They had an internship where they actually used what they'd learned.

A research team affiliated with Stanford University (Challenge Success) surveyed more than 100,000 high school students and reached the same conclusion: how selective a school is has no significant relationship to how much students learn or how happy they are in the future.

And then there's income — the calculation most of us run.

Economists Dale and Krueger conducted a clever study. They specifically looked at students who had been admitted to the same elite schools, but chose to attend more ordinary ones — and compared them to students who actually went to elite schools. The finding: once you account for the student's own ability, attending an elite school made almost no difference in future earnings.

What actually mattered was the student who had the confidence to apply to an elite school in the first place. Which name was on the sweatshirt turned out not to matter very much. What has a greater influence on income is what you study — not where you study it.

What about all those impressive alumni lists from elite schools? Here's a truth worth seeing clearly: elite schools "produce" accomplished people largely because they select the most exceptional, most well-resourced students at the front door — not because they transform ordinary students into extraordinary ones.

So when we see "acceptance rate only 4%," we shouldn't read it as "my child isn't good enough." A lot of those 4% spots simply weren't open to most applicants to begin with.

02 The Name-School Pressure Tightens Most Around the Child

Sociologists have studied a particularly subtle "success yardstick" in Chinese and Asian-American families: straight A's, an elite college, graduate school, then doctor, lawyer, or engineer — a short list of respectable professions. The frame is narrow enough that a child who earns an A-minus can feel like a failure.

The narrower the frame, the more children are guaranteed to fall outside it.

This sustained "must be better" pressure has a cost. As I've written before, psychological research has placed "children raised under high-achievement pressure" among high-risk populations deserving special attention — rates of anxiety and depression in this group are not low. The source of that pressure is often the sentence children swallow silently: "I can do it, therefore I must."

There's something even more hidden at work. When a child's goals are borrowed — from a parent's mouth, from a ranking list, from what the neighbor's kid is doing — those borrowed goals tend to be returned upon entering college.

Returned as: "I don't like this major." "I don't know why I'm here." "I want to take a gap year."

Psychology offers an important finding here: a choice driven by external pressure and adults' need to look good quietly erodes the commitment and perseverance a child needs after they arrive on campus. Only a choice the child genuinely participated in — one they truly own — will carry them through the hard stretches.

Our generation of Chinese parents has often outsourced judgment to a ranking list. Surveys show that roughly 70% of Chinese international students list "school ranking" as the most important factor in choosing a college — treating the U.S. News and QS lists almost as scripture.

But can a ranking measure the quality of a student-professor relationship? Can it measure a sense of belonging? Can it measure whether this specific child, at that specific school, will be able to sleep at night, smile, keep going? The answer is obvious.

03 How to Slowly Loosen This String

Loosening the string doesn't mean telling your child not to be ambitious. It means directing that energy toward things that actually matter. Here are a few things we can actually do.

Closing

Back to what I said to Dayu: you have to be the tiger first.

What I truly hope for him — and for every child — is that their worth does not depend on any single acceptance letter.

This string called "only elite schools will do" — we need to loosen it. Only when we do will children have the space to grow into everything they're capable of becoming.

In the end, what we're looking for, for our children, is a place where they can keep being themselves and keep moving forward.

I want to close with a line that has long inspired me:

An eagle standing steadily on the highest branch doesn't rely on how sturdy that branch is. It rests easy because it knows it has a pair of wings it can open at any moment.

That pair of wings — that's exactly what we can give our children. Help them believe: no matter which branch they land on, they can fly.

Applications are the outcome. Growth is the purpose.

(Next up is the main piece: The Science of School Selection. Now that we've loosened this string, I've broken down how to choose step by step into seven actionable steps.)