Well, I'm just an anecdote, but I think that's definitely true. I never made less than an A in high school and I made a perfect score on the ACT. I feel pretty

Well, I'm just an anecdote, but I think that's definitely true. I never made less than an A in high school and I made a perfect score on the ACT. I feel pretty confident that had I applied at a "top school" I would have had a fair chance of getting in. Maybe not - I probably would have been weaker on the non-academic admission requirements. I ended up going to a local community college for free and then transferring to a state university where eventually I got my graduate degree. I received several awards while there for academic performance, had some papers published with my name on them, and had a 4.0 again. Frankly it never even occurred to me to apply to other schools. I just wasn't interested and nobody talked about it. If you asked me now why I didn't, I couldn't really tell you. Looking back, I'm sure some of it was moving away from home. In retrospect I would have been worse off financially - the scholarship didn't hold past the CC, so I paid cash for the rest (I worked a _lot_) until I got a TA position and graduated debt free. I think though some people in SV would still look at that in askance though, and see that as saying something - "hey, this guy's not as motivated" or "this guy wouldn't be as dedicate as much of his life" and maybe that's true. In terms of work performance, though, I don't see a difference and I've always received extremely positive reviews. No doubt there are things I'm missing out on, like the kind of connections I might have made at a top school, but I'm doing pretty well for myself and I don't regret anything.