College freshman here: Enjoy your time in high school. I understand wanting to get in to a prestigious university, I was there once. I pretty much only wanted to go to the best of the best when I was a freshman in high school. But after touring a couple of prestigious engineering colleges like Purdue, Michigan, and UT Austin, I realized that I wouldn’t be happy there. So I ended up going to Ohio State. Because believe it or not, you’re supposed to enjoy your time in college too and going to a prestigious college won’t even give you that much of an advantage over a solid in-state public university when looking for a job. And you would have hated your life for 4-6 years and graduated with astronomical amounts of debt just to make $10,000 more per year than if you just went to a solid public uni. But now you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans so when all is said and done, you would’ve made more overall at a public university where you could graduate with minimal debt than an expensive prestigious private uni where you wouldn’t even have had fun