Liz Weston

Getting into an Ivy League school is basically a lottery for smart kids. There are no guarantees. Winning admission at many highly-regarded public universities is easier, but only by comparison. UCLA accepts about a quarter of its applicants, instead of the single digit acceptance rate at Harvard or Yale.

Look outside that privileged circle of “name brand,” well-known schools, though, and it’s a whole different universe. Most colleges are worried about getting enough students to enroll, not about how many they can turn away. The competition is particularly tough for small- to medium-sized private colleges that don’t have fat endowments. You can read “College is a now a buyer’s market,” my Reuters column this week, for more.

Here’s another fact you may have missed when reading breathless media accounts of “how hard it is to get into college”: where you go matters a lot less than your experience while you’re there. Elite schools apparently offer no advantage it comes to success in life.

I attended a small private college in the Pacific Northwest: Pacific Lutheran University. My alma mater recently named me one of its distinguished alumni. I was honored to be part of this impressive group, which included best-selling author Marissa Meyer and Air Force flight nurse/helicopter pilot Ed Hrivnak, who wrote the book “Wounded” about his experiences in Iraq and who was one of the first responders to the Oso landslide disaster in Washington state.

Research indicates a good reason for our success after school was the relationships we had with our professors. They weren’t far away creatures at the bottom of some cavernous lecture hall. They were accessible, they taught in small classrooms and they cared about our progress.

It’s only in the past few years that I’ve fully appreciated my college experience. For years I wondered if I should have attended a name-brand school. (I was accepted as a transfer student to Stanford, but opted not to go, since the financial aid office offered loans rather than the scholarships and grants I got at PLU.) Now I’m really glad I studied where I did.

So my advice to families contemplating college: open your eyes, and look beyond the name brands. There are some real gems out there that will be happy to have your kids and that will give them what they need to succeed.