Only if you make it so. Good college/university means little in many jobs. The best devs for example (and most paid correspondingly since they knew their value very well) I've ever met were either coming out of subpar schools or skipped university altogether.

I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.

Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.