alt Hacker News> Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
> Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard
Define "good" and "top".
Ivies, Ivy Tier privates (Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, NYU, Caltech, Georgetown, CMU), and Ivy Tier public schools (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) all recruit from the same student body. Thanks to the Common App, UC App, Coalition App, and ApplyTexas it's marginal effort to apply to all the colleges above in addition to the "good" tier.
The Good tier of publics (the rest of the UCs, the rest of the Big 10, UTD, SJSU, CalPoly, NCSU, William&Mary, VT, Rutgers) and privates (Claremont Colleges, Seven Sisters, Vandy, etc) end up with plenty of kids who couldn't mkae it to the top which also makes them more competitive.
Outcomes at Good and Top are the same for most cases, but both are similarly competitive. The kind of profile that gets you into CS@UCR today would have gotten you into EECS@Berkeley a decade ago.