In the Bay Area, we treat education like a competition for the most prestigious logo. Yet, the only thing about “great” colleges is that they are great at convincing you that they are the only schools. We risk teaching an entire generation that their worth is tied to something that can be printed on a T-shirt.

I’ve seen people who worked their hearts out — who traded their hobbies and sleep to study endlessly for four years — to attend a prestigious school named after a famous figure. And they deserve to be there. But not all of them end up there. 

For every person standing under a school ceiling that reeks of success, there are 10 more who worked just as hard but sit in a classroom where the air conditioner doesn’t work, wondering if their sweat was worth even half as much because the logo on their shirt isn’t as famous. 

This illusion of success is fed to us every single day by social media, peers, parents and the community. Yesterday, I watched a video from our own school that reinforced that — the trend where college-bound students show the shirts they’re wearing on commitment day. Despite Los Altos High School seniors heading to hundreds of different schools, the video featured the same 20. It made getting an elite-ranked education look like the only options, as if “winning” high school is having the right letters across your chest. 

By allowing videos like these to represent our school, we’re accidentally telling students who aren’t featured that they’re invisible. As a community, we’ve decided that only people with logos will be seen on social media, leaving everyone else as background noise. We’re saying that their stories don’t matter as much, because it’s not where “most people” are going. 

But dreams don’t require a famous logo to be valid. Because the shirt is just fabric and the names are just ink — and every school is just one more place to work hard and learn lots. The “rest of us” are still here. They’ll graduate from schools that were not featured in the trend, and we’ll all go on to build the world. 

We have forgotten that getting into college is a match, not a win. Rather, going to college is like finding the right key to a lock or the right piece of a puzzle. You find a place where your specific way of thinking and your specific way of being actually fit. Yet we keep chasing the “win,” and spending our whole lives running towards something that doesn’t exist; running past every hobby, friend and normal-hour night of sleep that we really need.

As a school, we need to stop being a factory of prestige and start being a place where people can actually learn. We need to stop equating someone attending an “expensive” and “famous” college with them being “smarter.” Because true intelligence isn’t a trophy you collect at the admissions office, it’s the curiosity and drive you bring to an environment. Instead of looking at the print on a T-shirt, we should look at the person. At the end of the day, the world isn’t built by the name of the school you went to — it’s built by the people who show up. And that’s the only win that matters.