To all of you who are about to receive Dear Johns from your top choices, take heart, history advises that people – not colleges – create successful, exciting, productive lives.

To all of you who are about to receive love letters from your top choices, take warning, history advises that people – not colleges – create successful, exciting, productive lives.

“Recognize that your own motivation, ambition and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma,” says the legendary Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton University economics professor whose distinguished studies on the effects of college are often cited.

“That you go to college is more important than where you go,” says Krueger, and who better to make his point than Steven Spielberg.

UCLA rejected Spielberg’s application to attend its celebrated film school. Determined, the puny, bespectacled Saratoga High School senior went to Long Beach State in a bid to transfer up to the University of Southern California’s film school.

This remains one of the few Spielberg scripts that didn’t sell; USC rejected his application. At Long Beach State, Spielberg made five movies before graduating and much of the rest you have seen in theaters near you.

It’s like Krueger says, it’s not about where you go to college it’s about what you do there and that holds true for the students who are going to the most select schools.

Jay Mathews, a very funny writer, who scribbles a column on education for the Washington Post, and who admits to suffering from Ivyholism, an addiction to the notion that big name schools make the difference, noted, despite this debilitating condition:

“Brand-name schools produce many graduates who are just average, and worse: The Harvard alumni reports are full of the same bad news you hear at any college reunion – emotional illness, alcoholism, broken marriages, ennui.”

Mathews encourages people to take a good look at European, Asian and African students who are thrilled to be at any American college or university. He says they’re overjoyed because, “unlike us, they have figured out that it doesn’t matter where you go to college in America, as long as the place conforms to your desires and needs.”

In short, it’s about you the student and what you do with your time at college rather than what’s afforded to you at college. Getting into your top choice will only work wonders if you work wonders, and you can work wonders, as you well know, wherever you decide to turn it on.

Paula Marantz Cohen, who teaches English at Drexel University and whose latest novel, Jane Austin in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SAT’s, asks the question, “If getting into an elite college isn’t a matter of life and death; why do we think it is?”

She notes that a lot of parents believe that a superior school will help to protect their children from many of the world’s growing troubles that we witness daily on TV.

Cohen calls this growing fear that the world will foil our children in unforeseen ways, apocalyptic angst. “This anxiety has always been around,” she writes, “but it greatly increased during the Vietnam era when it became clear that money and heavy artillery were not enough to protect our children.

“The uncertainty and vulnerability that are that legacy have only increased with the threat of terrorism. Thus, the college decal on a car is a talisman against harm,” Cohen wrote.

For those of us who want to give our college bound kids more than a lucky rabbit's foot: First, tell them it's their job to sort out their lives; second, remind them that any college campus provides an extraordinary opportunity to do that; and third, offer the support that is needed to help them develop the integrity and independent spirit needed to succeed.

“Very few of our heroes,” Mathews wrote, “went to Princeton: Martin Luther King Jr., went to Morehouse, Colin Powell, City College of New York, Warren Buffet, Nebraska-Lincoln, Rudy Giuliani, Manhattan, Oprah Winfrey, Tennessee State, Ken Burns, Hampshire, Muhammad Ali did not attend college.”

So here’s what you do – whether you’re going to a big name school or a school that you have to say twice before people wish you good luck.

Keep your grades up, get involved in student activities that reflect your interests, take on leadership roles when possible, and find internships or work in your field of study.

A student, who graduates from a “third-tier college” and who has made five movies, written eight scripts, created a film newsletter and found summer work in a studio, is in a better position to find work than the student who graduates from a prestigious film school and who is completing his first script.