You're reading her (and the Harvard article if you read it) the wrong way, I think. The intended message is not "stay where you are." It's not telling you or your kids not to work hard. It's not telling you not to invest in the education of your kids. It's not telling you that Stanford/Harvard is completely unattainable so forget about it. (Actually elite universities in recent years have made HUGE strides in making themselves more accessible. They've raised millions and millions of dollars in endowment so that they can make family finances almost no barrier to affordability.)
It's trying to tell you that Stanford is not the brass ring. It's trying to give some advice on how to raise not just materially successful but emotionally whole adults. That's because elite universities have seen close up what is happening to an alarming number of these students. And they are trying to find ways to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. It is a serious challenge for them. Since so many want to come through their doors in the belief that they are exactly the brass ring or at least a ladder placed right up against the brass ring.
They also want parents to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
I'll give you one small example of what I am thinking about. When I was a kid, and maybe when you were too, good high schools offered maybe one or two AP courses. The best students took them, mostly during senior year. There are kids now a days who start taking AP courses during sophomore or junior year. Kids who graduate with 9,10, 11 AP courses to their credit.
Ask yourself why that is. Do they do this because they are brilliant and ready to start taking a college load as juniors? Some probably are like that, but most are not. They do it because they think it will give them a leg up in the college rat race. Where do they get this idea. In part the colleges are to blame. But so are parents, high school guidance counselors and also private, for pay counselors -- can't leave them out. These kids are push and pushed told to speed up by so many voices. A good number of students actually struggle mightily in these course. And frankly, I suspect that many of these courses are not taught nearly as well as they would be at a strong university. Not trying to knock HS teachers in saying this.
Do you think college and universities WANT students to have 9 or 10 AP courses? Not really. They tend to think that students would be better off taking many of these courses from college level faculty. Not that they are totally against AP course - -they do give credit for it, after all. But where does the relentless pressure for more and more AP come from. Lots of places -- including parents, but also teachers, and counselors, as I've already mentioned, but also school boards, chasing that designation as a top performing school.
Nobody stops and thinks about the overall effect of this speed up on the kids. Universities are trying to figure out ways to give students clearer signals of what they are about, what it takes to succeed in them.
One of the things they want kids and parents to do is to give kids more space to develop their own, authentic selves and not merely to be resume builders and super driven over achievers. They want kids to be given space to develop genuine passions that fit into a whole self, not just a self focused on grabbing the brass ring of prestige.
Students and their parents vastly overestimate the marginal benefit of a little bit more prestige in a university education. They are so, so consumed with finding the right school, etc, etc. It needs to calm down. It's chewing up these kids. Hard for universities to play a role in calming it down, but they really are trying.
It's very tricky because one of the things is that as we have become more of meritocracy -- so that family connections and all that have less to do with where you go to college than they once did --- parents -- especially middle, upper middle class and wealth parents (with more of this happening as you move up the income scale) have devoted their resources to making their kids have more merit -- thus the SAT cram courses, the personal trainers. It's not like parents are being unreasonable in taking this approach. But it has unexpected costs. And the unexpected costs are very steep. The dean has seen the cost very, very up close and rightly wants to try to alert parents and their children to some of that.