Sure, we can all agree you probably can’t sleepwalk through an elite and achieve great results. But the sort of kid who TODAY can get admitted to an elite is typically NOT lazy and unmotivated. Quite the contrary! FWIW, neither of my older kids met anyone that fit that description at their schools. Granted, just as at any other college, the students are not all paragons of virtue or perfect as far as psychological maturity. Some students abused substances. But even those kids still worked pretty darn hard. A student going to a less elite school does not get sprinkled with magic striver dust either. I love how the comparison made on these threads always ends up being between the lazy Ivy kid and the driven kid at the ordinary school, rather than between the motivated Ivy student versus the motivated non-elite school student.