<p>It has always been the case that the affluent are just going to have more opportunities. That is nothing new. It is what it is. We are not wealthy and made choices that worked for our family, given our finances. Both kids in engineering, and luckily had no problem getting through the calculus ,physics,etc. Both able to graduate in 4 years(well, S2 in May but no indication that’s not going to happen) . It would not have been fun if they had not been able to get through their courses and be able to graduate on time,that’s for sure.</p>
<p>“One student admitted to Harvard but rejected by MIT asked on the MIT forum “Is something wrong with me?” You can read this a hundred ways, but I read it as a plaintive, but sincere question.”</p>
<p>It’s clear that this question touched your heart, but the fact remains - someone who has been accepted by Harvard who is reading an MIT rejection as “something’s wrong with me” is either a) being melodramatic to gather praise or b) just wants to rack up multiple acceptances to make himself feel better instead of dancing in the streets over his tremendous good fortune in having such a great acceptance in hand. Either way, these aren’t positive character traits and I find abhorrent the idea that some students should be auto admits to “save” them from having to confront their own lack of absolute perfection. None of us are perfect, and none of us are going to get exactly what we want in life. I certainly understand expressing disappointment and licking one’s wounds. But in the real world, people have little tolerance for this kind of attitude.</p>
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<p>They should read [Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables
by Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger](<a href=“http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf”>http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf</a>)
Using the College and Beyond data set and National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972, we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools.</p>
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<p>There is an Ivy edge for Wall Street and consulting jobs, but there are many other good jobs.</p>
<p>“The problem is not that students don’t need to learn how to deal with failure in a healthy manner. We all do. The problem is that that particular essay question puts the student in the awkward position of trying to discern which of his faults or mistakes are safe to share with the very people he’s trying to impress, and which might disqualify him by being too grave or too trivial.”</p>
<p>Oh good grief. The point of the essay isn’t about the actual mistake - it’s about the PROCESS that one goes or went through to deal with it! That’s why it doesn’t matter whether it’s the silver medal instead of gold, or the burnt apple pie! I think you’re willfully missing the point of the essay. </p>
<p>And yeah, it’s a difficult task to do well. So? They’ve got 25000 applicants with stellar academics and scores, so here’s another screening task.</p>
<p>“There is an Ivy edge for Wall Street and consulting jobs, but there are many other good jobs.”</p>
<p>Except for kids rejected from MIT, who should just hang it up!</p>
<p>There is plenty of disdain. CC is full of people who take advantage of every single opportunity to proclaim that the elite schools aren’t all that. In fact they’re actually overrated. After all, it’s nearly impossible to flunk out of Harvard, practically all the Ivies have rampant grade inflation, their ranks are populated with underqualified athletes and legacies, and a well-known idiot [not my words] graduated from Yale! Besides there are plenty of other games in town where one will receive an equivalent or better education and have similar career prospects. Therefore, the aspiring Ivy student or parent is being a prestige hound, naive, provincial, narrow-minded, obsessive, or out of touch with modern reality. I could go on for hours.</p>
<p>Of course, the opposite position can sound equally obnoxious, and I hope I haven’t fallen into that either.</p>
<p>“Suppose my S had decided to go ahead and major in engineering anyway, despite the early signs he wasn’t as strong in math as in other academic areas–including the sign of getting rejected by MIT (my son didn’t really apply, but let’s pretend he did.) Let’s say he listened to those who say he should follow his dreams, do what makes him happy, blah blah. What if, after a year or two in the major, he was weeded out because he couldn’t hack the math component of the classes? Now he has to change majors, possibly meaning an additional semester or year.”</p>
<p>Certainly you’re aware that many kids become engineers without having taken Calc BC as a hs junior. You’re aware, of course, many hs don’t even offer Calc BC much less to juniors? I think you’re assuming a level of super human math skills needed to become an engineer and postulating that your son doesn’t have them for this hypothetical.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, #1973–The reason that I am arguing that MIT should admit all of the students who can be identified as “top” talent (barring disqualifying actions or attitudes on their part) is that I think the opportunity to attend MIT should be open to them. </p>
<p>MIT doesn’t know where else they applied. Back when I applied to MIT, my interviewer commented that I seemed more interested in science than in engineering (100% true) and that Harvard was a better choice for science. Perhaps he was trying to see whether I had applied there. In any event, I had never thought of applying to Harvard. In my area, MIT was thought to be for science and Harvard was for the humanities and social sciences. I wouldn’t be surprised if some out there think that now.</p>
<p>collegealum314 mentioned that students he knew were discouraged by MIT rejections. I think he put the rejections in proper context for them, and they continued in a STEM field. The recent digression that I have put up on the thread was just to say that I don’t think there is something wrong with a person who reacts that way, necessarily. I think this is a potential collateral effect of MIT rejecting top students, not the reason why they should not.</p>
<p>I think that “shift to plan B, while the investment in plan A is low, the odds of A succeeding appear to be very low, B is nearly equally attractive, and I am 18” is a perfectly ok response to the “failure” to be admitted to MIT.</p>
<p>Alternatively, the student might respond to rejection from MIT by putting it on his his/her resume as the undergrad institution anyway (much like Jones and Rensselaer).</p>
<p>the GFG - don’t look at me! I’ve never said that there’s grade inflation, boatloads of underqualified athletes and legacies, etc. I do think someone who expresses their desire as “I want to attend an Ivy” as opposed to “I want to attend a top /elite school” is a little unsophisticated and thinks that there is some magic dust that Ivies have that other top schools don’t, which is basically only relevant in the narrow world of Wall Street, but whatever … Nothing wrong with wanting to attend a top school, IMO. </p>
<p>But the attitude on here was that certain students, on the basis of certain tests, should be auto admits to MIT unless it can be proven they kick puppies, because their feelings are so special that they can’t handle what tons of other top students in other fields have to handle – being shut out of their top choice – doesn’t sit well. The response to “MIT is the only game in town” isn’t “yes, you’re right, lets change the policies so you don’t sulk.” The proper response is “indeed, there are plenty of games in town.”</p>
<p>I loved bovertine’s analogy of changing sexual orientation because you were rejected on a date.</p>
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<p>I think this reaction is probably short term and most students do move on in the emotional sense. But what I think may be more common for those rejected from MIT - and this is unique to MIT because it is a unique school - is students shifting their interest away from engineering towards finance and economics, perhaps. Either the student decides that they may not be “good enough” for engineering (at a high level; we’re talking about accomplished students who want to be at the top of the field), or because they are not surrounded by that sort of peer group, they shift their interest. The pressure to go into more lucrative fields such as finance is going to be greater at schools other than MIT. It’s definitely a tech focused culture at MIT which fuels and enriches these types of students. Don’t underestimate the power of this environment for this type of student. When QM says that it is “good for the country,” for MIT to accept the tippy top math students, I take it as let’s make sure they have the best opportunity to go into fields where they can help the country in some way, rather than use their talent to enrich themselves.</p>
<p>So what if we admit all the USAMO students and they all wind up becoming I bankers and only enriching themselves? Do they have to pledge to work on only socially beneficial research?</p>
<p>Thanks, Gourmetmom, post #1990, you’ve said it better than I could.</p>
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<p>Sure, we’ve all heard this kind of talk on CC. But no one on this thread is saying ANYTHING of the sort. To be honest, you do seem to be veering into the territory of the “equally obnoxious” “opposite position,” at least on this thread. You’ve said before what elite school admissions mean to your family, so I generally read your posts with that in mind. </p>
<p>There is a difference between shooting for elite school admissions and concluding that one is shut out of viable options for career and life success if one doesn’t get in (or even aspire to get in) to an elite school. I can’t imagine there is a parent on this board who is not concerned about career prospects for his or her kid who is graduating into this economy. Graduating from an elite school could be a hedge against that uncertainty to some extent (probably in some fields more than others). One needn’t be blind to that reality to believe that it is possible to succeed without an elite degree. In fact, one would have to be blind (at least where I live, and I can’t imagine this isn’t the case everywhere, even on the East Coast) to believe that elite school attendance is a requirement for success. Not everyone aspires to be in investment banking or on the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>PG–did you see I said I thought my son could have become an engineer? I do think, due to his difficulty with the spatial aspects of math in particular, he’d have struggled a good bit. As it was, he had a tough time with the lesser math needed for his major. Gourmetmom has it right about students like S wanting to be at the top of their field; they don’t want to just squeak by.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I think we cross-posted #1988 and #1989. In any event, my response to #1989 is in #1988. </p>
<p>absweetmarie #1993: I know several people who had to drop plans for an academic research career when it wasn’t working out. This didn’t bar them from “life success” in any way, nor from career success. </p>
<p>Earlier on this thread, there was a reference to the Langer lab at MIT. Langer has about 60 Ph.D. students and post-docs at any given time. The person Langer rates as #60 in his group (figuratively speaking! I know he doesn’t rank order his group!) will still have good prospects for a career in science, but is extremely unlikely to wind up with a faculty position at a research-intensive university, if that was the goal. Many in the Langer group are focused on entrepreneurship instead–great, but that’s a different situation.</p>
<p>I believe University of Houston produces more engineers than MIT and those engineers on average have similar salaries as those graduating from MIT, if they actually work in engineering.</p>
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<p>Let’s say this happens. Five times a year? Twenty-five? It is impossible to calculate the opportunity cost to the country (and I submit that the cost to society of five or 25 or 250 fewer engineers, even super-smart engineers, would likely be rather small even if one could calculate it). The person who chooses the other path, one presumes, is doing okay, whether that person decided to go into finance, pursue a law degree, become a radiologist, start a business or stay at home teaching his or her preschoolers number theory. As for the would-be academic, with spots being so sparse, isn’t it a good result if the herd of wannabe academics is thinned?</p>
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<p>Wall Street allocates capital, which is an important social function. Sometimes Wall Street makes mistakes, but the government has even worse track record. Think of Solyndra, for example. Investment banking and trading are socially beneficial. Some branches of science, for example string theory in physics, may have negative value, because they draw brilliant people but produce nothing of economic or even scientific value. Physicists Lee Smolin and Peter Woit have written books about this.</p>
<p>Kids get jobs for much the same reason they get into top schools- they present well, have the right experiences, have the right “get up and go” to find opps, pursue them and the right luck, in the face of competition. Why is that hard to understand? </p>
<p>My problem with the affluence issue is that- just as some here know rich kids who seem to easily acquire all the right opportunities- I know so many kids whose parents made money, prep kids- and yet these kids are at less pursued, less arduous colleges. At my kids’ hs, there is a drive to offer hs opps to strong grads of charter-type schools- and these kids are real winners, amazingly so. Several vals, at high prestige colleges, already into internships, great kids. They have the triple: academics, engagements (both in hs and in the community) and socially adept.</p>
<p>The particular essay Q about failure was changed.</p>
<p>QM, I also think a kid is allowed to mourn not getting into MIT- but the corresponding mistiness among smart adults on this thread is baffling. How often does a sympathy vote really work? The idea of “winner” includes how one picks up after a defeat.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, Please don’t tell me that Sheldon and Leonard on the Big Bang Theory are not producing anything of economic or scientific value! They do seem to have alot of time on their hands! :)</p>