Difficulty of Ivy League Admissions

dufus3709
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:49:41 +0000

iwantfood: You can consider me an old man, and I can appreciate the irony of someone 17 years old saying that they have spent their entire lives working towards getting into an Ivy. However, I’m not stupid. I do understand how important this is to you and I’m trying to help. There are 1.2 million graduating seniors each year. Every valedictorian in every high school in the country thinks that they are going to Harvard. The parents, friends, and other people in the town can’t believe it when little Becky who had a 4.0 and 1450 on her SAT gets turned down. As long as you understand that it is a lottery even for the extremely well qualified, and that the odds are against you, and that there are at least a hundred colleges as wonderful as Harvard, and that you need to be thinking of schools in terms of their characteristics and not just their prestige factor, then I’m happy.

When you look back on this, you may realize that picking a husband/wife is more important than picking a school. Nobody evers tries this hard to get the right wife/husband. This has struck me whenever there is a discussion about the value of going to an Ivy. A lot of people seem to think that once you graduate from an Ivy, you life is complete and all you have to do is hang out for the rest of your life. Graduating from a top school with an undergrad degree will help you get your first job because the top companies recruit at the top colleges. After the first job though, success depends more on actual job performance. Except perhaps for lawyers, MD’s, prestigious MBA’s and other post-undergrad degrees, the idea of their being “connnections” is myth.