I’m a teenager looking at colleges. High stats. I come from an upper MIddle Class suburb and an a white girl. I know, i know, I’ve had everything I could ever ask for. Very privileged.
I love to write, both creatively and journalistically, and am very interested in political activism. I consider myself an intellectual. I was looking on my bookshelf in my house and was Googling the names of the people who had written books about things like education, politics, or economics, who had worked in major advocacy organizations, etc. it was like: Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, etc, etc, etc. I kept tracking Wikipedia and it became increasingly clear that famous writers, intellectuals, and/or political advocacy workers who had not attended Ivy League schools were outliers. it made me worry that if I don’t get into a highly selective school like that, i won’t be able to be part of that sect in society. I know this is ridiculously irrational; there are many successes in life who did not attend the Ivies. my own parents did not. I suppose I’m just looking for empathy or thoughts. one theory I had is that it was far easier to get into Ivies back then, so perhaps today successful people will attend a larger range of schools. jealousy is a hard thing to combat. i must work on it.
@lightsgoout, I think the whole landscape has changed within the last 10 years, and there is a plethora of high stats kids who aren’t getting into schools that they would have gotten into years ago. As a result, the former second tier schools are getting filled with these incredibly gifted students, so they are no longer second tier. On another note, don’t worry about other kids, really. Just focus on being the best version of you that you can be, and keep working on improving yourself.
Those writers you respect are successful not because they went to Harvard, but they went to Harvard because they were successful. In other words, whatever they had was already there. If you’re driven, hard-working, and focused, you’re going to make a success of whatever career you choose, regardless of where you go to college.
I actually don’t think this is true. We humans are susceptible to confirmation bias: in other words, if we have already begun to believe something, we pay more attention to cases that help solidify that belief and disregard or pay less attention to the elements that don’t.
Even if we’re just talking about famous writers, intellectuals, and political activists who attend schools that are not Ivy League, we have Melissa Harris-Perry (Wake Forest), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Howard), Sean Hannity (dropped out of NYU), Scott Pelley (Texas Tech), Lesley Stahl (Wheaton College), Gwen Ifill (Simmons College), Charlie Rose (Duke), Katie Couric (University of Virginia), Diane Sawyer (Wellesley College), Meredith Vieira (Tufts), Thomas Friedman (Brandeis), Martha Nussbaum (NYU), Steven Pinker (McGill), Dick Cheney (University of Wyoming), Jared Diamond (UCLA), Patricia Hill Collins (Brandeis), Alan Greenspan (Juilliard/NYU), Elinor Ostrom (UCLA), Newt Gingrich (Emory), Hillary Clinton (Wellesley), Bonnie Erbe (Barnard), Jon Stewart (William & Mary), Stephen Colbert (Northwestern), and Joseph Stiglitz (Amherst).
And that’s excluding, of course, all of the famous non-North American intellectuals and writers and activists who went to non-North American universities.
Now, you will notice that elite/selective universities are overrepresented. That’s due to a couple of different reasons, not the least of which is that people who are famous and wealthy are more likely to have had parents who were famous or at least wealthy and had the resources to prepare and send them to elite universities. Selective colleges and universities do also have a range of resources and connections that tend to benefit alumni. But as you’ll see - both from this list and from doing some investigation - the list of schools that can provide those sorts of resources is far bigger than the 8 Ivy League universities and the handful of others floated alongside them.
I recently heard Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak and she received her undergraduate degree from Eastern Connecticut State University before doing graduate work at more selective universities.
If you want the feel of a very elite university, with top professors in every field, but don’t have the qualifications s to get into Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, etc., Try U of Michigan, U of Toronto, U of Edinburgh, & U of Wisconsin-Madison.