I think the obsession is a function of affluence, culture and region. Some of those are intertwined. I think certain cultures who very much value the quality of education see only what they perceive as the best as acceptable. Less than that is seen at best as compromise and at worst failure.
The more affluent the parent or at least perceived affluence the more entitled SOME become. They have have made investments in their children and want those investments to pay off. A smaller contigant of people are obsessed are those who are lower or middle class who see the well endowed Ivys as a means to afford an education. Students perceive if they âfailâ to get in they will have to settle some for CC.
Finally is the region the students are from. I think there is far more âIvy Envyâ in the northeast than in most parts of the country though with the common app etc. itâs reach is expanding. There are far more students in CA worrying about getting into their desired UC school than most of the rest of the country.
The northeast I think has an interesting mixture of all of these factors. As a whole it is more affluent than much of the rest of the country. It also has more alumni from these schools who were accepted when acceptance rates were by current standards much higher. They tend to prepare their kids for top schools at a very young age establishing the expectations.
A couple of other things affecting this is the whole concept of ranking in the first place. It has taken what was largely a regional obsession and made it more national. Finally, is the idea that college is the end goal rather than a means to an end. I think for some students the image they reflect is more important than the future they wish to create.
Personally, I was somewhat inoculated from this due to having been steeped in the Ivy world pretty much since birth, so my attitude going into all this was pretty much "Fine, great, BUTâŠnot for everyone.
But some other things helped me refine and articulate that attitude to those around me. Following is a hodge-podgy bullet list. Mix and match as needed:
Jacques Steinberg's The Gatekeepers: Great write-up of what "holistic" admissions is all about. Useful for recognizing how quirky the process is, and not getting any fixed ideas about who's in, who's out. I also attended a presentation of his where he made a really good case for NOT concentrating all hopes and dreams on "top" schools.
Appropriate cynicism about ranking systems. Read up on what drives the rankings. Ask yourself if that's what's going to matter to you or your kid's academic experience. Understand how they can be gamed.
Math: If "top" schools are so hard to get into, and it is so hard to find a "top" academic job, well, where do you think all those other people are landing? That's right, in all the other pretty damn good schools. Not getting into a "top" school is not the same as being sentenced to four years with subpar pears and subpar professors.
Laws of attraction. Do you REALLY want to go to school with all the OTHER people who are Ivy-obsessed? Maybe. But also maybe not.
Getting in is only half the battle. Learn about the stories of kids who drove themselves hard to get in to these schools, and the burned out once they were there. Better to pace yourself, savor high school, develop as a human being, and then choose the school that meets you where you are. For some, that may well be an Ivy, for others, not so much. You'll get where you're going regardless (see Bruni, above).
Remember that "name recognition" can be both highly regional and driven by irrational factors such as sports teams, myth, etc. Be smarter than all that.
Our school normally sends about a dozen kids to the Ivyâs each year. This year, the pattern was different. With what was a strong class, we had fewer Ivy matriculationâs, but more kids attending non-Ivy top 20 schools.
I was a senior at one of the top rated universities when rankings first began to be published. The conversation among some of my friends went like this:
âHey it says here that we are among the top X% of college students in the whole country!â
âWell if thatâs the case, our country is in big trouble!â
For families who are under certain income/asset levels, I think itâs a great thing to attend Ivy League or similar colleges because they give you a near free education because these schools have good financial aid. For people who can afford the tuition, there is a prestige involved just like why people buy Benz. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get into one of top-ranked schools but the problem is when you donât get in, you have to learn to adjust and proceed with a positive attitude. And you have to select good safety schools and make sure you have different options. You have to take a very business like attitude about this such as âIf no Plan A, then Plan B; if not Plan B, Plan C.â We had up to Plan D going into this college admission adventure.
Having said this, I am generally against people applying to too many Ivies or similar type; imo you should apply to only 2 top reach schools at the most.
The problem then is someone will show them a list of the Presidents in the past century, and what colleges (and professional schools) they attended. Apart from Warren Harding, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, itâs a pretty prestige-heavy list.
True, @JHS, but professional/graduate school is a different beast. Many of the elite professional/graduate programs are considerably easier to get in to now (or are at least more certain) than the tippy-top American undergraduate programs for those who can get great test scores and great grades and are driven.
Thus a reason to not stress out/kill yourself in HS and to hone skills & interests that will serve you well in life. If you do awesome in the marketplace/workplace, trust me, HBS/Stanford/Wharton will want you.
@PurpleTitan : Itâs a pretty prestige-heavy list at the undergraduate level, too, although there are a few people (like Nixon) who only got prestige degrees for law school (not that there is anything low-class about Whittier).
Here are the undergraduate colleges of Presidents in the past century: Johns Hopkins, Ohio Central, Amherst, Stanford, Harvard, [none], West Point, Harvard, Texas State, Whittier, Michigan, Annapolis, Eureka, Yale, Georgetown, Yale, Columbia, Penn. Itâs hardly a monolithic list, but itâs not great evidence that a prestigious college doesnât matter.
Also, itâs a little misleading to say that many of the elite professional programs are easier to get into now than the corresponding undergraduate programs. Sure, 12% (Harvard Business School) or 9% (Yale and Stanford Law Schools, and Stanford Business School) are âconsiderablyâ higher acceptance rates than the <5% undergraduate admission rates. But because students applying tend to have longer resumes, and there is more agreement on the value of various credentials to an application, there are fewer applications that are complete shots-in-the-dark, too. Nine percent, or 12% or even 16% (Harvard Law School) are very low acceptance rates, and no one, least of all a high school senior, can count on meeting that standard years into the future.
One way to tackle this problem is to educate the parents and students about COLLEGES. Many people from other countries think a college is a glorified high school and definitely inferior to a university. Consequently, they wonât even allow their children to apply to top LACâs. That is starting to change, but even so they will limit them to Williams and Amherst. My Sâs best friendâs parents did not want to allow her to attend Dartmouth for that reason, and they only let her apply to Dartmouth because she convinced them it was an Ivy lol.
That said, I have to say that sometimes itâs hard to ignore the different reactions you get as a parent about the kid that went to an Ivy or Stanford, compared to the kid that is going to a good LAC that no one ever heard of or confuses with a low-ranked university.
@JHS: Yes, but my main point is that graduate school admissions are more within your own control, and many grad/professional school admissions are more stats-wise than undergrad, so it makes more sense to focus on doing stuff that will prepare you to succeed in life than to get in to certain undergrad programs.
High schools really need to set a time in late junior / early senior year that allows kids to take a computerized survey about what attributes they are looking for in a college, and then have the computer give them a list of 20 or so matches. You have to spend four years of your life there, you need to look at more than prestige. Incidentally, I have a kid who has no interest in Ivies or small LACs. A Google search of top honors colleges produced a list for her to start her search. Not one of those universities would have otherwise been on her radar, but quite a few meet her list of demands.
Isnât increasing income inequality a driver? I.e. there is an increasing perception that the economy is becoming more of an âelite or peonâ economy, and that âfast track to Wall Street or consultingâ schools are much more desirable than others, because both parents and kids see more downward than upward mobility otherwise.
Increasing income inequality also means that the wealthiest can pay more for college and preparation for their kids, fueling the âarms raceâ.
I think another contributor to the Ivy-worship is grade inflation and the growing number of people scoring higher on standardized tests. In 1997, 956,000 students took the ACT with 74 achieving a perfect 36. In 2014, 1,845,787 took the ACT with 1407 receiving a perfect 36 (I contribute this to far more test preparation and the number of people taking the test multiple times). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_(test) If that is extrapolated over the top 10% then far more students today are receiving high scores on the ACT and I would venture the SAT would be the same.
Students with these score have different expectations than students with more average scores. Assuming that the scores for the top 10% of scores remains the same there would have been about 90,000 students in the top 10% in 1997, today that will be at least 185,000. This means much more competition for the fixed number of top schools. Students attitudes toward their achievements havenât changed as fast as the reality. Universities by necessity have to find ways to discriminate the far greater number of applicants who are high academic achievers. I think this partially explains the parents and students on CC who question what they did wrong.
On the flip side their are far more of those who take the ACT (and SAT) who are not academically ready for college. The average ACT scores have changed little. Just like there are far more students who do well there are also far more students who do poorly.
Canât resist this solution. Move to the Midwest.
Enough top tier flagships that east/west coast schools off the radar for most students- even the gifted ones. After (too many) years on CC I canât help but notice how many small schools in a geographically small region with a huge population there are on the east coast. Totally different college mindset.
Fast track to Wall Street or consulting is a narrow window even for the kids who go to the chosen schools. Its a little like the parents who think their kid will play pro sports (or even get an athletic scholarship to college). Some do but most donât. Even the incredibly great kids.
Even outside of the Wall Street and consulting goals, many students and parents (not always correctly) assume that more selective or exclusive colleges greatly improve the chances of going into other desired jobs and careers.
Also, the long odds of making it into professional sports does not seem to deter parents from spending and doing quite a bit to support their kidsâ sports interests. The chances are somewhat better for athletic recruiting for college, although that may be less valuable than otherwise assumed, if the intersection between colleges interested in recruiting the student and colleges otherwise suitable (in academic offerings, costs even if there are athletic scholarships, etc.) may have few colleges in it.
As far as the number of students getting perfect or near perfect scores⊠itâs primarily the H1B Asian kids here in CA.
âactually itâs everywhere now.
Just google a list of the names of National Merit Finalists.
Whether anyone wants to face it or not, the rather recent influx of STEM oriented, ultra-competitive, less than top 1% is not good enough Asian families have changed the game of college admissions (and high school).
These are the kids who retake the ACT because they âonlyâ got a 33 or 34.
@intparent
Being a college admissions counselor is not the solution. (I am one.) They remain unconvinced. They become convinced when, after spending mega time, money,and swear, their children get no offers from âelitesâ but offers from other great schools, thereâs no choice left. Then the child goes to Great School and ends up in same great career with same great opportunities that the parents insisted were only available with a more âprestigiousâ diploma. Then the parents finally get it. Thatâs been my experience