What are your long term goals?
Regardless of where you go or might have gone, why do you want to go to go to college? You already have a successful business, so what’s the point of it all?
^ Very interesting question. Not to imply you shouldn’t bother with college (clearly some shouldn’t), but what are your goals and dreams? Will any of they schools prevent or aid those dreams and, if so, how?
I think you’ll find it’s really more about you than the actual school. That said, all of the schools you list (admitted, rejected, waitlisted) will provide you with the opportunity for an excellent education, alumni network, research (if that’s of interest), “college experience”, etc. They are all highly selective which means you will be surrounded by lots of very smart and motivated kids.
As someone pointed out, you won the admissions game. Congrats!
Make a decision and focus on making that the best decision by crushing it going forward.
If you really want to shoot for the Ivies, you still can. Accept the best school from your current list that will give you a gap year. Then do something amazing over the next year and apply to the Ivies next year. It’s been done before. Successfully.
Worst case is you get rejected from all of them. But at least you’ll find out. And you’ll still have this year’s top choice to fall back on.
Sounds like you had some great choices and also got rejected or waitlisted from some others. So now you are angry at yourself and this is all you have been thinking about. I also think you need to move on. Its hard when so many people are stuck at home but you can make a choice to start thinking about other things. Your pattern of acceptances doesn’t suggest that you undershot by any means.
Hooks are things largely beyond your control (being full pay, URM, legacy, etc), so I wouldn’t assume your project would have made up for lowish stats. And admission to ivies isn’t exactly a crapshoot. If you feel strongly about it take a gap year and reapply. Or apply there for grad school.
The funny thing is that I don’t know that you’d get any better college experience at an Ivy than at the schools you got into:
Wash U - top 20, phenomenal school, same residential college system as Harvard & Yale
Emory - a Southern Ivy, big city powerhouse like Harvard, Columbia, & Penn
Tufts - named by Forbes as one of the top 5 colleges “worth every penny”. Dartmouth was the only Ivy in the top 5.
Wellesley - best women’s college in the country, top 5 LAC
Middlebury - top 10 LAC, might be the best place in the country to study a foreign language
Colby - another top 10 LAC where the focus is on undergrads and you will be taught but professors, not TAs or grad students.
Depending on your goals or interests, these are all colleges that might be a better pick than one of the Ivies for a high quality undergrad experience and to accomplish your goals.
Getting into just one Ivy is an incredible reach for anyone. Had you applied, your chances would have been about the same as being struck by lightning. Start with Harvard where there were 42,000+ applicants and 2000 were accepted. Almost all of the 40,000 rejected had incredible credentials, resulting in applicants with perfect scores being rejected. Check out the Harvard wait list thread or that of any of the other Ivies for those stories.
Agee with @Bill Marsh that checking out any specific Ivy League waitlist threads may help OP to better assess her situation.