No.
That is the absolutely wrong way to look at it.
Lotteries are based on luck with no evaluation about whether or not you should win - poor people win the lottery, rich people win the lottery, previous winners win the lottery.
The admissions group makes a determination about who gets in. They don’t flip a coin or throw a dart at the board. They look at the application and make a decision. That determination may be on the slightest of differences, but it is based on a difference. They had a preference for one applicant over another.
Now, as to the larger pool, if what they say is true about filling the class 3x and is not just a way to let people down gently, then that means of of the pool only about 24% were qualified (8% admit rate x 3). Which means that 66% were not and essentially had 0% chance. Those people could look at it and say “I have an 8% chance, why not?”. and you see a lot of that on CC and in high schools.
It is more important to think of it as a non-deterministic process. Thinking that you checked off all the boxes is wrong since you don’t have any idea of the relative weighting of the boxes, the specifics of the applicant pool, the timing of the reviews and the mix. USAMO finalist? Great! Oops, they had already admitted 15 other USAMO finalists during EA. There goes that differentiation.
“…once you’ve done your best and submitted your app, it is best to think of it as a lottery. Rather than a Reflection Upon Your Self-Worth as a Human or The Only Fitting Reward for Your Hard Work or as Your Just Due in Life That Shan’t be Given to Anyone With a Lower SAT Score” -PG
This should be required reading for every new CCer, parent and child.
Yes and no.
Agreed that it isn’t a reflection of your self worth, etc.
However, it is wrong to think of it as a lottery since it totally deprives someone of real self reflection and is more symptomatic of “every one is a winner, here is your participation trophy!”
It is much healthier to acknowledge that adcoms have determined that you are not as good a fit as the people who they decided to admit, and then move on, vs. an attitude of “oh well, I lost in a lottery”.
Ya know, maybe the elites really should choose by lottery, after applicants meet some baseline requirements (If they want to keep AA, they can do hooked applicants in separate lotteries). Who gets in and who doesn’t probably wouldn’t look any less mysterious or arbitrary than it does now, but the selection process might feel more fair to prospective students.
Why would anyone be surprised by the results of such as list. Stanford has been the most selective school in the country for the past three years, and Harvard perhaps for the past 300 years?
The process can be both highly selective and entirely NON-random. The lottery analogy is pure non-sense.
Okay I just spliced what I liked from PG’s statement, so sorry if that made it look weird, but I think the sentiment would be helpful to a lot of people on CC who are bewildered or feel cheated by the selection process. To a lot of them it feels random. It often looks random to me, too…sometimes as random as a lottery pick would be. Everybody scratches their heads on CC over what the elusive magic formula for admissions might be. Well, you know what? Maybe there isn’t a formula at all, just gut level responses and subjective feelings that guide the process after the requisite GPA and SAT thresholds have been established. Go read a Harvard results thread. You will see one kid with a 1910 and a 3.7 who gets in (unhooked) and another with a 2400 and a 4.0 who doesn’t. Both similar ECs. What was the magic formula for admission? I’m not even sure the adcoms could tell you. I remember when I turned in one chapter of my dissertation to my advisor (many years ago) for review. He absolutely trashed it! So, I changed about three sentences and a little punctuation and resubmitted it (a little experiment on my part). Guess what? He raved about it! He gushed over the new version: 'What an improvement!" (LOL) Maybe he was in a better mood. Maybe he got a raise. Who knows? But the submitted chapters were essentially the same. I am not convinced that the selection process for elite colleges is any different (again, after the aforementioned thresholds). That feels pretty random from the standpoint of the applicant.
Too much Ivy worship around here. To those who didn’t get in, of course it’s a lottery. To those who did, of course it isn’t, it’s 100% due to their greatness.
Take a look at some of these losers who didn’t go to an Ivy undergrad, they’re everywhere and gasp, seem to be doing well, how is that possible?
Business:
Warren Buffett – UNE
Jack Welsh (retired CEO, GE) – UMass(Amherst)
Jamie Dimon (CEO, JP Morgan) – Tufts
Bob Iger (CEO, Disney) - Ithaca College
Allan Mullaly (CEO, Ford) - UKS
Howard Schultz (CEO, Starbucks) - Northern Michigan
Phil Knight (Founder, Nike) - UOR
Bernard Marcus (Cofounder, HomeDepot) - Rutgers
John Paulson (Hedge fund king) - NYU
IT:
Sergei Brin - UMD
Larry Page - UMI
Jan Koum (founder of Whatsapp) - San Jose State
Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder) - Washington State
Evan Williams (cofounder of Twitter) - UNE (dropped out)
Michael Dell - UT Austin(dropped out)
Larry Ellison - UIUC (dropped out)
Steve Wozniack (cofounder, Apple) - UCB
Steve Chen (cofounder, YouTube) - UIUC
John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) - UWV
Andrew Grove (Founder, Intel) - CUNY
Tim Cook (CEO, Apple) - Auburn
Entertainment:
Steven Spielberg - Long Beach State
Oprah Winfrey - Tennessee State
Anne Hathaway - NYU
Kristin Davis - Rutgers
Ashton Kutcher - UIA
Brad Pitt - UMO
Tom Hanks - Cal State, Sacramento
Politics:
Paul Ryan - Miami Univ.
John Boehner - Xavier Univ.
Charles Grassley - Northern Iowa
Madeline Albright - Wellesley, JHU
Bill Clinton - Georgetown
Condi Rice - Univ. of Denver
Colin Powell - CUNY
Rudy Giuliani - Manhattan College
Michael Bloomberg - JHU
Of course it isn’t a random process and no one should feel that it is.
Anyone who believes that there is an “elusive magic formula” is just deluding themselves. If there were, the admissions results would be released on January 2nd after the formulas computed the answer.
The applications are evaluated, discussed, and other factors like class mix, are taken into account and the adcoms determine who they want in the class that year. The adcoms have a lot more info and context about each applicant, far more than someone who is perplexed about a 1900 SAT getting into Harvard. It isn’t a lottery and it sure ain’t random.
I don’t really think what college an actor or actress went to is particularly relevant to their career success.
As for other people on your list, due to their raw talent and drive, they may have done just as well if they never attended college, or they could have done even better if they attended a better college. Secondly, many people you listed attended decades ago and the competitive environment was a bit different back then.
“Take a look at some of these losers who didn’t go to an Ivy undergrad, they’re everywhere and gasp, seem to be doing well, how is that possible?”
No one thinks that the Ivy League (and the 8 to 10 Ivy peers such as Northwestern, before Pizzagirl takes my head off) get all of the best students every year. Many outstanding students want to stay near home, take a better financial deal, or decide to go to another school for another reason. It is still entirely possible that the best student in the country is at a directional community college somewhere and never even applied anywhere else. What a top 15 to 20 school does get, is a stronger class overall, and disproportionate access to outstanding students.
You will find that the very top students at almost any college are capable of competing with Ivy League students. It is just that lower ranked colleges will not have a class where the average student is capable of competing with the average Ivy student.
Finally, the best schools are great at building an overall class, but make some spectacularly terrible and inexplicable individual decisions, just ask any counselor or consultant who has had the opportunity to get to know a significant number of top students personally. In aggregate, the better students do get into better schools, but some of the individual admission decisions are just poor. They simply got it wrong, sometimes even with all of the relevant information sitting right in front of them. They are just people and they make mistakes. that is why it is very important that applicants avoid getting too attached to one school and instead focus on ordering the schools by preference.
I never understood why people like to post such lists in an attempt to convince others of the --I assume-- lack of greatness of the Ivy League. How hard would it be to produce a list compiled solely of Ivy League graduates who went on to accomplish great things. What was the famous Harvard HBS year? 1947? Should we look at the SCOTUS over the year and compile the HYPS graduates?
I think that both lists share the same silliness! We all understand that while there is life outside the eight Ivy League schools, it remains that it would be hard to find a more prestigious organized group of 8 schools.
PS For the accuracy of your “sample” you might want to remove the great Sage of Nebraska as it well known he attended Wharton for two years, went on to Columbia for a MS, and was not accepted at Harvard Business School.
To me, this list is meaningless, but funny. I mean, lots of entertainers never went to college at all, and very few of them attended an Ivy. The list of non-Ivy league entertainers could go on for hundreds of pages.
You also have to remember that there are what, 3 million students going to college per year, and maybe 18,000 them are going to an Ivy. Of course most successful people did not attend an Ivy. That should be obvious.
I just don’t get why some think every kid applying to an Ivy is emotionally at risk.
Or, from some tiny patch from NYC on up.
If OP meant lottery as in you have no control, fine. But it isn’t a spin the wheel. Nor do we always need to rag on the schools with the lowest admit rates. CC has been there/done that. Ad nauseum. No longer clever.
I guess I was interested in the statement that I mentioned and that I have read in numerous places - that admissions committees believe they could have created a number of “just as good” freshman classes as the one they ultimately created from the full pool of candidates.
Obviously I recognize that certain candidates are more qualified than others…hence my reference to having additional chances in the “lottery.” I wasn’t suggesting that the process is totally random, just that in the end, if they have to turn down a large number of “just as good” candidates - there is a level of randomness to the process.
Certainly I believe it is much healthier for those kids who approach the process understanding that getting into ANY college is not a comment on their worth as human beings. Unfortunately, we have crowned a few colleges as the most desirable and kids (and their parents) often hyper-focus on one or two of those schools. Accepting that no matter HOW good you are, you just might not get admission to that dream school, seems to be a healthier way to approach the process.
Anyhow, I was just thinking out loud. Thanks for the thoughtful responses.
As I stated the list is about where these famous people went for their undergrad, which is what all the feeding frenzy is all about in college admissions. Some of these people went on to top 10 grad schools, many didn’t. Warren Buffett did start out at Wharton, he said he never went to class because they didn’t teach him anything he didn’t already know, and after 2 years, he decided it wasn’t worth the money and transferred to UNE. The fact that he was turned down by HBS just shows you how flawed their admissions can get.
There are people esp. on CC who give off the impression that it’s Ivy or bust, that if you don’t get into a top 10 school, you can’t ever be successful. My list is to show these people that that isn’t true, that many famous people from all walks of life have succeeded without going to a top 10 school. It is not to show that these schools are better than Ivies or whatever. Some people are just too touchy and defensive. Yes I realize that you can generate a big long list of famous people who did go to the top 10 schools, but my list could also easily have been just as long. And no they didn’t all graduate from college decades ago. Many tech startup founders today didn’t go to top schools either, in fact many didn’t go to college at all.
I also don’t get why it is that when someone who didn’t go to one of these schools succeed, people are quick to attribute their success to them as individuals, as if they succeeded in spite of the “lesser” schools they went to, but the minute they find out these people went to a top 10 school, they immediately attribute their success to the school they went to. Why the double standard? Michael Bloomberg attributed all his success to his undergrad school, even though he also went to HBS, he has donated over $1B to JHU.
"There are people esp. on CC who give off the impression that it’s Ivy or bust, that if you don’t get into a top 10 school, you can’t ever be successful. My list is to show these people that that isn’t true, that many famous people from all walks of life have succeeded without going to a top 10 "
No, no intelligent grown adults say that. High school students say that. Sometimes immigrants from other countries who haven’t caught on say that. But the vast majority of parents on cc neither say what you’ve ascribed to them nor believe it.