NYU was once a safety school for City College rejects!
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Really makes one wonder what the conversation will be in 30, 40, 50 years of colleges that today might be safeties and become reaches and vice-versa.
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This is my favorite NYU as an (accidental) safety school story: (from the Mighty Girl site)
When Dorothy Height showed up at Barnard College in 1929 with her admission letter in hand, she was told by a college dean that they had already reached their quota of âtwo Negro students per year.â Height, who was born on this day in 1912, had just graduated with honors from an integrated high school in Rankin, Pennsylvania. After Barnardâs decision, she said she felt crushed, recalling, âI couldnât eat, I couldnât sleep for days.â Unwilling to defer her dreams, however, she visited New York University with her Barnard acceptance letter and they admitted her on the spot. It was this determination that would drive Height through the following decades as she became, as President Barack Obama observed, âthe only woman at the highest level of the Civil Rights Movement â witnessing every march and milestone along the way.â
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I didnât know this story, but I am so glad that you shared it. Dorothy Height was a wonderful leader in the Civil Rights and womenâs liberation movements and helped drive much of the progress that we now take for granted. One of the things that Iâve noticed about these ranking conversations, indeed so many discussions on CC, is that posters spend a lot of time trying to convince students that even if they attend a lower prestige college or lower ranked undergraduate program, the student can still go into high prestige careers, get into law school/medical school/graduate programs, make connections with strong alumni networks, and get a high-salaried first job/internship. The message is hammered home about how the undergraduate brand name is less important than students (and their parents) believe. I agree with these posts and I think it is good for students to understand that they can still get where they want to go from any college.
Nevertheless, this is one of the rare posts that makes the same point about prestige but in which success is defined around the positive social impact, leadership and human rights (even success in humanities fields or artistic/literary excellence is rarely defined). Presumably the relative infrequency of such posts is driven by the interests and concerns of the students asking for advice, which seem to lean towards the desire for high financial rewards. Still it is nice to see a civil rights leader and someone whose work focused on social progress lauded for a change.
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