<p>I couldn’t disagree more with CityEntrepreneur. The lessons he or she took from law school are not necessarily incorrect – law programs are more standardized, and firms hiring new law grads pay attention to rankings more than seems rational. But undergraduate colleges are so diverse in mission and approach that there is no such thing as the “best one.” As an example, if you want to be a PhD scientist, statistics surprisingly show (and have shown for half a century) that your odds of success are best if you go to a liberal arts college, not a research university. If you want to go into business in some particular state, you might be well advised to attend that state’s flagship public, or some local private (e.g., Vanderbilt) which has little awareness of its academic programs (as opposed to sports) in many parts of the country but has huge influence in the South. Etc. I know the Ivy league well. Between my partner and me and our parents, we have taught at three and studied at two others. I’ve lectured at every one except Dartmouth. But I turned down undergrad admissions from the Ivy league and went elsewhere, and while I would recommend individual Ivies to particular students, applying to the whole athletic league is a sign that you just don’t really know anything about them.</p>
<p>@Astrotech, If you’re a freshmen or sophomore, I wouldn’t worry too much about refining your college list yet; and you’re probably better off not hanging out around CC too much. But if you do hang around, you should survey the wreckage of the last admissions cycle.</p>
<p>Read about guys like this Harvard hopeful who was so dumbfounded and bitter about his results that CC apparently felt compelled to ban him from the site.
<a href=“*** Official Harvard University 2018 RD Decisions Only*** - #10 by satman1111 - Harvard University - College Confidential Forums”>*** Official Harvard University 2018 RD Decisions Only*** - #10 by satman1111 - Harvard University - College Confidential Forums;
<p>Surf the threads and read about their aspirations, plans, qualifications, college choices and results</p>
<p>Here is a pretty common pattern:</p>
<p>John Doe applies early to his ‘dream’ school. He fretted a lot deciding between Stanford and Harvard. Maybe he even considered Princeton because it’s more undergraduate focused. He knew admissions was difficult, but probably did not envision how difficult. As an international applicant, like yourself, maybe he didn’t realize soft quotas put him in the 1%-3% acceptance range. Try to imagine sitting in a waiting room with 30, 50 maybe 100 other brilliant and accomplished international applicants and only one in the room gets called. Some in the waiting room have amazing stories about overcoming and excelling under unimaginable conditions: war, poverty, famine, deportation, disease etc…</p>
<p>John Doe get’s rejected by his top choice, but odds look good for what he likely considers ‘lesser’ Ivys like UPenn and Cornell. Worst case he thinks he’ll get offers from schools like CMU and Duke. And maybe he would have in the ED round, but these schools have already seated 40% of the class. They may already have their fair share of Canadians and physics majors. And guess what, their applications will increase near tenfold in the RD round All the other kids who prepped up to a 2300+ SAT score and were deferred by their first choice schools have now jumped in to the pool.</p>
<p>Maybe John gets an acceptance letter from Cal-Berkley or UCLA but, guess what, there’s no aid. Had he bothered to look at schools like,say, Harvey Mudd or Grinnell, he might have found he could get a STEM/LAC undergrad education second-to-none and cobble together a decent aid package.</p>
<p>At any given high school college fair, the Harvard rep will be assigned his own large class room, and students will be herded in at 25 minute intervals He won’t give you a business card because his email and voicemail inbox is perpetually full. But go to the gym and the rep from (insert non USNWR top 20 U here) will be there alone, waiting for you, and he’ll chat with you., correspond with you and hook you up with your department of interest.</p>
<p>Instead of matriculating at an intellectual hot-bed like Harvey Mudd, John Doe ends up at his local safety school that he never imagined he would attend. Maybe his parents or GC insisted that he include that school on his list. But he probably gets a perfectly adequate education there and turns out just fine in the end.</p>
<p>I respect 2014ProfDad’s post, but my views are different.</p>
<p>The mission of most colleges and universities is to give their students the best educations possible and equip them with the tools necessary to get into the best grad schools and get the best jobs. Most of them offer plenty of similar majors, although non-LACs also can have specialized programs (e.g., engineering). When I was in grad school at Harvard, I cross-registered and took a class that was in the field that I majored in in college elsewhere, and so I know that you can take similar classes in similar fields at a variety of schools.</p>
<p>So given that most reputable schools offer similar majors and similar classes and similar degrees, unless you want to earn a degree in a specialized area, it just makes sense to pick a school based on prestige as long as you could major in the same thing at multiple schools. If you’re open to majoring in the usual suspects of economics, biology, English or history, for example, why sell yourself short with a degree from a school ranked, say, #32 if you could also get a degree in the same field from a school ranked #5, which will open a lot more doors? If you’re paying for a Lexus, why settled for a generic brand of car?</p>
<p>@CityEntrepreneur: I strongly disagree. I know many graduates from UMich, UChicago, Notre Dame, and Duke who have gotten better, more prestigious jobs, with higher salaries right out of college than many Harvard graduates who majored in the same field. Just because a student graduates from a fancy institution with “the best brand name” doesn’t mean they get the fanciest job. That’s not how life works. To quote Jeffrey Brenzel who retired from Yale Admissions last year to go back to teaching philosophy:
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<p>Because grad school admissions officers, and hiring managers who look for graduates from these fields, don’t care about USNWR. (Remember–it is simply a single list produced by a for-profit publication, with metrics that don’t necessarily correspond to education quality or outcomes for students.) Many of the top feeder programs for grad school are small LACs, and not only the best-known ones. For med and law school, GPA and test scores matter more than the name on the undergraduate diploma. In terms of the job market, most hiring is local, and a qualified candidate with a degree from the state flagship or other locally respected school is going to be met with the same (or more) enthusiasm as one with a degree from some fancy “elite” school somewhere else.</p>
<p>“UMich, UChicago, Notre Dame, and Duke…”</p>
<p>Ahhh…, gibby, if you’re going to argue against “name brand” colleges, you should actually mention some actual “non-name brand” colleges in your counter argument. From USNWR’s list, Chicago is #5, Duke is #7, Notre Dame is #18, and University of Michigan is #28. You might say that in terms of “name brand,” Michigan is on the bubble (although I think that’s arguable). The rest are clearly among the very elite of American universities. I doubt there are many folks actively looking to apply to college who haven’t heard of these schools. Although it’s not even #32, even BU is a “name brand.”</p>
<p>These are not the colleges where most folks wind up. Most folks wind up at the Towsons, the Salisburys, the Frostburgs, the Yorks, the Limestones, the Lehighs of the academic world. THOSE are non-name brand schools.</p>
<p>Where to apply to college isn’t a question with a one-size-fits-all answer. I’d say, out of the roughly four million students who graduate from high school each year, very few should apply to ANY Ivies. A student with a 1900 and a 3.5 who spent three hours per night studying to accomplish that much (or perhaps, even worse, would never dream of spending that much time on schoolwork) may be much better served at State U than at any Ivy. We call these elite schools (not just the Ivies) the “best” schools, but really what we mean is that they are, in some sense, the best schools for the very best students. More or less. Maybe more less than more.</p>
<p>For these elite STUDENTS, a large number of these elite SCHOOLS will likely fit quite nicely. Especially since most folks who are becoming college freshmen are 16, 17, or perhaps 18 years old, and although they may be very bright, that doesn’t mean that they have the formation, the knowledge, and the wisdom to profitably make fine distinctions between one elite school and another.</p>
<p>What do all of you folks think of the fellow who just was admitted to all eight Ivies? Are you going to denounce him for his poor selection choice of schools to which to apply?</p>
<p>^^ Maybe I should have used the University of Nebraska as an example. Warren Buffet, who probably was an ELITE student in his day was rejected from Harvard and graduated from U of N. He seems to have done just fine for himself.</p>
<p>FWIW: <a href=“Teen accepted to every Ivy League school credits ‘helicopter parents’”>http://nypost.com/2014/04/02/student-accepted-to-all-ivy-league-schools-gives-tips-for-success/</a>
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<p>I’m not a betting man, but I would say the odds of running all 8 ivies are pretty high!</p>
<p>gibby,</p>
<p>Actually, he started as an undergrad at Penn’s Wharton, and then transferred to Nebraska-Lincoln after two years at Penn. He was rejected from Harvard Business School and went to Columbia, instead.</p>
<p>So, apparently, he applied to enough Ivies to get into at least one for both undergrad AND grad school.</p>
<p>“I’m not a betting man, but I would say the odds of running all 8 ivies are pretty high!”</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>But according to the majority sentiment, here, this kid acted in some way foolishly, or poorly, or ignorantly, or naively, or stupidly, or in some way offensive to the sensibilities of many here, in applying to all eight Ivies.</p>
<p>We don’t advocate any kid applying to all 8. That’s all. Reasons have been shared. This kid did something right in his life beyond the issue of how many he applied to. That’s what matters. The next one who thinks all 8 would increase his chances, is missing the differences- among the colleges and perhaps between himself and this LI kid.</p>
<p>Some need to remember the popular poster/SAT-admissions advice guy with the 2400 who then got admitted to only one Ivy. Don’t remember how many he applied to. </p>
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Why would there be a denunciation? Kids come to these boards asking for advice and they get it. Mr. Enin, who was hooked, was accepted to many selective schools. His application strategy did not show very deep research or introspection. All here I’m sure wish him well. Applying to all Ivys still makes no sense. It is like saying that for your next vehicle it’s a tossup between a Mini Cooper and a Ford F-150. It is like saying that your dream city is either Tokyo, Minneapolis, or Naples, FL.</p>
<p>To respond to:</p>
<p>"
gibbyPosts: 5,035Registered UserSenior Member </p>
<p>8:07AM · edited 8:15AM </p>
<p>@CityEntrepreneur: I strongly disagree. I know many graduates from UMich, UChicago, Notre Dame, and Duke who have gotten better, more prestigious jobs, with higher salaries right out of college than many Harvard graduates who majored in the same field. Just because a student graduates from a fancy institution with “the best brand name” doesn’t mean they get the fanciest job. That’s not how life works. "</p>
<p>Of course. We all know that. There will be some people from Notre Dame who get a better job right out of school than someone from Harvard does. There will be plenty of people from Duke who get better jobs than Harvard graduates do; Duke and Harvard are pretty close in terms of student body quality. There are people from Columbia, NYU, Fordham, Georgetown, etc. who got better law firm jobs than I did with my HLS degree.</p>
<p>However, I am 99% certain that I got the jobs that I did out of law school because I went to Harvard; I am 100% certain that I got my current job because I went to Harvard. The career path that I have had has been better for me than it would have been had I not gone to Harvard. (That’s not the same thing as saying that I get a better job than a non-Harvard graduate; it just means that given my own skills and abilities, I have achieved more in the job market than I would have gotten had I gone to a lesser-ranked school). That’s precisely why people should generally attend the best schools that they can get into: because their own personal outcomes will be better than if they had gone to lesser-ranked schools.</p>
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<p>Nice!</p>
<p>@notjoe said “What do all of you folks think of the fellow who just was admitted to all eight Ivies? Are you going to denounce him for his poor selection choice of schools to which to apply?”</p>
<p>I say kudos to him, but I still don’t see applying to all the ivy schools as a wise approach. I think the more common result is that of the kid I linked to in my earlier post:
A: Rutgers
WL: Penn, Cornell, Brown, Duke
R: HYP</p>
<p>William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean at Harvard College said
“Students’ intellectual imagination…and their ability to exercise good judgment — these are critical factors in the admissions process, and they are revealed not by test scores but by students’ activities outside the classroom, the testimony of teachers and guidance counselors, and by alumni/ae and staff interview reports.”</p>
<p>I think @CityEntrepreneur recommendation of just looking at the US News rankings, applying to all of the top 10 within your region, plus some of the Ivies and then selecting the highest ranked school you’re admitted to indicates a lack of intellectual imagination and good judgement.</p>
<p>You’d be paying a high admissions premium for schools that may not be strong for your particular interests at the opportunity cost of missing out on some great schools with lower admissions premiums that are better suited for you. </p>
<p>@notjoe said: “Especially since most folks who are becoming college freshmen are 16, 17, or perhaps 18 years old, and although they may be very bright, that doesn’t mean that they have the formation, the knowledge, and the wisdom to profitably make fine distinctions between one elite school and another.”</p>
<p>I disagree. I think the kids at this level do have the self awareness to see where they fit and what they want and can look beyond rankings.</p>
<p>CityEntrepreneur: You really ought to stop generalizing from law school to college, something you do relentlessly. In the law world, there is a pretty strict and fairly universally accepted hierarchy of law schools at the tippy-top level. Not so much school-by-school – Yale is usually rated higher than Harvard, but no one would say you were crazy to choose Harvard over Yale – but in bands. Almost any knowledgeable person would tell you that you should attend a law school in the highest band that accepts you, unless you know for sure that you want to settle permanently in the city where a lower-band choice is located. (And even then, it depends how much lower. If someone was 100% committed to living his life in Philadelphia, I would tell him it’s OK to pick Penn over Harvard, but not Villanova.)</p>
<p>That’s just not the case on the undergraduate level. The prestige bands are much wider and fuzzier, and they matter a whole lot less. Basically, people coming out of law school are getting hired to fill one of, at most, six or seven jobs, and all of the people doing the hiring are lawyers. People coming out of college get hired to fill hundreds of different jobs, with no shared culture among the hiring decisionmakers.</p>
<p>“I think @CityEntrepreneur recommendation of just looking at the US News rankings, applying to all of the top 10 within your region, plus some of the Ivies and then selecting the highest ranked school you’re admitted to indicates a lack of intellectual imagination and good judgement.”</p>
<p>I disagree and think that it indicates focus and drive to achieve.</p>
<p>I applied to two safety schools (UNC-Chapel Hill and Emory) and apart from that, applied only to the schools in the USNWR top 10 rankings that were east of Chicago. Having gone to an undergrad school that few have heard of and that had poor job placement, I was done with dealing with schools such as that. I didn’t want to sell myself short again.</p>
<p>@CityEntrepreneur. I just don’t get your agenda…why do you keep coming on this college thread to talk about HLS…this is a COLLEGE thread. And why do you repeatedly denigrate your “college” wherever you went? You keep saying it was a third rate LAC or something and somehow you were “lucky” enough to get into HLS and become a lawyer…good for you. Okay. We get it. There are many of us on CC who have attended elite law, medical, and business schools as you have (including @JHS above)…so what? We are trying to help some of the wide-eyed college aspirants make informed decisions/choices rather than based on some hocus-pocus outdated method of creating a college list based on an athletic conference…But, I have never met anyone…no matter where they attended college (podunk U to some prestige U) who was not PROUD of their college experience or their college (once they get their degree). It seems to me…you basically want to wipe your “college/college experience” from the face of the earth…and , frankly, that’s just not cool…</p>
<p>“I just don’t get your agenda…why do you keep coming on this college thread to talk about HLS…this is a COLLEGE thread.”</p>
<p>At Harvard you can cross register and take undergrad classes, and I did; I have undergrad experience there.</p>
<p>“But, I have never met anyone…no matter where they attended college (podunk U to some prestige U) who was not PROUD of their college experience or their college (once they get their degree).”</p>
<p>I’ve met plenty of people who had negative college experiences and are not proud of their college experiences. Just look at online reviews of colleges; plenty of them are negative.</p>
<p>I see that though it’s not quite denunciation, this young fellow’s application choices (the one admitted to all eight Ivies) are nonetheless criticized herein. That’s good. At least folks are consistent.</p>
<p>As to those who make the analogy to cars, yes, I’d like to have both a truck and a sedan. And if I had the truck, I might get a small sedan rather than a large one. In fact, I actually have an SUV and a sedan. Not quite an F-150, but… And if I could get a passenger van, too, well then, I might get a roadster instead of a sedan!</p>
<p>Or cities. See, the problem with talking about “dream cities” is that the analogy is fundamentally faulty. If one’s “dream school” is Harvard or Penn, or even Stanford or U Chicago or Duke, one has a fairly modest chance of getting in. Thus, one’s “dream city” may be Tokyo, but if you can’t get to go to Tokyo, would it be bizarre if your second pick was Paris? Or Rome? Or Annapolis? If so, why?</p>
<p>Are folks so narrow that they can’t see themselves thriving in a variety of environments? I know that my two sons had no problem imagining thusly. Before narrowing to his final cut, my younger son’s top 25 included Brown, Harvard, and Columbia. In spite of the differences in approach to curriculum. His high school education was probably most similar to Harvard’s in this regard - a few mandatory courses, a requirement to take a certain number of courses in certain disciplines, and then the ability to do as he pleased. The Columbia curriculum, though much more tightly defined, seemed acceptable to him upon perusal. He sees the choices his brother has within Harvard’s system, and that was acceptable, and of course, he believes he possesses (I think rightly) the self-discipline, self-knowledge, and maturity to create his own from scratch.</p>
<p>His older brother went from a small, poor, religious (Catholic) college prep high school where he was top of the class and had only a handful of academic peers, where most kids go off to State U or other similarly-situated institutions, and only a handful have what it takes to get into the premier schools, to a very large, very rich, very secular, even hostile to his Catholicism, college where, if he’s lucky, he’s an “average” kid. He managed to transition from two very unlike institutions. He had a great time in high school, and is having a great time in college! Who’da thunk it! Able to succeed, prosper, AND thrive in two very different sorts of places!</p>
<p>The idea that young adults are either square pegs or round pegs and will only fit into square or round holes, respectively, doesn’t seem so obviously right to me. I’ve heard folks say that someone who would be happy at Brown wouldn’t be happy at Columbia. I’m not so sure. My younger son liked both (although he didn’t apply to both), plus Harvard, too! </p>
<p>My own view of things, shaped by years of homeschooling, years of working with a local Catholic college prep school, and my own personal experiences is that the sorts of kids who should go to the most elite schools need most one thing: a very challenging academic environment, broadly defined. Not to say that there aren’t other important things, but they all come second to that one.</p>
<p>Obviously, if one has one’s heart set on being an aerospace engineer, Harvard or Dartmouth might not be quite the place for you! Reputation-wise, lowly University of Maryland, College Park, might be a better pick.</p>
<p>But, the bottom line is that most really top-tier kids, by the very reason of their greater intelligence and maturity, will usually manage to thrive and be happy at a wider range of schools than less-bright and less-mature kids, so long as they are challenged.</p>
<p>This strongly suggests that top-tier kids should apply to a range of top-tier schools, and including a handful of Ivies may not be such a bad strategy, depending on the student, his circumstances, and his goals.</p>
<p>You can be happy with a variety, sure. I love coastal Maine and San Francisco and Paris and backwoods Virginia. But can this hs kid articulate why he wants, say Brown versus Columbia or Dartmouth? Does his profile seem to be the sort that would resonate with each? Or is he only looking at what “he wants.” Ie, forgetting he will be examined further? </p>
<p>@notjoe</p>
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<p>I actually think the kid with all ivy league schools and/or the usual other top ten schools on their list are the more narrow thinkers and are less apt to see themselves thriving in a variety of environments. I think maybe some see the Ivy League as their high school honors level are AP level groups (the smart kid classes) thus they focus the bulk of their efforts on getting in to the ivy League. On the other hand, when I see a list with schools like Harvey Mudd, Smith, Oberlin and maybe an Ivy or two, I think that is a kid that can see themselves thriving in variety of environments.</p>
<p>Also on other threads, I’ve seen kids criticized for not filling out a lot of reach school applications. I remember one kid saying if you can’t handle the work of filling out all those applications, you probably can’t handle an Ivy League school. I thought to the contrary, if you can’t do the research to arrive at a strategic and diverse list, maybe you don’t belong in an Ivy League type school. </p>
<p>You asked what I thought of the kid that got in to all the Ivy league schools. What do you think of the kid I referenced who was shut out? He had a 2320 SAT and is 1/432 in his class. Was he wise to apply to six Ivy league schools and Duke? </p>