On The Plus Side: Many College Applicants Luckily Diverted From Becoming Red Sox Fans
Harvard Screener Beat Down By Overachievers - Gawker
(my comment here)
I read the original article before Gawker published their take. I kinda liked it. More on this topic:
I got the impression that the author of the Times article wasn’t the one doing the rejecting. It seemed to me like he found reasons to heartily recommend most of the students whom he interviewed, yet only one of them (in the end) actually got an offer for admissions - he’s not actually on the admissions committee. I think that’s pretty much how it goes; most Ivy alumni are shocked at what today’s youth do to themselves to be competitive for college admissions.
The Ivies’ dilemma should be the other universities’ windfall. If Harvard & Co. are rejecting so many qualified applicants, wouldn’t that mean that there’s a lot of other schools out there ultimately picking up Ivy-caliber talent? If Harvard & Co. fail to maintain their dominance in collecting elite students, well they won’t be so special anymore, will they?
I’m sure that the collection of Ivy hopefuls in New Jersey alone would be a strong enough group such that Rutgers, if they all used it as a fallback school, would end up within a few years being a more impressive institution than half the Ivies (crowded with their dopey legacies). Actually, that’s exactly where things are headed.
Keep in mind: yearly admissions at most of the Ivy League schools hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 students, meaning that under 20,000 students per year actually get in the club*. Out of over 4 million high school grads**. That’s under 1 percent of all applicants each year. So out of the top 5% of students (most of whom, I would think, attempt to get into at least one of the Ivies just for the sake of trying) in the United States, the greatest country in the world, 4 out of 5 are, arbitrarily, going to schools other than Ivy League schools. So what the hell are those other 4 out of 5 doing at the other universities? Much more than bong hits, I presume.
In closing, while everyone knows that Ivy League schools offer excellent opportunities to ambitious students, our national fixation on these institutions is increasingly absurd, based more on 200+ years of extremely competent branding rather than their true standings among all universities. From the numbers alone, it’s easy to see that they could not possibly remain an exclusive destination for elite students - they might be exclusive of elite students, but elite students don’t exclusively attend Ivy League schools. Not by a long shot. They are exceptional schools, but are hardly peerless. (And I’m not just talking about Duke, Stanford, and the top polytechnic schools) I don’t know why, among probably a hundred excellent universities from which a talented student might be conclusively or arbitrarily rejected, Harvard is the number one perennial heartbreaker. Maybe today’s kids aren’t all that smart after all.
* http://ivysuccess.com/admissions_stats_2008.html
** Calculated roughly from census data: http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2005-sa.html