Attending an Ivy is no guarantee of success in life. Ted Kaczynski went to Harvard. If success and happiness were reserved for graduates of the Ivy League, we’d be a country of dismal failures, since Ivy League graduates are about 0.3% of the population.
If your parents are trying to push you towards these schools because they’re Ivies rather than because they’re well suited to your academic interests and the sort of environment you’re looking for, they’re doing you a disservice. About 95% of students are happy with the college they eventually attend, so your parents shouldn’t be overly concerned with what your top choices are.
The college flowchart doesn’t look like this:
Princeton–>success
UPenn–>success
Other Ivy League school–>possible success
Anywhere else–>failure
It looks like this
Princeton–>Chance to succeed
UPenn–>Chance to succeed
Any other top 100 school with a strong program in your area of interest -->Chance to succeed
Somewhat selective colleges with strong programs in your major–>Slightly lower chance of success
Community college–>Considerably lower chance of success
For-profit college–>Degree that may or may not be worth the paper it’s printed on.
As long as you attend a good college (and no, “good” doesn’t mean that it’s only a top 20 school), you’ll have the opportunity to accomplish anything you may want to achieve. What matters then is taking advantage of that opportunity. Statistically, it’s more difficult to do well if you’ve graduated from a not-very-selective school or a community college, but it’s still possible. And in any case, if your parents are even thinking of UPenn or Princeton, you’re perfectly capable of getting into a lot of good schools.
Two people I’ve known for a long time chose colleges their parents were pushing over the school they wanted to attend (they grew up in families where their fathers’ decisions were final). They both regret that choice, even now. One of them, 35 years later, is still angry at his parents. I would urge your parents not to present you with a similar choice of attending the schools they want you to, or angering them.
This is one of the aspects of the college application process that I really loathe. Your parents aren’t the ones who will be admitted to these schools-you are. Nobody is going to think less of them because their kid wasn’t interested in their alma maters. Nobody is going to think more of them if you get into Penn or Princeton. They should let you make your own decisions in this, perhaps the most important choice of your teenage years.If you’re a few months away from being eligible to vote for the next leader of the free world, I think you can be trusted to gauge which colleges are right for you, and which ones aren’t.