Applying to best friend's top choice

Colleges & Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>Harvard is my number one choice, but I obviously need to apply to a lot of Ivy league schools if I want to maximize my chances of gaining admission to one. I'd like to go to one of the top schools no matter what. Think Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The problem is that my best friend has made it known since the sixth grade that her top choice is Yale. Usually, each Ivy league accepts one person from my school each year--it's almost like they have a quota for my school or something. </p>

<p>What do I do about this situation? I think I might have a better chance than her of getting into Yale, but if I get into both Yale and Harvard (not likely, but it is possible) and decide to go to Harvard, I'll feel like I took her acceptance away. Note: I haven't really made my first choice as big of a deal and she has said that she plans to apply to Harvard. I really have no clue what to do.</p>

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<p>There is no set number per school that’s a myth </p>

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<p>Every time you think they always take 3, they take 7; on the other hand sometimes they go from taking 10 to none. Depends on the year, and you’re not affecting her chances.</p>

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<p>I’ll be more frank: apply to what you want because statistically, you’ll both be rejected. But she would be a terrible person to hold against you your applying anywhere.</p>

<p>FYI: there is no quota like TigerCC said.</p>

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<p>Why didn’t she apply early? I’m applying to my best friend’s top choice and he’s applying to mine, but we applied early to our own top choices and got in so it’s kosher.</p>

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<p>what makes you think you’ll have a better shot at yale? the .2% difference in acceptance rate this year? lol</p>

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<p>I agree with everyone and also urge you to apply to the colleges you want presuming your family can finance the school’s cost of attendance. Check out the online net price calculator at each college. If you don’t apply to Yale and H rejected you, you’ll be haunted with a “What if” scenario and there will be some sort of resentment on your side which may actually affect your relationship with your bf down the road.</p>

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<p>Alright, I had a very similar situation and I’ll share my story.</p>

<p>I was deferred from Stanford early and then decided that I needed to apply to a bunch of schools (if I had gotten in, I probably would have only applied to 2 or 3 others). One of those schools was my best friend’s dream school: Duke. I never really wanted to go to Duke, but I justified it by saying that I would have rather gone to Duke than to my state school. I never actually told her that I applied there and, cards on the table, part of the reason that I applied was to see what would happen. We are kind of best frenemies and we were having one of our passive-aggressive girl wars at the time that apps were do. She was always really competitive with me (wanting to know my GPA, SAT score, etc), and I decided to finally partake in this competition, but I didn’t tell her. </p>

<p>I was accepted to Duke and she was waitlisted. I felt horrible, especially because I had no intention of going to Duke (after being accepted to my other top schools). She didn’t get in off the waitlist and now she’s super happy at her school. I never ended up telling her that I applied, and I do still feel like a may have taken her place. But honestly, if they had really wanted her, they would have accepted her - either outright or off the waitlist.</p>

<p>Do whatever you think is right and what will make you happy, but I would recommend telling your friend that you are applying.</p>

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<p>@MikeNY5, Harvard accepted 5.79% and Yale 6.72% in 2013, so technically you’re 16% more likely to get into Yale. But as others have pointed out, chances are they’ll both be rejected by both schools. But the OP could refrain from applying to Yale as a courtesy to her friend, then after the likely rejections, she could forever remind her friend of that courtesy and that they’'ll never really know what could have been. Could come in handy, just a thought</p>

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<p>

This post verges on satire. Besides brand name and what other people think, can you two identify specific reasons why these are your top choices over 200+ other fine schools? Neither of you are likely to get into either, but so what? Your best bet is to do a lot of research after building a list based on criteria that matter (region, size, LAC vs. Research, campus culture, Greek or not, urban/suburban/rural, strengths). And rest easy that neither of you will keep the other out of either U in any case, you don’t really have that power :)</p>

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<p>@danstearns, Harvard lost 2% of applicants this year whereas Yale’s pool grew by more than 6%. Both acceptance rates will be in the high 5% range. Statistically, there is no difference-- never mind enough of one to consider one less selective than the other in a general sense. Come on.</p>

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<p>@MikeNY5 I wasn’t saying I’d have a better chance at Yale. I was saying I think I’d have a better chance than her of getting into Yale. The only reason I said that is because I have her beat in test scores, AP Classes, and ECs. She does have a 4.0 GPA, though. </p>

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<p>@snarlatron I don’t really understand why you immediately dismiss brand name as a bad reason for choosing your school. I think it makes a HUGE difference when you are seeking a job. Other than that, I think that the connections at Harvard, student life, and quality of education/opportunities at Harvard are amazing compared to most other institutions. </p>

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<p>@shanethesemi My apologies; I misread. However, I wouldn’t bank on “stealing” a spot from someone. If he/she’s really not an incredible applicant, someone else will take her spot if you can’t.</p>

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<p>I should also point out that admissions at top universities isn’t necessarily a “zero sum” game. There is no ridged number of applicants that the office is required to take, which is why the number accepted varies from year to year. If they like two applicants a lot, why wouldn’t they take them both?</p>

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<p>Let’s see. As we know from other posts, snarlatron is an adult who has worked in education for over two decades, including at Harvard, and shanethesemi is a high school senior . . . . Which of you is more likely to understand the importance of college brand name in the real world?</p>

<p>shanethesemi, if you asked the parents on CC who went to Harvard or Yale, or whose children graduated from either, whether either “makes a HUGE difference when you are seeking a job,” you are going to get a resounding, unanimous NO! I will go out on a limb and say that in the history of the world, or at least in the past 60-70 years, no Harvard graduate has ever gotten a job over an equivalent Yale graduate because he or she went to Harvard. And you could substitute 20 or 30 names for “Yale” in that sentence without making it false in any meaningful way. If you expanded the field to 100 or so, including pretty much every public flagship, one might say that a Harvard degree was a plus compared to some of the others, but nowhere near enough of a plus to overcome a meaningful difference in GPA, or quality of recommendations, or relevant experience.</p>

<p>Harvard students tend to succeed in the world, not so much because they went to Harvard, as because they are the kind of people that Harvard accepts – i.e., sure things. The 15% of people Harvard accepts who decide to go elsewhere do just as well as the 85% who enroll at Harvard. And since all of the other super-selective colleges are pretty much accepting the same types of people, or subtle variations on the type, the same is true for all of them.</p>

<p>That’s not to say that " the connections at Harvard, student life, and quality of education/opportunities at Harvard" are not “amazing compared to most other institutions.” Of course they are! But, guess what, they are not amazing compared to a whole bunch of colleges that are also not “most other institutions.” If you look at the group of top colleges, none has some sort of categorical advantage over the others in terms of what opportunities they provide and how effective they are at producing long-term success. </p>

<p>Harvard may be the greatest university ever, because it offers 3,593,778 opportunities to its students. Yale may only offer 3,286,904 opportunities. But any one student can only pursue two or three of those at most, and can only definitively follow one path. And lots of those opportunities are merely different ways to get to the same place. So no individual student can possibly experience what makes Harvard so great, because it’s irrelevant to any particular person. Furthermore, even the least-respected directional public offers thousands, tens of thousands of opportunities, many of which, if pursued with the skills of a typical Harvard student, would lead to the same sort of ultimate success Harvard seems to offer.</p>

<p>Branding is important, by the way. It’s just not anything like "HUGE"ly important, and it’s barely important at all in distinguishing between branded products in the same market tier.</p>

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<p>@JHS First off, I thought snarlatron was also a high school student. I didn’t realize that he/she had so much more experience than me.</p>

<p>I found your comment very interesting and insightful. I still think that Harvard is my top choice, but I do agree that it isn’t the end of the world if I’m not admitted. There are plenty of other universities out there. I do disagree with you on the point you made about a Harvard degree making a difference in your job search. Sure, you won’t have a leg-up on job applicants from similar institutions, but I have spoken to about 5 Harvard grads, many of whom said that their education made a large difference in the jobs that they were offered. When you tell people that you received a degree from Harvard, you instantly gain credibility. </p>

<p>I have looked into many of the “20 to 30” schools that you mentioned, but when I considered the factors that are most important to me, Harvard came out at the top of my list. </p>

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<p>“I have spoken to about 5 Harvard grads, many of whom said that their education made a large difference in the jobs that they were offered. When you tell people that you received a degree from Harvard, you instantly gain credibility.”</p>

<p>JHS remarked about how top school grads realize that what they have isn’t unique to their alma maters. I concur. If I hadn’t gone to my HYP and instead to Purdue or Georgia Tech, I’m pretty sure I’d still be where I am today. Havardians don’t gain instant credibility. They have passed some hurdles others haven’t – but after your entry level job, all that goes out the window. In fact, some top school grads are frowned upon as know-it-alls who don’t want to roll up their sleeves and are unteachable. @shanethesemi: your broad generalizations are just that – very broad and very general. In most of the real world, an Ivy degree is interesting and may ■■■■ an eyebrow – but that only gets you a few steps inside the door.</p>

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<p>As T26E4 shows, what going to HYP will get you is the ability to use, correctly, secondary meanings of words whose more common usages get them bowdlerized by CC’s naughtiness blocker software. You can’t put a price tag on that!</p>

<p>Seriously, as I said above, I do think that prestige has value. I have had a very nice life, thanks in some part to prestige points I collected early on, including where I went to college. But the value of that kind of prestige is just nowhere near as much as many of the highschoolers on CC seem to think. Furthermore, the limited value name-brand college prestige has is much more diffused through the system than those highschoolers think, and the relative differences among comparable institutions practically negligible. </p>

<p>If I see on a resume that someone went to Dartmouth or Michigan, I don’t think “Oh, that’s not Harvard, this person can’t be first rate.” I think “Cool! This person went to Dartmouth [or Michigan]!” The world is such that there are lots of paths for smart, ambitious people to take, and lots of roles for them to fill. Brand-name college graduates are not elbowing each other aside for most opportunities; most opportunities attract 0-1 such candidates. </p>

<p>The one place where that’s not necessarily true is entry-level jobs in New York City and Silicon Valley. But even there, where people can be really snobby, there is no difference in the prestige bump conferred by roughly equivalent schools, and very little difference between the effects of different, but comparable schools. (What I mean here is that, with no other information, Harvard adds more oomph than, say, Michigan, mainly because the student body at Michigan covers a broader range of types and abilities than at Harvard. But no one is going to see a top student from Michigan as necessarily inferior to any Harvard graduate, top, middle, or bottom, nor should they.) </p>

<p>One of my kids is a great example of this. She went to a college with a good brand name, but not HYPS, and she did fine there but nowhere near Phi Beta Kappa. She has an amazing great job, for which she beat out numerous applicants from HYP and other Ivy League schools, most of whom had post-college experience similar to hers. Her employer is plenty snobby; almost everyone there has prestige degrees, and the CEO is a former Ivy president and provost. She knows that the brand name on her diploma was necessary to getting her hired, but it wasn’t anything near sufficient. It didn’t matter at all that her diploma had two or three ticks of prestige less than someone else’s diploma. Once the pool had been culled down by looking at experience and undergraduate degrees, the final choices were based entirely on other, more personal factors.</p>

<p>Also, you should know that what names confer prestige differs somewhat from industry to industry. In the world of high-tech hardware, Carnegie-Mellon and UIUC may carry as much heft as Harvard or MIT. Anywhere outside of the (north) East Coast, the local state flagship, and maybe the flagship next door, is as good as an Ivy.</p>

<p>This is NOT an attack on Harvard, by the way. Not at all. In general, I am a huge fan of Harvard. I have tons of relatives who went there. My parents raised me to go to Harvard; they sang me Harvard songs when I was a baby. I turned down Harvard admission offers twice, and both were good decisions for me and worked out really well, but I never thought Harvard was anything but great. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to go to Harvard. I do blame them sometimes for overvaluing what Harvard means.</p>

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<p>Don’t apply to Yale unless it’s your top choice too. In that case, tell her and make sure she’s okay with it. Please don’t even give either of you the option to blame yourself. If she doesn’t get into Yale, no harm no foul. If she does, well, you’ve got yourself a very happy person and you can give her a big hug and genuine congratulations.</p>