I’ve always thought celebrities were similar to development cases…they’re accepted because they help improve the school’s image, but there are still minimum standards.
Danica McKellar math degree from UCLA (no small feat), Mayim Bialik PhD neuroscience PhD UCLA, and David Duchovny, Princeton BA, and dissertation short of PhD at Yale, are prime examples of cerebral actors. Here is a bit of trivia for you, Miuccia Prada, granddaughter of the Prada founder, and the founder of her own line, Miumiu, has a PhD in political science.
It would have been great to have Emma Watson in a college class… Raising her hand as high as possible to try to answer a question. …As a prank she must have done this at least once.
Imagine Emma Watson having issues with Common App and application stuff :-j
Jackie Chan’s son went to Harvard with a 2.9 GPA and dropped out second semester of freshman year, so I guess anything is possible.
I recently heard that Karlie Kloss, some model, is ‘considering’ going to Harvard, as if she already got in.
But another model, Cameron Russell, who has walked for very big fashion shows, went to Wellesley and Columbia for her undergrad, and attended MIT as a graduate student.
My cousin and I were talking about this topic the other day. She made a joke that the admission letter read: “Congratulations! Your bank account has been selected for admission to Harvard University.”
Accepting the celebrity is a no-brainer for the colleges; you have to be living under a rock not to know that Emma Watson attended Brown, and that’s free publicity for Brown for not only the entire generation of Americans who grew up on Harry Potter, but it’s also a huge advertisement for international students. I was in China last summer and I would say that Brown is high up on the list of colleges which Chinese students recognize because of Emma. My D is in college right now, and they all know who the bold face names are in their school (mostly children of very wealthy or CEOs), and where Bill Gates’s child is in college etc… And who doesn’t recall where Jodie Foster or Chelsea Clinton went to school? As President Obama’s daughter enters her senior year, you better believe there will be a wild scramble among these schools to ensure that she is given a spot in their incoming class. My bet is on Princeton, where Michelle Obama attended. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, whereever, none of them is above going hard after recruiting a celebrity for their class (and lowering their standards if need be), for a famous actor or singer, or the child of a billionaire, a President, or even a Kardashian.
A Kardashian, hmmmn, that I take pause. The donation to the development office would have to be in the high eight-figures…
Since this is a Brown forum, I guess there is the question of whether Brown goes after celebrities a bit harder than the other schools, especially with respect to children of very wealthy. My D’s experience seems to be that there are a lot of children of extremely wealthy parents who have no prior association with the University, e.g., children of Wall Street CEOs, hedge funds, and a people who have NYC museum wings named after their grandfather. Watson is an example, but so are the children of Jane Fonda, JFK Jr., and Amy Carter. In my view Brown is just like any other place; if you go to Harvard or Stanford, you’ll find the same select group of people who got in based on their celebrity status or the recommendation of the development director. I went to Duke and every year the list of Duke’s Board of Trustees is filled with such-and-such billionaire hedge fund owner, “P’12, '15” (i.e., parent of alum children). When your parent is a billionaire, you have a far easier time of getting into any of these schools than any other kind of “leg up,” be it legacy, AA, or athlete.
One other thing, it’s sometimes funny that college students get excited by a celebrity name but it turns out it’s just a false rumor (and may have been falsely spread by the ‘celebrity’ himself or herself). I remember a woman named Merrill, who had a child at my D’s nursery school and she basically told everyone that she was the granddaughter of the founder of Merrill Lynch. I happen to know the history behind the Merrill family and it was pretty clear to me that she was no relation, but I never said anything because I didn’t want to humiliate her. But I always found it funny that other families fell so hard for her story and would fawn over her like she was some wealthy scion. In another case with more serious ramifications, my father was meeting with someone he believed based on rumor was the founder of the such-and-such shoe company, and was a potential big donor to my father’s program. I had to point out to my father that this person was actually the brother of the CEO of the company, and he was wrong to assume that he was wealthy. He was in fact a well-off doctor, but certainly not someone to pluck for $1 million donations. And finally, there’s the sad case of the guy I went to college with who said he was a child actor in a famous TV advertisement. It was before the days of the Internet, so no one had any way of checking on it so we just assumed it was true. (He looked sorta like the boy, and who would lie about being in a TV ad?) Many years later, I looked it up out of curiosity and it turns out that the actor was a totally different person. I hope colleges are doing a better job of due diligence on the celebrity before they go admitting the celebrity children to college.
I read The Gatekeepers and they talked to admissions directors who said they look for people who achieve across the board and they also look for people with spikes - very high achievement in a specific area. I would say a successful working actor would fit into that latter category, although it seems that Emma Watson likely also fit into the former category.
Top tier schools always have celebrities in them. For the most part they just blend in. Jodie Foster was at Yale when I was there. Was there when Hinckley shot Reagan “for her”. It was crazy at school for awhile. For the most part, celebrity kids (and the kids of famous people and really, really rich people) just go about their daily lives. I am sure most kids on the campus don’t even recognize her since I am sure she goes to class in sloppy sweats and her hair up in a ponytail.
The celebrity publicity can backfire too, of course. In the case of Emma Watson, there is an apocryphal story that a Brown student made fun of her by shouting “100 points for Gryffindor!” when she answered a question in class. She had to deny that to the press, but when she showed up at Oxford for a year the rumors were rekindled and only finally extinguished when she returned to Brown to graduate.
Incorrect. He went to William and Mary but left.
Well, if you think about what Emma Watson went to school there for and how amazing her resume must have been. It makes sense.
I think Joseph Gordon Levitt went to Columbia
Absolutely. The admisssions dept. thinks of alumni donations first & foremost. Very immoral way of doing things. This is not to say there aren’t celebrities or politician’s kids who aren’t intelligent but most tend to be spoiled. To their credit some are quite credentialed: Jody F at Yale, Meryl S. at Yale, Paul S. at Columbia. It seems poltical dynasties have lacked the brains.
Wow Cordie: you’ve come back with a vengeance. It’s “immoral” to accept a single development kid whose family’s donations can fund the education of 12 poor kids? And then you predict that colleges will collapse due to the lack of affordability. Inconsistent much?
Meryl Streep wasn’t famous when she started college. For the record, she went to Vassar. She got a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama. By the time she enrolled there, she had considerable acting experience. She wasn’t a celebrity admit to either Vassar or Yale.
And as for the “political dynasties have lacked the brains,” try checking out a few of these:
Vanessa Kerry, John Kerry’s daughter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Kerry (Yale) Not a heck of a lot of people graduate summa cum laude from Yale while playing a varsity sport and then go on to graduate cum laude from Harvard med.
Alexandra Kerry, also JK’s daughter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kerry Brown
Allison Pataki, former NY State governor’s daughter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Pataki Yale Her first novel is not only a NY Times best seller, but the book has been picked up for a movie.
Chelsea Clinton hasn’t done so bad for herself either. Stanford
Elyssa Spitzer, older daughter of former governor Eliot Spitzer of call girl fame, graduated from Harvard, where she was a writer for the Crimson
Barbara Bush Yale