<p>Stop being an Ivy?!</p>
<p>Let’s think for a second about one of Cornell’s admissions pitches: Elite, but not Elitist. Looking at their admissions statistics, this actually seems true. Sure, the stats for those ACCEPTED tend to be lower than other Ivies, but what about the stats for those who APPLY? I know an Ivy League acceptance is not a guarantee for anyone, but at the other Ivies, having a 4.0+ GPA, a 2400 SAT score, and tons of ECs makes you a candidate for admission, but at Cornell that’s not true, because they accept people with all kinds of statistics, making it impossible for anyone to really feel confident about their admissions statistics. Also, think about how many high school seniors will be going to college in America alone. Now, think about how many will be going to an Ivy Leauge School. Only about 10,000 people will actually enroll. Considering the massive quantities of people that apply to colleges, I think it’s safe to assume that most of the people not going to Ivy League schools either didn’t get in, or didn’t apply because they thought/knew they wouldn’t get in. When you tell any one of these other hundeds of thousands of people that you go to Cornell, I seriously doubt their first thought is going to be “oh, so you couldn’t get into the others, huh?”. The only people who would ever think that are SOME of the 7,000 or so people that got into the other Ivies, and that thought will fade as soon as it comes time to apply for graduate school and they realize we’ve all got the same chance. In fact, when I tell people that I’m going to Cornell next year, if they know anything about colleges, their reaction is usually “Wow, that’s amazing. That’s an Ivy League school”. When my friends who got into WUSL, UChicago, and Tufts tell people where they’re going, their reaction is usually something like “Well that’s a good school.” Also, when I suggested to one of my friends who’s applying to a couple of Ivies (not Cornell) that some might think Cornell isn’t that great, her reaction was “Are you crazy, it’s an Ivy!”. Believe it or not, the Ivy League name carries a lot of weight, and makes Cornell even more prestigious than it would be if it wasn’t a school. In fact, there was a publication that I saw from a school that is comparable to Cornell that said something like “Ivy even grows in [insert region name here]”, and mine and my friends first thought was “it’s an Ivy League wannabe (sp?)”. It may seem like Cornell is drastically easier than other Ivies to get into, but I think our dissillusionment comes from the fact that we base a lot of that on what we see here on CC. To be frank, college admissions are a game, and if you know the rules, secrets, and science behind the game, you’ve got a better chance of winning. The people that post/read these boards are often obsessed with getting into a particular school, so we learn everything we can from each other, giving us an education in an area that others with better stats than us don’t have. This gives us a HUGE advantage over those people. I had friends who had better numerical statistics than me (and just as many hooks) who got flat out rejected from Cornell, and I honestly think it’s because they didn’t know the game well enough. In terms of comparing to the prestige of the other Ivies, sure Cornell hasn’t put any presidents into office and their generally aren’t movies about pretty blonde girls who want to be lawyer to win back a boyfriend going, but look at how things have turned out when another Ivy League school has produced a president, and movies about the other Ivies tend to make bad sequels anyway. I would say the number of people who would ever dream of classifying any Ivy as “the worst” is somewhere close to 10,000 out of every graduating class of high school seniors. Compare this to the number of people that age, and it seems rediculous. Like it or not, Cornell’s Ivy League status puts Cornell on a sort of pedistal. I love the fact that I’m going to an Ivy next year, even if it’s one that 1 out of every 1,000 people I ever meet and talk too will say it’s the worst of the best.</p>