<p>I think what’s a bit silly about this is the idea that Harvard has to choose between taking academic superstars and “weird” achievers who march to a different drum. Harvard’s not that big, and there are lots of students out there–it can fill its class with weird people who are also academic superstars.</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s silly in so many ways. Harvard, and all schools for that matter, has to choose between taking academic superstars of all sorts of varieties, as well as having to choose between the truly artistically talented. The thing is, what can you do?</p>
<p>As my grandmother used to say, “Never marry potential ladies, marry the man the way he is.”</p>
<p>Who cares, really, if some genius creative type (and I am a creative type, so no negative bias) is toiling away in their head. How the heck is anyone supposed to know this? The number of talented people who fail to produce anything of value is very high. All these schools can base their judgement on is what is already on the table.</p>
<p>There are plenty of art schools for the heady artist to go and see what happens. </p>
<p>You can’t gauge talent from air, or a conversation. You can’t figure out whether the creative will be able to get what is in his or her head into a form anyone else will understand or value based on some unmeasurable vibe. I mean, maybe Harvard should hire some psychics or something?</p>
<p>My point is just that Harvard can find enough people who show the potential to be great artists or writers who ALSO have great grades and scores. Harvard may reasonably conclude that this kind of person will be able to make the most use of Harvard’s resources.</p>
<p>I agree. It’s not Harvard’s mission to seek out the underachievers.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily, especially before the mid-'60s. </p>
<p>If a given underachiever is a scion from a well-connected and/or well-off enough family with the potential to donate millions at the drop of a hat, they may want to seek him/her out(a.k.a. Developmental/legacy admits). </p>
<p>One example who was an upperclassman when my Yalie uncle was a freshman was a recent ex-president well known for phrases such as “Workin’ hard to put food on your family”.</p>
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Harvard considers it to be a significant achievement to be a member of such a family. (Supposedly there are limits, even for big donors, as to what the elite schools will accept in terms of academic achievements.)</p>
<p>No. Being a scion or legacy isn’t automatically enough for an underachiever. I keep saying the number of dev and discretionary admits is such a low % that you can almost ignore it. I think it was .007 last year, where I have a peek. It just sounds like such a threat, when the phrase is used. We envision the worst sorts, rich slackers. But, as a group, they have to meet the same bar and general expectations.</p>
<p>I think it’s pretty well known that the true developmental cases don’t have to meet the same bar, but that doesn’t mean that there is no bar–they still have to be at least accomplished enough that the school thinks they won’t fail.</p>
<p>People here tend to overestimate by a large margin the number of development cases in any Harvard class. It’s not hundreds; it’s not dozens. Maybe it’s 9 or 10, but I doubt it’s that many. Students with little to offer besides family wealth/power and a decent, workaday intelligence are NOT a big factor at Harvard.</p>
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<p>It is likely that, at most schools with high selectivity, the bar for “not expected to fail” is significantly below the bar for unhooked admissions. Of course, the student admitted just above that “not expected to fail” bar may not be likely to take the toughest honors courses at the college, but as long as s/he does not fail, the college will have satisfied its “institutional need” (development admit, recruited athlete, scion of important domestic or foreign government official, etc.) by admitting him/her.</p>
<p>At the opposite end of the college selectivity spectrum, the opposite is true; it is easier to get into an open admission community college or other open admission school than it is to pass a transfer-preparation or associates degree curriculum. It is also likely the case that getting into the least selective public and private universities is easier than doing well enough to complete a bachelor’s degree there, based on the low graduation rates at many such schools.</p>
<p>I would say there are three disadvantages to an extremely elite college education:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There’s usually no one there who will be dumber than you so you have to get used to not being all that special and that can be a bummer.</p></li>
<li><p>A lot of people who don’t attend such schools or whose kids don’t attend them will often have a tendency to notice any errors or mess-ups and then forever tell everyone willing to listen about the idiot from so-and-so elite school who was so dumb!!</p></li>
<li><p>A lot of people who don’t attend such schools will assume you’re a genius and although you’re pretty smart and occasionally even have genius moments, you’re also often pretty regular and so you might feel illegitimate or stressed if you don’t make millions of dollars or publish a national book award winner by the time you’re 30.</p></li>
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<p>Three good points, sewhappy! :D</p>
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<p>YMMV depending on the individual student. That wasn’t the experience of my Yalie '70 uncle nor HS friends who attended the Ivies or peer elite institutions with the exception of schools like MIT, Caltech, Reed, CMU, Swat, UChicago or other “hard schools”.</p>
<p>However, there are also others who would agree with that. Depends on the individual elite college student and their academic level. </p>
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<p>True. Rightly or wrongly, most people tend to have higher expectations of those who attend elite educational institutions. </p>
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<p>Another YMMV as this depends on the individual student. I’ve observed students at several elites feel that way while others could give 2 figs about externally imposed expectations. </p>
<p>Some in the latter group took it to the point of extreme slackerism as shown by a few past elite college alum colleagues who ended up getting fired within weeks/months of being hired or an Ivy engineering grad/son of some senior exec at my Uncle’s* civil engineering firm who ended up being parked as said uncle’s secretary. </p>
<p>The firm felt this was the best way to ensure said grad could do the least damage without firing him and risk incurring the wrath of that senior exec who was extremely fond of him. </p>
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<li>Uncle’s an elite school graduate himself(Columbia SEAS BSCE/MSCE late '50s).</li>
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I think this is one potential downside of attending these schools–and they contribute to it by hyping the “best and brightest” idea while you’re there. Reality can be a bit sobering when your expectations are inflated. Still, I don’t consider this a huge deal.</p>
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<p>The first point can also be very exciting. If you’ve always been the smartest person in the classroom, it can be wonderful to suddenly be surrounded by people who are equally smart. That’s how my kids experienced it. Number two is true. My daughter told her brother, “Get ready, because for the rest of your life, whenever you make a mistake or don’t know something, people will say, ‘And you went to Yale?’” I think there is some truth in point #3, but once you are in the work world, you’re judged more by the work you do than where you went to school.</p>
<p>I’ve had lots of Ivy alums as grad school classmates and professional colleagues over the years. I’d say as a general matter the arrogance quotient tends to be slightly elevated, on average, among those who attended Ivies as undergrads, especially among Harvard alums. This can cut both ways; it can give them an extra edge in self-confidence, and perhaps intimidate some people into deferring to them in some circumstances, in either case opening up some extra pathways for them. But it may also cause some people to resent their perceived arrogance and look for opportunities to cut them down to size, thus creating extra hurdles. On the other hand, many of the Ivy grads I know are among the nicest, most down-to-earth people I know. Arrogance is by no means a universal trait among Ivy grads, nor is it by any means exclusive to Ivy grads, though on average I would say it is elevated just a notch among Ivy grads, with ample exceptions.</p>
<p>Some of the smartest, most capable, and best educated people I know are graduates of top LACs. By and large, they don’t do a lot of name-dropping of their undergraduate alma maters, perhaps because they quickly learn that even names like “Williams” and Amherst" don’t carry anywhere near the same kind of throw weight as the “H-bomb.” But those who can throw around the H-bomb will do so in some cases. And of course, it’s a longstanding parlor game among non-Harvard grads to see how long it will take a Harvard grad to mention that fact, and to observe how cleverly or clumsily he or she will manage to work it into the conversation.</p>
<p>Final observation: to the vast majority of people I’ve known, attended school with, or worked with, where you got your undergraduate degree (or any degree) matters a whole lot less than is often imagined by the holders of degrees from the most elite institutions. So in my experience, concerns about non-Ivy grads looking to magnify your “errors or mess-ups” or erroneously “assum[ing] you’re a genius” are grossly exaggerated. These problems exist mainly in the minds of certain Ivy grads, who by and large are the only ones obsessed with their own status. Most people just don’t give a hoot; they’ll judge you on who you are as a person and on the quality of your work, and won’t give a second thought to where you went to college unless you constantly bring it up. Among my own faculty colleagues with whom I interact almost daily, I couldn’t name where where more than a tiny handful got their undergrad degrees or even their graduate degrees, without looking it up. Not that I haven’t looked at that information; I have, but it’s information of such low value that I promptly forget. I know those whose work I most respect, and those I most admire as persons; I don’t stop to think about whether there’s a correlation with where they went for their undergraduate education, or where they did their graduate work, but my guess is such a correlation would be fairly weak, especially for undergrad degrees. I am aware, however, that a small minority of my colleagues seem to feel a need, whether out of arrogance or insecurity, to remind people where they got their undergraduate degrees, and this tendency seems to be somewhat more pronounced among Ivy grads, and especially Harvard grads, though again not universal among those groups.</p>
<p>But, I still liked SewHappy’s post. And, I thought there was at least a bit of tongue-in-cheek there.</p>
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<p>Fair enough. But Charles Darwin, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, George Bernard Shaw, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were all people who either struggled with or rebelled against formal secondary education before going on to produce works of genius in their respective fields. They were not the conformist types who would do well in todays elite college admissions game. Of course, Harvard may be right that their non-conformist approaches and outside-the-box thinking would not have made these people best suited to gain from the Harvard experience. But let’s be clear, then, that notwithstanding its claims, Harvard is not necessarily seeking out the “best and the brightest.” It’s seeking out those among the best and the brightest who also fit a certain mold: diligent, high-achiever types who dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, and who perform well in conventional instructional settings.</p>
<p>I think the further you get away from school, the less anyone cares. At my age, no one asks or cares where I went to school.</p>
<p>Realistically, why shouldn’t they have some expectations? Why not send our bright, budding authors to a highly selective writing program, our genius tinkerers to the best environments for that? I hesitate to call H conformist- no more so than a RISD, for art, or an Iowa, for writing- where you are limited by the standards of the programs, the views, practices and likes of the faculty. If we expect the elites to redefine worthy kids, why stop at admisisons? Should outliers be allowed a totally open curriculum, attendance at will, etc. Or?</p>
<p>I’m struggling to think of a place, college or other, where “best and brightest” is so openly defined that no one has to meet some sort of needs that work for the whole.</p>