I turned down an Ivy to attend a State U for financial reasons, but let me tell you it was not easier. I still had to work my tail off at the State U to earn my STEM degree.
Even though I have had a very successful career since, working for top consulting and IT firms, there is still this part of me Wish I had gone to the Ivy, if only for bragging rights. It’s also why I encourage my children to aim high, even though I would also be totally fine with it if they just want to go to State U.
I think ambition is inborn. Some of us are just born more ambitious than others. H thinks top schools are a waste of money, he’s not interested in paying $240k for the same degree you can get for $100k, reputation means nothing to him. Sometimes I wish I were less ambitious, more easily satisfied, I think I’d live a happier life LOL. Ambition is a curse.
Gladwell forgot to account for the fact that 95% of Harvard admits are athletes, musicians, URMs, legacies, children of rich donors or the well connected, not exactly what most people consider “Harvard material”. Only 5% of their admits got in strictly on academic merit.
In many instances, these students are Harvard material. They’re just Harvard material who also happen to have a hook. Harvard isn’t admitting legacies who got 500s on the SATs.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that “only 5% of [Harvard] admits got in strictly on academic merit,” unless your interpretation of “strictly” is so strict as to suggest that there are only a couple hundred students a year anywhere who deserve to be at Harvard. If anything, the numbers should be flipped around. 90-95% of Harvard admits are admitted based primarily on academics, or on academics plus something else, and only a small minority are admitted with merely OK academics based on some other factor (sports, wealth, artistic achievement).
Maybe I do not interpret this statement correctly, but it seems to me that whoever write this thinks that being an athlete, a musician, an URM, a legacy, a child of a rich donor or the well-connected is automatically not Harvard material.
Even if this were true (which I do not think so), I want to point out there is nothing wrong for a college like Harvard to admit students with one of more of the qualities. It is not easy to be a top athlete or musician. It is not easy to be an URM and still achieve something to the level Harvard would think highly of. (There are many URMs Harvard won’t take.) For the rest, isn’t it true this is a PRIVATE college that could choose what they want to do? To put it bluntly, such families could contribute more to such a private college , at least in the short term, statistically speaking and what is “wrong” for a college to include SOME self-interest factor in their admission policy?!
Also, I think there may be some truth that the criteria for UG college admission are not totally the same as those for graduate school admission - just like the “quality” of an UG college may not be totally the same as its affiliated graduate school.
The GFG – Your daughter might check Wheaton in MASSachusetts. I know of families with children who had less than stellar math scores that looked at it for “safety” reasons. The college also seems to try to balance liberal arts education with more “practical” concerns.
“not exactly what most people consider “Harvard material”. Only 5% of their admits got in strictly on academic merit.”
If this is true, then “most people” have no idea what “Harvard material” is all about. Harvard wants Renaissance people: the ballerina physicist and the charity-leading poet. They have straight As and killer test scores. The academic admits are kids Harvard thinks are likely future professors and research scientists. They have original publications in their fields and are already contributing new ideas to those disciplines. “Academic merit” is really not the right phrase to describe this attribute.
@theGFG Has your daughter looked at Agnes Scott College? I don’t know about classics, although the do offer the major, but I know two young women who majored in art history there, several years apart. They had very successful outcomes, IMO. One of them ended up in a PhD program at Uchicago. The other one is in a training program to become a museum curator in New York.
@mcat2 “For the rest, isn’t it true this is a PRIVATE college that could choose what they want to do?”
I don’t think so. They may be ‘private’, but they are charities/nonprofits. They are given absolutely enormous privileges (financial and otherwise) by society, so there are some limits on what we should accept from them.
@Hanna “Harvard wants Renaissance people: the ballerina physicist and the charity-leading poet. They have straight As and killer test scores. The academic admits are kids Harvard thinks are likely future professors and research scientists. They have original publications in their fields and are already contributing new ideas to those disciplines. “Academic merit” is really not the right phrase to describe this attribute.”
Normally I agree with your posts, but this is way overstated. Harvard students are clever and accomplished sure, but not many of them are out there contributing new scientific ideas. The admits are just kids.
@Hanna “Right, only a small number are – 5% is probably about right for the number of “academic admits.” 95% are admitted for other reasons.”
Really? Even that sounds a bit much to me. In my field, the number of genuinely new ideas contributed by undergraduates, let alone pre-undergraduates, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I agree with ChuoShinkansen. In my field, I know of only one genuinely new idea contributed by an undergraduate, and that was by Richard Feynman, when he was a senior at MIT. Also, he was being advised by John Slater, who probably made suggestions about the overall research direction. Harvard would need to look for some other indicator, for its academic admits in this field.
Oh, please. The standard for being a true academic admit is not being Richard Feynman (although I’m reasonably certain that Richard Feynman would meet the standard, whatever it is) and producing bona fide new ideas. It’s simply being noticeably better than almost anyone else at handling the old ideas.
One of my kids had a high school classmate who must have been an academic admit, because he really had nothing else going for him. He was a Japanese permanent U.S. resident whose extra-curricular activities essentially consisted of being a mediocre cross-country runner and going to Japanese school for hours every Saturday. He was ranked seventh in a class of 550 (which, given the school’s track record, was high enough to be admitted anywhere, but obviously not #1), and had excellent SATs (but not 800s across the board). He had no national or even local honors, and nothing that would traditionally be considered “leadership.” What he had was the near-universal belief among his peers and his teachers, that he was one of the smartest people ever. He was accepted at all the colleges to which he applied, which were Harvard (SCEA) and Stanford.
Where you get your PhD matters a LOT for academia. Where you get your undergrad degree, not much at all. Both spouse and I are PhD’s from tippy-top programs, and our peers in grad school came from everywhere: Yale, Bates and Michigan sure, but also Rocky Mountain College, SUNY Buffalo and Sacramento State. And there was NO difference in the ability of these various (obviously hyper-selected) people to do graduate level work. Or to get jobs after graduation.
Here’s a little tidbit: I can remember four years’ worth of the two top editors of my law review. That’s a credential that really mattered – a peer-selected leadership role on the law review of an elite law school.
So, out of the eight people, there were two from Harvard (three if you count PhD, which you probably should), two from Yale, and one each from CCNY (with a Harvard PhD) and the Universities of Arizona, Minnesota, and Texas. (If I could have remembered enough people, I would have looked at the five top officers each year, which would have been a bigger group and a more meaningful distinction from the rest of the world. It would have brought in at least a couple of Stanfords and Princetons, some more Harvards, one Vassar, one Carleton, another Arizona, one University of Kansas, and one University of Oklahoma.) You would have a hard time telling who was who from their subsequent careers, except that the ones with elite pre-law school degrees have been more likely to wind up as legal academics, and one of the Harvard people had a particularly steep career arc in part due to family connections (made more powerful by considerable personal merit).
You would see the same kind of pattern if you look at several years worth of Rhodes Scholars (another distinction that really means something). Lots of colleges are represented, only a handful are represented over and over again.
Every published paper is supposed to have a new idea in it – that’s the point of research. Something doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be new. “Here’s a flaw in the existing technique for distilling chemical A out of fluid B” is a new idea. So is “We tried to replicate the results of study A and got result B” and “Here’s why this phrase in Homer should be translated as A instead of B.” That’s the kind of contribution I’m talking about.
@Hanna Granted. But I don’t think 5% of Harvard admits have published sole-author papers before. And being one of 20 people in a lab mentioned in a science paper way down the author list isn’t any sign that the person contributed any ideas.
In post #54, I don’t know whether you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, JHS. The point of my post was to counter Hanna’s earlier claim about how the bar for academic admits is set. It seemed exceptionally high. Hanna’s post #57 tones it down quite a bit, in my opinion, and while I’m okay with that, I suspect that the bar for an academic admit is actually a bit higher than Hanna suggests in #57.