If it is “a pretty broad range of what would be reasonable” then I am not sure what the disagreement is. Sounds like most kids to me.
Also, even though you may not have intended for the “paying for the party” comment to be specifically insulting, I respectfully suggest it did read that way.
OK – very highly regarded, highly selective private universities and LACs. Not ivies.
Gothics? lol
OK, here are the 30-40 Gothics I had in mind – schools that are reaches or low reaches for most everyone:
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
Williams
Amherst
Swarthmore
Pomona
Middlebury
Caltech
UChicago
Columbia
Penn
Brown
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Johns Hopkins
Northwestern
Bowdoin
Wellesley
Carleton
Haverford
Wesleyan
Vassar
Smith
Claremont McKenna
Carnegie Mellon
Emory
Georgetown
Notre Dame
Rice
Vanderbilt
WUSTL
Washington & Lee
Harvey Mudd
Hamilton
Colby
Tufts
That’s 40.
We could keep going. But in listing just 40, we begin to see how many elite private schools we have to choose from here in the USA.
Its amazing how things have changed. When I was looking at colleges, Vassar, NYU and Brandeis were safeties. It was quite a shock to look at the stats and see how much things have changed. There is no question that its all much harder for my kids then it was for me.
List of wonderful colleges, all. And all are “elite” as you note. Of course the downside is that this list covers nearly all of the privates that meet full need and are need blind. (And they are hard to get into.)
@lastone03 oh I don’t know how many B’s would alarm me. It’s hard to say in hypothetical scenarios and a lot of it depends on the child. DD2 for example, as I mentioned, is a member of two dance companies. While I agree that “kids need time to be kids,” I feel like she is being a little indulgent, especially since she also spends another 15+hrs each week on her sport. She LOVES all of her ECs and she’s maintaining her A’s, but I would like for her to have a little more downtime to just do nothing.
The term “Ivy League” was around before the sports league. It was applied to clothing styles, haircuts, and older elite genteel colleges with certain characteristics in common.
Exactly what those characteristics were is tough to nail down. I’d think it was applied to different colleges by different people, but certainly the likes of Williams & Hamilton would have been considered Ivy League. Perhaps not grind schools like Chicago, MIT, or Hopkins? Northwestern & Virginia likely had at least some of the characteristics. Bottom line is that the meaning of “Ivy League” has changed over time, and will presumably continue to change.
I think the days of Ivy dominance of college prestige are numbered due to the evolution of technologies. Already, schools like Stanford, Illinois, Ga Tech, & Carnegie-Mellon have more cachet than the Ivies in tech circles due to their impact in engineering & computer science. Perhaps this trend will erode the Ivies dominance of college prestige the way X-Games sports have diminished the monopoly of traditional sports in the Winter Olympics.
In reply #95:
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-college-athletics shows the percentage of high school athletes who go on to NCAA sports. http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-professional-athletics shows the percentage of NCAA athletes who go on to professional sports. More at http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/probability-competing-beyond-high-school .
Most sports are elite or bust for the purpose of getting anything college-useful (recruiting, admissions, scholarship) out of it. And it is even more so for those who want to go professional.
On the other hand, I do see a decent number of parents with kids (or high school age kids by themselves) in the library.
True dat. Somehow calling them the “COFHE Schools” never quite caught on:
I think a number of those colleges are not formally need-blind, although they award significant financial aid to a high percentage of their students. I think meeting need is a much more important commitment than need-blind admissions.
One of the interesting things to me about @prezbucky 's list, which is generally excellent, is that it’s not hard at all to come up with even further colleges fully equivalent to those on the list. Grinnell? Reed? Oberlin? Colgate? Bates? Bryn Mawr? Kenyon? How about NYU? USC? Boston College? And that doesn’t begin to count public universities with faculty strength and facilities superior to most of the colleges on the list, which may or may not be affordable to any particular out-of-state student, but are tremendous opportunities for lots of students. The forty “Gothics” listed could easily be 60+ if the main criteria are faculty excellence, a critical mass of successful, intelligent, motivated students, and a track record of successful education.
And the sizable penumbra beyond those 60+ schools are educating future superstars every day. Not long ago, my firm’s leadership consisted entirely of Ivy League alumni. It’s a much stronger institution today, and its new generation of leadership includes some very impressive graduates of colleges that were not candidates for @prezbucky 's list. (Harvard, too.) Three of the most brilliant, accomplished people I know went to college at Michigan State, Albion, and Albright, places not likely to show up on anyone’s top-60 list. The quality of the American higher education system is really amazing.
That’s why the narrative remains…the best by definition can not be 60. It can’t even be 40.
The educational “brass ring” is Ivy + Stanford + MIT. Caltech should be in there…but it’s not. Why? Because the vast majority of people in the world don’t know it. This discussion is about less than 1% of students going to college every year (someone will point out it’s 0.3 or 0.4…I’m not looking it up). Let’s agree we’re discussing exceptional people. Unhook the athletes and the kids of movie stars and the legacies, and you are left with people who function at a level beyond “great”. Your kids aren’t there. My kids aren’t there. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, as those folks often struggle with the non-academic aspects of life. But please don’t suggest those kids are attending Boston College.
Science drives these clusters. Writers don’t need the same critical mass as Chemists. There are tons of great engineering schools, but the 10 listed above (Ivy+S+MIT) are the automatic entry into the conversation at all levels of business, politics, science and religion. (please refrain from listing all of the great flagship engineering programs…I know).
Two of the three worst visits we’ve had at colleges were Ivy. We live close enough that we actually returned to one to see if we were there on an “off” day. The place was miserable. Nobody smiled. Nobody helped. Nobody made eye contact. The staff acted like they were doing favors to the visitors. The only happy people was the bus of Japanese tourists, jumping off like they were entering the Holy Land. I’m glad neither of my children applied to any Ivy’s…but please stop suggesting they aren’t special.
All of the schools in the top 60 have amazing students, but they are clustered in only a few.
Except that we all know what disasters engineering and business school graduates have been as POTUSes. 
This fascination with “the Ivies” is hard to even fathom. Yes they are great schools. Yes they have their pick of top students. Yet at our large public suburban school maybe 1 or 2 students even would consider an Ivy. Probably because their parent(s) attended. The whole CC universe seems skewed in favor of the LAC/Ivy style of school. I regularly see Varsity sports dismissed as a valid EC while Science Olympiad? and Model UN etc. are touted. Not sure if it is just the self selection that is the cause based on the CC user base or what is the cause. In reference to the OP I would suggest that most 17-18 year olds are looking for any number of things beyond the academics of the Ivy League. Social, sports, size, reputation, parties, etc etc. There are many schools that offer outstanding academics with a much more varied array of non academic choices and still offer fantastic career opportunities. The Ivy League is a great fit for some, but as one who turned it down to attend a large public OOS university for the environment and opportunities I just question the fascination of people with the Ivy League and “elite LACS”.
Because its on the Left Coast. 
What about the “exceptional people” who can’t justify the expense of HYPSYM? Where are they attending?
Ouch! (There are several BC grads attending Stanford PhD programs right now, even on an extra Stanford Fellowship.)
I know plenty of people who don’t know Stanford and definitely not most of the Ivies. Or what MIT actually stands for.
Everyone knows Harvard, that’s about it for universal name recognition. I suspect that’s more about it being mentioned so often in movies and popular culture as a stand in for “smart” or “rich”.
(I have no skin in this game, just an observation)
Many HS students are a little more sophisticated than we may give them credit for. Ask any of the tech focused HS kids I know about colleges and you’ll hear mentions of MIT, Cal Tech, CMU, and Stanford. Ask about Harvard and you are likely to hear “Maybe in the future, they are investing in improving”. May be different in other areas of study.
LACs are definitely the confounding element here since they most closely resemble what ivies were like seventy or eighty years ago when the phrase was first coined. But, once you include them, what’s to distinguish them from every “smallish” university in the country with a lacrosse team? FWIW, I had the same experience as @EyeVeee recently, walking around an exceptionally popular urban ivy League university and wondering to myself, “Where the h**** is all the ivy?” In many cases, the old campuses of these places are buried beneath tons of 20th century growth and not particularly inspiring aesthetically.
Kids who get into tippy tops are not exceptional, if you mean some pinnacle. They did what it takes to get in, showed the commitment, challenges taken on, resilience, compassion and more, wrapped in a decent app/supp. And then , in a big pile of qualified finalists, they got chosen. (If we take Harvard’s 6x number of finalists to seats, those last kids who end up at other schools are no less great than they were as finalists.)
And these are kids, yet to be honed. They aren’t “beyond great.” But there’s your narrative, eh? This thinking that getting into a TT is some special ultra validation of superpowers. A sort of faulty thinking, imo.
Plus you forget the filter of institutional needs.
@bluebayou - So is Stanford (on the left coast). It’s a size issue (IMO). BC is good school, but none of the dozen or so kids I’ve known to go there in the past 5 years are in the same league as the MIT, Harvard and Yale kids I’ve known. Nice kids, bright futures…but not the same level.
@sylvan8798 - There are truly gifted, special people at most schools, but there aren’t dozens at any one time. Beyond connections for one’s career, I do believe that when surrounded by numerous other exceptional people, true genius is more likely to occur.
PS- I’m talking about the intellectual top XXX %. That’s what drives the “brand”, and makes the Ivy narrative compelling. Acceptance into one of them somehow generates a glow of intelligence for all, which can be misleading. I like to point out that the most intelligent person I ever worked with and arguably the least intelligent were both Wharton grads.