Judged on your college

College Confidential Community
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<p>Admissions to elite colleges today is far from meritocratic. It's more akin to playing the lottery. Colleges pick the class that is best for them which does not necessarily include the best students. Barring the few geniuses/incredibly talented applicants, every other well qualified student's acceptance is a toss up. Private institutions have the right to take who ever they want and to use any factor in their decision.</p>

<p>With this admissions game, excellent and deserving students may not and most likely do not get into their institution of choice. Yet, society judges you based on the outcome of this stochastic process. The top students at UCLA/Michigan are probably better than 80% of Stanford/Harvard students if not more. However they are not offered the same opportunities as the elite school student. It is very possible that they drew the short straw in the admissions cycle. Top companies recruit from a few select institutions disregarding others. While all these colleges offer excellent educations, the "name" of your college determines a lot in your initial years.</p>

<p>The world is far from democratic and is something we must all accept, but it is disturbing when you see so many brilliant people turned down for "lesser" students. It pains me to see the student with a 2050 SAT who is average by all accounts get into Princeton over the near perfect scoring student who is truly passionate about what he does. The latter is sure to end up somewhere nice, but is it fair when he may have utilized that same education much better?</p>

<p>Edit: I couldn't find the right forum, so please move this thread if in the wrong place.</p>

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<p>… that’s your opinion. As an HYP grad myself, I don’t discriminate people based on their colleges. Any hiring manager worth his/her salt, seeing a top UCLA/UM applicant would be very happy.</p>

<p>Admittedly, some firms will limit searches to MBAs from certain schools only. Also, in limited recruiting budgets, you always go for the biggest bang for the buck. That’s sensible.</p>

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<p>Schools judge success on the quality of their outputs as much as by the quality of their inputs. Graduates are one important output. The best <em>students</em> are not necessarily the best graduates, as there is not much use for students/scholarship outside of school. Yet, scholarship is what schools are best equipped to foster. Leadership, character, creativity and a number of other qualities, which schools cannot teach, but combine with the knowledge and intellectual skills that are enhanced by scholarship have a lot to do with the quality of graduates. The solution is to select for entering students who show some evidence of such extra-scholastic qualities together with some required level of intellectual ability.</p>

<p>Also, students benefit greatly from interaction with others who are not exactly like them, so a certain degree of diversity is necessary.</p>

<p>There is a lot of luck involved in school admissions as there is in all aspects of life, but your perception of the degree of random chance in admissions is exaggerated by your overly narrow definition of what constitutes merit.</p>