Schools you didn't realize that are very selective

[cobrat]

In terms of the ivies, U of P , Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Dartmouth were kind of seen in my day as being ‘lesser ivies’ (and before someone takes my head off, I am not saying I agree with that), that HYP were kind of the ‘senior ivy leagues’, and the rest were merely “great”. There is still some of this attitude, the music program my son did in high school was full of kids in there because they knew Ivies look for serious music students and it helps admissions, and among them there still was the bias towards HYP, some of the kids were really disappointed they got only into “the other ivies”, and Cornell especially for some reason to them was ‘slumming’ (I don’t understand it, given the faculty the place has had, including one of my heroes, Hans Bethe:).

This was the prevailing mentality among many in the top 25-33% of my graduating class who were applying and getting admitted to Ivies and peer elite colleges.

In my graduating year, the common perception among them was that Cornell(mainly A & S and moreso Ag School which had a much easier admission rate for in-staters) and to a slightly lesser extent Columbia(especially SEAS) was “slumming” because

1.) A sizable proportion of my graduating class were admitted to those institutions(~1/6 of my graduating class were admitted to Cornell A & S, ~1/7 of my graduating class to Columbia College/SEAS…with the numbers tilted in favor of SEAS).

1. Most of the students applying/attending had noticeably lower GPA/stats than students applying & getting accepted to HYPSMCC and peer elites judging by the admission stats put out by the Guidance office and from what I knew about friends/classmates admitted.
   

Since the Guidance office limited us to 8 total applications while mandating one application must be to a state/local public college system(One can select up to 8 state colleges within the one state public app) and limited the number of Ivy/elite colleges each student applied to and the GCs had a reasonable idea of which students’ stats/GPA/ECs were HYPSMCC worthy or not based on past admissions results, the students who were encouraged to apply to HYPSMCC seldom applied to the “lower Ivies” or their peers except as an academic safety as confirmed by their respective GCs. And this worked out for the vast majority of friends/classmates unless they really screwed up their application with a crappy essay or getting their admission rescinded due to a steep decline in senior year grades or in one friend’s case…being found to have not completed 4 years worth of English lit and being forced to repeat senior year to complete those English lit credits despite receiving admission offers to 2 Ivies*.

However, the above mentality didn’t apply to students in Engineering as much as in their case, Cornell would be considered a far stronger choice and the prevailing mentality was only someone who was extremely prestige obsessed and not really serious about engineering would apply to the Ivies other than Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia SEAS …the three Ivies considered among aspiring engineering majors and many engineering/STEM employers I know of to have the best engineering departments among the Ivy league and could hang with elite engineering schools outside the tippy-top MIT/Caltech/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley tier.

1. They were located in NY state which most classmates wanted to leave for their undergrad years. This especially hurt Columbia as it was located within NYC and this was the period when NYC...especially the area around Columbia's campus was much more crime-ridden.
   

• Despite this blip, after a year at a SUNY, he ended up successfully transferring and finishing at one of the Ivies which initially admitted him as a senior before the offer was rescinded and went on to medical school to become an MD.