<p>As the parent of teens going through the college preparation process, I can fully empathize with them and share the stress they experience. I find their so-called "obsession" with college selection completely rational. </p>
<p>After all, current college graduates will be part of the first generation where many will have a lower standard of living than their parents. Very few children graduating from our town's high school will ever be able to afford a home where they grew up unless they inherit the house of their parents. As echo-boomers they will enter a work force where the more senior employees are highly trained and the environment brutally competitive. This is a far cry from the 1970's and 80's where only a small minority was college educated. Now a college degree may just lead to a job at Starbucks. </p>
<p>I also believe that current teenagers are much more mature and informed than teens from prior generations. That are exposed to vastly more information and a web site such as CC can only help fuel their anxiety. They realize that they need to not only work hard and get top grades, participate in numerous activities outside of school, show a genuine passion for some activity and hope to stand out among their equally qualified peers. Even then they may not get into their top college choice. </p>
<p>Despite all the anecdotal evidence that choice of college does not really matter, they look at the reality around them and reach their own conclusions. If college choice did not matter why do the top students in their high school nearly invariably choose top ranked colleges. Yields at top schools are so high precisely because very few turn down the opportunity to attend their top choice if admitted. And this happens despite attempts by lower ranked schools to skew the process with merit aid. They have grown up in global free market for education where information circulates near instantly. A top student as far away as India or China is fully aware of the comparative lifetime advantages of an education at an elite school in the US. They know that if they want to work for Microsoft or Google it makes a substantial difference if they attend MIT or Stanford as opposed to Georgia Tech or UCSD. They know that if you want to attend a top professional school it makes a statistically significant difference which college you attended. Yes you can go to a small LAC or the local State U. and still be hired by a top firm or get into HBS, but in economic terms the volatility and therefore the risk is much greater. It is similar to an investment in a small cap stock over a blue chip or comparing the NASDAQ to the Dow Jones. You can do well at both but it is very hard to beat the Dow Jones over the long run. To a large extent, current students are operating as highly sophisticated players in a mostly efficient marketplace. I personally give today's teens great credit for making the best possible choices based on all information available.</p>
<p>I see signs of irrational exuberance, to use Greenspan's phrase, in the feeding frenzy to attend the most prestigious school possible. </p>
<p>I won't pretend that it doesn't matter at all which undergraduate school one attends. Such a frenzy can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The higher the frenzy, the more choice of school reveals one's place in high school in the national pecking order.</p>
<p>Here's where the students at Harvard Law School (full disclosure - they rejected me) did their undergraduate work:</p>
<p>Harvard - 241
Yale - 113
Stanford - 79
Penn - 57
Princeton - 54
Berkeley - 48
Brown - 48
Columbia - 46
Cornell - 45
UCLA - 39
Dartmouth - 35
Georgetown - 32
Total for schools ranking 1 through 12 in frequency: 839
Total for schools ranking 13 through 255: 835</p>
<p>These stats encapsulate the overall situation pretty well, in my view: the most capable high school students are clustering in a relatively small number of schools. Nevertheless, there are still substantial opportunities to establish one's place at the top of the heap outside of that small number of schools.</p>
<p>Greybeard's stats above prove my point precisely.</p>
<p>Of the schools sending 40+ kids a year to HLS, the only non-ivies are Stanford and Berkeley. These top 12 schools fill 50% of HLS.</p>
<p>Schools ranked from 13-255, = 242 schools on the other hand, fill the other 50%. A bit screwed? Yes. Rightly so? Yes. Why? Because prestigious colleges attract driven students that are further helped by the prestigious name on their diplomas.</p>
<p>truazn: With all due respect, you've got it all wrong. Greybeard's stats prove nothing.</p>
<p>(1) It's only logical that the schools on Greybeard's list would be the most highly represented. Why? Because the vast majority of Harvard Law's applicants come from those colleges. Why? Because those colleges have the nation's highest achieving group of students. </p>
<p>(2) For every Harvard or Yale student who applies to Harvard Law, MANY are denied each year. Those are the ones the public never hears about!</p>
<p>(3) If colleges ranked from 13-255 fill the other 50% of Harvard Law's enrollees consider this: Graduates of schools 13-255 beat out a HUGE number of applicants from HYPS. This proves exactly what I've been saying:
A "Harvard type" who chooses to attend Kenyon college will be admitted to Harvard Law not because he went to Kenyon, but because he possesses "Harvard type" qualities. </p>
<p>Also, the HYPS grads admitted to Harvard Law were the "best of the best" HYPS grads. Few who attend HYPS end of being at the top of their class at those schools. Again, it was the "cream of the crop" Ivy grads who are fortunate enough to be admitted to Harvard Law.</p>
<p>I would go as far as to say the graduating from HYPS could actually hurt ones chances of getting into Harvard Law, because they want to enroll a class with some diversity. The student who went to Harvard, which has dozens and dozens of students applying to Harvard Law, may have been better of going to Hamilton, which has only a handful of its grads applying to Harvard Law each year.</p>
<p>Yeah, during the college process everyone was obsessed with getting into the prestigious schools, no matter whether the school actually "fit" their personality. Maybe it's because they're teenagers, but it felt like their priorities were impressing others with bumper-sticker names instead of finding what would really work for them.</p>
<p>fine you know what? Ivy League schools suck then.</p>
<p>Go to a TTT CommunityU and enjoy your life while the Ivy "dumbasses" take their faux-prestigious diplomas and hang it on their wall somewhere downtown wallstreet.</p>
<p>I think this thread got out of hand and is nothing to do with the OP's post...</p>
<p>to the OP. I was unable to name all of the ivy league schools until the second month of my senior year. I had no clue where I was applying until early November. I didn't visit many schools, and was still able to nail interviews. I didn't take AP tests seriously. I ended up up very successful in terms of getting into college.</p>
<p>Those 2 guys that started Google went to state schools for undergraduate. Microsoft is a drop out of Havard. And people that graduate from Ivies will be working for them.
The article I read was recently so it's not outdated information from the 70's and 80's. That is why I read them to have more update view of the people that graduate recently.
For top law school, people go to Ivies will most likely apply to top law schools, paticularly in the field of law where it's more important, hence the high yield from Ivies to top law schools.
For Ibanking, I even heard people who went to UCLA get to work at hedge fund. That if you want to work 20 hours a day.</p>
<p>They become obsessed with getting into a prestigious college because that is where they want to attend college.</p>
<p>I too think it's ridiculous for people to become hysterical over college admissions, but that's no reason to actually discourage anyone from applying to certain schools.</p>
<p>I get that people are saying you can have equal opportunities at Non-Ivy/Elites as you can at the Ivies and Elite colleges, but it keeps sounding like they are saying you SHOULD bypass the top schools for other ones. Like oldbutwise said, yes, you'd probably have better chances of getting into top grad schools if you graduate number 1 in your class at some less prestigious school as compared to in the middle of the pack at Harvard, but so what?</p>
<p>I'm sure most kids who go to Ivy League schools realize that, and they don't have goals of settling for being 'average' or below average at a top school. They still want to attempt to be the best. Sure, it won't work out that way, but no one who gets admitted to schools such as the Top colleges have their sights set low.</p>
<p>But back to the question, few people in my school care about the 'prestigious' school. The "smart" kids tend to follow the money (merit scholarships) more than the prestige and understand that undergraduate research, internships, and publications will do more for them in the long run than the 'name' of a school. The ones who do attend 'prestigious' schools do so only if money (FA) is amazing. The ones who give up the merit scholarships and the special treatment and placement offered at the non-prestigious schools also fully weigh the pros and cons of the choice.</p>
<p>old but wise, I agree with a lot of what you say but let's stick with the intellectual enrichment bit. College is about intellectual gluttony, one should go to college to have an intellectual feast .If you concede this, then it follows that you should be at a school where your peers are slightly better than you in SAT scores (using that as a measure, however flawed). Just as you improve in chess or tennis by playing higher ranked players similarly you improve by being with professors and students who provide intellectual challenges. Hence, the ivies and S/M woiuld win out. They attract the top students for the most part. Since the selection also selects for drive and persistence if you can get in you should go to the highest ranked college. The rankings may be flawed but they are the best we have, an imperfect tool, but the marketplace has voted, students know which the top schools are, they vote with their feet, the market takes note and employers and grad schools recruit at those schools which in turn feeds the frenzy. The argument that a Harvard type who goes to No Name school will do just as well is based on what has been. Please pay attention the Black Swan effect. The population of the world has probably doubled in the last 40 years, global competition is ferocious, the BRICS nations are rising to the top, so maybe what has been will not necessarily be what will be. My feeling is that there has been a paradigmatic shift in the meritocracy and unfortunately those who go to lesser ranked schools will be at a severe disadvantage. The days of a Linus Pauling or Jack Welch going to a no name school are past (with few exceptions) because the nature of the pursuit of knowledge has changed and the global marketplace. Also, English majors at the ivies will be at a disadvantage compared to math majors at the same schools and so on.</p>
<p>But the primary reason to go to college must be intellectual exploration. My son is going to Columbia in the fall and since 9th grade I have encouraged him to pursue the most comprehensive curriculum he can and to hell with the college admissions frenzy. He took 2 foreign languages, Latin and French to AP Lang and Lit, the toughest math, science and computer sci and art hist. courses, went on a trip to Italy's museums, did ZERO community service because that did not excite him, absolutely no clubs or competitions, like tennis and played on the varsity team, and guess what, contrary to the school counselor's dire warnings, he got into 5 Ivies. As an Asian parent I had to continously fight my dark side like when the school wanted him to do more community service and he wasn't keen on padding his resume with a contrived activity for which he had no heart. Mind you, he is incredibly generous, but maybe like Thoreau he is notoriously suspicious of deliberate do-gooders. My two cents.</p>
<p>There was another post from a student from a top school, perhaps Ivy league even and he said he was disappointed at the students at his school, there are no more intellectual discussion, mostly ambitious career minded students, not what he expected out of a top college. Maybe just one person, but I tend to think the I want to work in Ibanking mentality is taking over the Ivy league students. Maybe I'm wrong?</p>
<p>Our system is becoming an educational arms race. We must get caught up in "the whole college thing" if we hope to remain competitive in the global economy .</p>
<p>Just my $.02, and this is from someone who isn't attending a T20 school.</p>
<p>We won't have Google either, I don't want the next generation to be so obsessive in focusing in one thing and miss working/producing what's useful to everybody in general.
Ibanking has been around since years, remember Ivan Boesky in the 80's. Michael Milken, etc..</p>
<p>ramaswami: To you, the primary reason to go to college is to partake in the "educational feast." That's fine, and I certainly respect your perspective on what college is all about. In my experience, however, partaking in the educational feast was at the top of the list for very few of my college-bound students, including some of the most intellectual ones. Most were focused more on what college could do for them in terms of fulfilling future professional goals. Example: A student interested in becoming a physician would want to know which colleges had the best track record of getting students into good med schools.</p>
<p>I would be very interested in hearing from our CC high-schoolers out there who are looking at the Ivies.........is your main motivation for looking at HYPSM to partake in the educational feast, or is it to put you in a good position to ultimately get a great job? I'd like to hear from you.</p>
<p>MK99: Our college-obsessed high schoolers are brainwashed into thinking that they will end up working at Starbucks if they don't graduate from a prestigious college. For the media, the topic of college is a very boring one, unless they come up with news that is sensationalized and will get people's attention. So, the media focuses on how hard it is to get into the top 2% of all colleges, while ignoring virtually everything about the remaining 98% of colleges. A newpaper article focusing on the number of valedictorians with perfect SAT's denied by Harvard sells newspapers; a newsworthy article about great things that are happening at the University of North Dakota doesn't. So, that is the type of info we are fed by the media on a daily basis. </p>
<p>The current generation of high schoolers and their parents are bombarded by various types of media like no other generation in history. Thus, we are living in a society in which our young people and their parents are led to believe that to make it in the global economy one must graduate from a prestigious college. Hogwash! 98% of all people will not graduate from a prestigious college, yet they will survive in the global economy and many will make major contributions to it!!! In fact, they are doing it now. The reality is that the majority of people making major contributions to the global economy ARE NOT grads of Ivy League schools. The majority are from less prestigious schools like Lehigh, Holy Cross, Kenyon, Michigan, Oberlin, etc, because the Ivies are producing only a tiny percentage of people who are participants in our global economy. Also, our society needs teachers, counselors, accountants, computer programmers, etc., not just investment bankers and grads of Harvard Law. All contribute to the global economy.</p>
<p>old but wise, you are correct. I hope my son will put educational feast ahead of career goals. Yes, most will graduate from ordinary schools and do well but my fear is that that tiny fraction, very tiny fraction, from the elites will have a better future, just like the IIT grads from India.</p>
<p>No, there is no shame in putting professional aspirations ahead of the intellectual feast but college is possibly the last chance to be a student before job cares intrude and I hope some will at least postpone careerism.</p>