NEWS: Ivy League Schools Don't Want You More Than Ever

CULTURE: Ivy League Schools Don't Want You More Than Ever

Upon reading this New York Times article today, I immediately had flashbacks to my senior year of high school. I'll admit, I was kind of a slacker in my last couple years: my AP scores were average, my GPA hit 4.0 only when weighted, and while my SAT verbal score was a shining beacon of analogical genius (760, chumps), my quantitative score languished. My mother had taken to lamenting loud and often around the house whenever the topic of applications came up, which was often. "Don't you know," she would cry, "you need a 1450 to get into NYU? How will you ever get into NYU? I guess we can just forget about Stanford!"

Had I been born a scant six years later, I likely would have imploded from pressure, had I not committed seppuku first to spare my family the shame.

Ouch, that burns.

It is interesting from a sociological standpoint, though: myriad factors, it has been noted are contributing to this smart-kid bottleneck.

Ah yes, the Princeton Review. Not least of the problems effecting prospective college alumni these days is a vicious spiral of pressure and competition, turned up to new exponential degrees with every passing year. I was twelve when my mother introduced the Princeton Review: Word Smart (1st edition) into my vocabulary, and my friends all laughed at me spending afternoons studying flashcards with words like sobriquet, malaise, and plutocrat. Nowadays, The Princeton Review, and others like it, are an industry of staggering proportions, and as hundreds upon thousands of kids turn to preparatory classes and guidance counselors to plot their future successes, it's almost too easy to call out the flaws. When everyone has the same perfect SAT scores and has taken the same perfect prep courses, how can one possibly expect to stand out?

I guess if you want to split hairs, only getting into NYU is nothing to cry about, but getting rejected from a college you'd set your dreams on is a pretty crushing blow no matter how you slice it. The good thing to remember throughout all of this, however, is that plenty of other schools will always be there for you. Sort of. Well, as long as you're willing to get creative.

Build a tractor? Hey, all right, small schools, that sounds great! You know it's depressing when an Amherst representative admits that he wouldn't even be considered for enrollment on the same credentials that got him accepted in the 1970s.

Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating high school class of 2007, I salute you. For the love of god, I don't know how you do it without having embolisms left and right. That said, I do have two very important words for you, which I suggest you consider objectively and fairly.

State schools.

(Seriously.)



_DictionaryGirl_ is having another senior year flashback: spring, this time. Laying despondently on the floor of the AP Art classroom, streams of tears collecting on the cold linoleum. Alukh standing by, with hopeful words like "your life is not over, nerd"; refusing, in despair, to believe it. Ms. wasserman yelling get off the floor before I give you both detentions. In short: getting rejected from Berkeley and UCLA on the same day. Don't talk to me about failure, son! I eat failure for breakfast!

Oh how would we survive without college graduates to tell us what to do. Thank Goodness we have so many smart people to solve all of our country's problems.

college, a place where social stratospheres become soldified.Nothing says I want to be upped class like trying to go to an ivy league school. Rejection...its the American way

Hell, I just graduated college a year ago and I probably wouldn't get in now to the school I went to on the credentials I had.

For what it's worth, people applying to grad school are experiencing a similar pressure - and it's also intensified in just the last few years. Just the other day, one of my (utterly brilliant) faculty acknowledged that he probably wouldn't have gotten into our program (and he attended one of the top universities in our field).

I learned everything I needed to know from my dog.

And Michigan!

as someone who just finished the application and acceptance proccess for the 1st time at the age of 25, this was a most interesting article to read.

Oh that's interesting. My top schools are Oxford and the Sorbonne. Harvard's my safety.

Also, I used to work for the Princeton Review. While I certainly agree that they've helped to create this culture of hyper-achievement, to their credit they also work pretty tirelessly as an advocate against the SAT as an accurate measure of a student's worth. Or at least they did while I worked there 5 years ago.

I think this is universally true, unfortunately.

Here in the UK, of the 6 leading Universities i applied for it was true to say for each of them that had i applied there 2 years earlier i would have had to achieve only very average grades to get in.

Whereas a mere 2 years later, when i did apply, there were bright kids getting turned away left right and centre because the entry requirements had almost doubled.

Quite a blow in a society where anyone who shows even mild potential at high school level is instilled with the belief that university is the ONLY route to success, nay, happiness!

damn im glad im graduating college and not high school. i dont think i could live throught that now.
i hope grad school application isnt that bad.. oh wait it is

Bruce Dern speaking to his daughter's graduating class in the movie, "Middle-Age Crazy:"

"You can't all be the future! Hell, there ain't that much future to go around!"

does anyone think this has a lot to do with the baby-boom's spawn being collegiate aged as well?

I go to University of Florida and when i got in they said "the average incoming GPA was 3.95" I guess i brought it down with my 3.80 . I can only assume that has risen.

I just dispensed with the entire process and went to a technical college. No entry requirements whatsoever, bay-bee.

Of course, it's also not doing that much for my career.

Perfect regurgitation still doesn't equal smarts.

These places need new slogans like "We don't need your money and we're not giving you any of ours"

I applied to one school my senior year. I wanted to go to GMI & that was it. No fallback school if I was rejected. I wasn't rejected, but I probably should have been since I failed out two years later.

Yeesh. My brother is graduating high school in a few weeks. I'll be very interested to find out where the boy ends up.

I live in Canada. We all get in to university!

actually, this is nothing new. most top schools admit that SAT scores and GPA's are a terrible way to judge admission candidates. passion (outside the classroom) is, as any right-thinking person should know, far more important (in all aspects of life).