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As I’ve mentioned before and repeated here, when you go to some of these schools, the admissions folks already weeded out the non-achievers so you’re mostly going to school with the top future leaders and execs of the world. Yes, some joe schmo can start a business and be a millionaire or multi-millionaire from a state school, but the odds are against you.
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You would be surprised about this. (flame suit on). In my observation, there were a few different ways to get into an Ivy League school.
1. By hard work academically, with some extracurricular things. Even, if you wanted to be the nerdiest science geek imaginable.
2. By some athletic achievement. Even though eventually, weren’t going to pursue an athletic career, once you got it, you had mobility to pursue a degree even though academically you probably wouldn’t have gotten in.
3. By having money and from a family with connections. You couldn’t be horrible academically, but you could get away with being average. Chances are, you would have been waitlisted for admissions. But surely, you would have gotten in during the waitlist period.
4. You met the criteria to fit some quota number. Several of my engineering classmates fit that category, and a lot of them nearly flunked out and/or transferred out of their engineering degree after 2 years. Those that ended with a C- from an Ivy League school with little connections (family or friend) had a real tough time finding a job post grad, partly due to the economy at that time, but partly since at that that time some employers couldn’t literally recruit students below a grade threshold, no matter what school they came from.
That said, having volunteered with the admissions board as a student member, we knew the concept of “weeding out” was very subjective. I, for instance, was wait-listed for admissions for just about every Ivy I applied for. And when when I was finally accepted, I thought it would be extremely difficult academically. But I graduated top 5% of my class, and had no problem finding an internship during my first 3 years, and had no problem finding a job any engineering company that I applied for as a backup (wall street firms was a different story). Meanwhile a significant portion of my graduating class (the ones that did survive, many didn’t) didn’t find something meanful and went on to post grad work because there was no better option (that was the day that Sun Microsystems/Netscape/Yahoo was considered hot, Qualcomm was considered a scrapy telco company, and Motorola was still #1).
So sorry, I don’t buy the concept of Ivy League’s “weeding out process”…Especially, if you’re asian+male, you’ll probably realize, well at least until recently, you’re already at a slight disadvantage, especially if you are trying to pursue something STEM related. And only recently, is it somewhat changing if you are asian+male, but mainly if you’re from overseas, probably with parents with money that can pay for full tuition or more, kinda like what the UC system is doing these days. For me, personally, I think I was a rule breaker, some punk kid at the time that the school (almost) wrote off.
If you(your kid can get in), great. If they can’t, it’s not the end of the world.
