Application Year in Review: Putting the Ivy League in Perspective

After concluding my 15th year of working with high school seniors, with many of them getting admission letters into Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and Yale – it’s becoming increasing apparent that top students are obsessed with the Ivy League. For many parents and students, admission into an Ivy League school is a stamp of approval of their hard work in and out of the classroom. In many instances, students and parents see an Ivy League admission letter as a punched ticket to success for future aspirations. I often joke with my students that getting into an Ivy League school today is like unwrapping the golden chocolate bar from Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

However, as a Harvard graduate myself, I’d like to put this all in perspective. Many students are obviously not going to be admitted into Ivy League schools out of the sheer numbers involved. Most if not all the Ivy League schools received approximately 30,000 applications per school this past fall. Harvard this year accepted approximately 5% of all applicants, meaning that 95% of the generally highly-qualified and insanely driven students who applied to the school were either waitlisted or more likely rejected.

This is devastating for many students and parents, and understandably so. Just as an admission letter to these schools is seen as an academic stamp of approval, students and their families often interpret a rejection from the Ivies as an indication that something went wrong in the student’s high school experience or in their college application.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

A variety of factors are involved with admission into any school, particularly the Ivy League. Merit, unfortunately, is not the only standard by which these schools admit their students. Other factors including athletics, alumni connections, race, gender, religion, and ethnicity all come into play. These schools, like other highly-selective schools, demand a diverse freshman class and they actively seek to craft that class from their admitted students pool. The appalling reality is that a student can do everything “right” in high school, including getting near or perfect ACT/SAT scores, a 4.0+ GPA, and loads of extra-curricular activities, and yet still not get into any of these schools.

For those students in that situation, let me reassure you that you have nothing to worry about. Let me explain why.

If you take it as a given that most highly-driven students in the country will eventually pursue a graduate degree, then you must accept the assumption that a college degree is a starting point, not an end point. A bachelor’s degree even from a well-regarded school such as Harvard and Princeton will rarely lead to a six-figure job right after college. The vast majority of top high school students will eventually attend graduate or professional school, frequently immediately upon graduation from college.

If the student goes to a terrific state university – think Berkeley, Michigan, or Texas – or a wonderful liberal arts college – think Wellesley, Amherst, or Haverford – and does well in the classroom and scores well on standardized tests for graduate school, they will not be at a disadvantage to Ivy League graduates when applying to graduate programs. In fact, many graduate programs make it more difficult for students from their own school to get in precisely because they want to diversify the number of undergraduate programs represented in their graduate programs.

Ironically, this would mean that a Harvard College graduate could potentially be at a statistical disadvantage into getting into Harvard Law School if a similarly situated student from the University of Wisconsin applied, merely because the Law School might need to increase Upper Midwest representation.

There’s another reason to not be too concerned if you did not get admitted into an Ivy League school this year. Employers frequently tell me that the most important degree they look at is not the first one, but the last one. In other words, it matters more where you got your terminal degree than where you got your undergraduate degree. For law school and business school, this is especially important because the top 20 programs in those disciplines are critical to getting a high paying job. For medical school, it is less important where you went to college and far more important that you achieve an amazing GPA and MCAT score (and interview well). The good news is that the admission rates into Ivy League graduate programs are considerably more generous that for the undergraduate program in most disciplines.

The bottom line is this: if you got into an Ivy League school for college this year, congratulations because it was a very tough battle. If you got waitlisted or rejected, don’t take it as a personal slight, because it isn’t. Rather, focus on things you can control which is to find the right fit for college, do exceptionally well with your GPA, and do your best to prepare for the next round of standardized tests (e.g., LSAT, GMAT). Four years from now – they will go by very fast - when a student is applying to law school, medical school, or some other graduate program, it will be a level playing field regardless of whether a student went to Princeton or Penn State, Cornell or Carnegie Mellon, or Brown or Bowdoin.

Most importantly, congratulations to this year’s graduating class and good luck to you wherever you wind up going to college.