False Advertising: Selling Your High School with Ivy League Admits

Over the weekend, I had the great pleasure of hosting a family in the Twin Cities with a student attending a top private school. Over dinner, we were discussing how we, as parents, decided where to send our children to school. Our friends noted that at a number of elite private schools they considered, a key selling point was how many of their students went to the Ivy League. Those schools were essentially saying, “Come to our school, and you’ll have a terrific chance to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”

We all agreed at our dinner that this sort of approach really has no place in higher education. I don’t like it when schools establish their bona fides by telling you about the elite colleges their students get into. I say this as a Harvard graduate, which may be surprising. Nonetheless, I would be exceptionally careful of any school that validates its program by bragging about how many students it sends to the Ivy League.

Let me explain.

There are nearly 3,000 four-year public and private universities and colleges in the United States. There is truly a college or university for virtually every high school graduate in the United States, and often there are many institutions that would be a perfect fit for a given student.

The only thing that is an absolute nonnegotiable factor in choosing a college is strong academics. But once you go beyond that, colleges offer dramatic differences in terms of culture, sports, politics, religion, and ethnic and racial diversity. A student who would be a perfect fit for Brigham Young University would probably be an awful fit at Oberlin College, and vice versa. You also can barely imagine more different schools than Ole Miss and UC Berkeley, even though both are state universities. The fact is, a great college for one student could be a terrible college for another, even though both colleges boast solid academics!

A great high school recognizes that its top priority is finding out the best fit for a student and a college. That’s why it’s imperative for college counselors, either in a high school or in private practice (like me), consider a broad range of schools for a student with an eye to finding the right fit – this will, after all, be home for the student for at least the next four years after high school.

If Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are the best fits for a given student, terrific. If not, don’t worry – there are many outstanding institutions out there that would love to have your student. And be especially wary of any high school that tries to establish its credentials by the number of students it sends to the Ivy League.