Where do the kids who used to feed into the Ivy League go now?
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Anonymous
| Sorry to disguise myself a bit on such a snarky forum as an HYP grad. I graduated from Harvard magna cum laude and my friends at SLACs - from Williams to Davidson to Wesleyan - all got a better undergrad education. |
Anonymous
| Overseas |
Anonymous
Yea they're treated like the rest of then T25 privates. Some very miniscule could be the difference between Ivys and top non ivys. And by miniscule I mean the admissions officer was in a bad mood that day when reading your application. |
Anonymous
DP How would you know this ? |
Anonymous
A Sidwell grad with a 3.5 GPA would've been a shoo-in for an Ivy in the 80's. That same kid now is going to Wisconsin or Tulane. College admissions has simply become more nationalized. In the 80's, 90's most of these schools got their students from the east coast and a small set of prep school counselors wielded enormous power in "placing" students into desired schools. The St. Albans/NCS/Sidwell counselors would have 8 slots at Yale each and could jockey on the phone to get their favored students admitted. That all ended around 25 years ago, as the elite universities have become more focused on "equity" and "fairness" in admissions. They're now looking for students with compelling stories from underrepresented regions of the country like the deep south, great plains, rural and inner city areas, etc. The result is that your standard "average" student at an elite prep school is no longer headed to Dartmouth/Brown/Williams/Amherst like they did in the 80's. And the "very good" ones aren't headed to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia. They're headed to WUSTL, Rice, Tulane, Wake Forest, etc. If they're strategic enough to apply ED they can get UChicago or maybe Northwestern. |
Anonymous
Wildly inaccurate. Same kids who apply to Dartmouth also apply to Williams. People are not applying to Penn and also Bowdoin. I realize there are kids - mostly immigrant or first gen - who apply to all the ivies because the only thing they know or care about is saying “my kid got into an Ivy”. But vast majority of people have a more educated view and care about where they’ll thrive and not that your mom’s great aunt who’s never heard of Pomona thinks. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
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Students who apply to Penn are not applying to Williams or Swarthmore, either.
Dartmouth is an outlier among the ivies because it is more like a SLAC than any other ivy, so some students would consider Dartmouth and say Williams (although probably not many since the culture is so different). Also, many kids from educated families at my kids’ mcps public HS applied to a swath of ivies without focus on fit/culture at each, and just waited to see where they got in. |
Anonymous
Which is not surprising, given the lottery ticket feel. |
Anonymous
Same where we are (Fairfield County, CT). A large number of the unhooked students shotgun most of the T20. |
Anonymous
oh please. Are all the legacies applying to ivies because their parents can say, "my kid got in an Ivy"? |
Anonymous
Legacy kids aren’t as likely to shotgun ALL ivies. Way more likely to try their legacy school and then play the odds (ed2 at chicago feels tailor made for this group) |
Anonymous
So much has changed over the past 30 years. But what hasn't been mentioned much is what students want to major in these days. In the 90s, there were tons of bright kids majoring in subjects like English, History, and Political Science who went on to have successful careers. That's not the case anymore. The smart kids today tend to want to study biology, engineering, computer science, economics, IT and other more difficult majors. 30 years ago they may have applied to Ivies, but these days schools like Rice, Harvey Mudd, Georgia Tech, CMU, Michigan, and Berkeley - not to mention MIT, Stanford, and CalTech - are getting the best and brightest. For students that are not quite as STEM focused, schools such as Vanderbilt, Duke, UCLA, Northwestern, and Georgetown are all getting very smart kids. Also, given the cost of college these days, there are many really smart students in the honors programs at their state flagship schools. Many of those public schools are better than the Ivies anyway in the STEM majors. It's a completely different landscape out there. As for the SLACs, I'm sure Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Pomona and a few others will continue to attract smart kids. But given the demographics of the US - the number of 18 year olds will steadily decline in the years ahead - and given the STEMy inclination of students today, I suspect SLACs below the top ten will soon have a hard time attracting bright kids. |
Anonymous
They aren't the list at the bottom is per capita. Brown is close to 30 below Emory. So if that is their "weight" then all the schools ranked above Brown are Ivy tier, at least for finance. |
Anonymous
Gatech, Mich, Berkeley, and UCLA are not getting the smartest kids. You can look at the test scores to clearly see that. |