Reply to Nate Silver: "Go to a state school"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]safer bet is to try to get into a good but not hyper selective college and to do well there[/quote]
How is it a "safer bet"? The competition is way more stiff, because in terms of sheer numbers there are more good students and you need to finish higher in the class than at the top schools (where the margin for error is usually much greater).[/quote]

Look, you’re going to have to perform in college at some level.  Or maybe that’s the obsession with elite colleges - you can coast without actually having to compete with anyone.   But is it really harder (for the kid who would be a legitimate candidate to apply to an Ivy) to graduate magna at Penn State or University of Delaware than it is to get into Princeton? I very much doubt it.  If you’re 16 or 17, and that was the career you thought you wanted, you are (and will be more true 5-10 years from now) more likely to get into a T75 college, graduate magna, and get a job at consulting firm X than you are to get into a 5% acceptance rate college and get a job at consulting firm X. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive, you can apply to Princeton and StateU or whatever, but people need to realize that StateU is a viable path to pretty much anything they want to do.[/quote]
No one's saying it's not viable. There are simply fewer paths to [insert golden ticket] by attending StateU.

Let's take Harvard Law for example. Yes, they have 1Ls from a whole bunch of schools, but the vast majority of them are sending one student. You think that graduating magna/summa at Penn State or University of Delaware is sufficient for admission to HLS? It's table stakes. You likely need both a 4.0 and top LSAT score. Whereas those applying from Princeton are likely competitive candidates with either a 4.0/decent enough LSAT or a top LSAT score/decent enough GPA. In other words, multiple possible paths...a greater margin for error and a more enjoyable undergraduate experience most likely (knowing that anything short of an A won't sink your chances).[/quote]

DP Define "golden ticket"? Everyone wants different things. There certainly are fields where an Ivy league degree has a lot of cachet. But many people don't want to get into Big Law. For many people the "golden ticket" is interesting government work with a decent paycheck. Work life balance is so much more important than a lot of people realize until they have no time for their families.[/quote]

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