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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Maybe it's too early to tell or maybe she just didn't capitalize on all the opportunities (I suspect very few do) but it most certainly has not [i]changed her life[/i]. The thing I do notice is overall a higher percentage of deeply committed pre-med students than my son's peers at the state flagship. Other than that there's this laughable idea that an elite college is a golden ticket to a $150,000 job offer and a rich spouse and that's just not accurate. The plum six-figure job offers are scarce and go to the connected and elbowy overachievers with perfect grades. And generally the rich socialize with the rich. If you want your child in that orbit they need to be in that orbit by 9th grade at some ritzy prep or boarding school.

I have a niece at Cornell who is close with my daughter and she has had a similar experience. At Cornell the rich are in the rich kid sororities and fraternities.

A few years back we were caught up in the admissions frenzy but in retrospect it seems so nutty. I'm [now] far more impressed with a parent who tells me their kid is at a less selective school but just got into medical school than some Ivy League parent who tells me their ubiquitous kid is going into "consulting" for $60,000 a year or some second rate grad program.[/quote]

It is overrated when psycho tiger mom strivers living their teens scam them into a college they don't belong in. I know parents whose control their teen's email account, social media, LinkedIn, wrote all of their Common App essays, force them to do summer programs, fake founder of a nonprofit, the whole nine. If your kid doesn't have a hyper competitive bone in their body, why curate this fake hypercompetitive bio and con them into a hypercompetitive college? They feel like dummies on campus because they are the dullest most noncompetitive students there.[/quote]

My kid got into these schools on his own. No private counselor. No fake narratives. No fake non-profits.  No tiger mom or tiger dad.

I am impressed with him for the outcomes he is having this cycle which appear to be merit-based (no hooks at all) and on the personality he conveyed and hard work he alone put into essays/supplementals.

In fact, my spouse and I are shocked he's been getting into these 5-6% acceptance rate schools when the tiger parents were going on about how impossible admissions were.[/quote]

Agree! Mine did it with no private counselor nor fake narratives, just pure smarts, high scores, true intellectual curiosity and love of all hard subjects. Both at top-10 USnews "elite" schools (one ivy, one non) and loving it, love the challenging classes, getting to know incredibly talented profs, and being surrounded by other highly intelligent peers. They fit in better than they did in their competitive private school , because now the vast majority is the same level of intellect and they all push each other. I went to an elite. It was life-changing as a high-financial-need white kid from an average urban public.  The kids who bottom out and hate elites were likely over-prepared by parents doing too much for them in high school, or got in on a major hook and not actually ready for the intense academics. My elite was a pipeline to top 50 med and T14 law schools, and high-paying industries, as are my kids' elites. 
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