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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is a lot to be said for smaller colleges, but an Ivy? No. Students are too handpicked. The culture is too manufactured, like products in a gift shop. The collective intensity, anxiety and insecurity of students is too much.

So to answer your question, if your kid is interested is a big public flagship - wonderful. Smart kid. [/quote]

You clearly do not have a kid at an ivy. The students are some of the most down to earth, real, inquisitive humans mine says they have ever met (and that is coming from a top private school which had a lot of cookie-cutter UMC kids most of whom were bright but not truly intellectual). Ivy students on average happen to be very driven but in a collaborative way, and also love to give back to their community and have fun on the weekends. 
We know just as many anxious students at William&Mary and UVA as we do at the ivy. Anxiety and insecurity are common in all top schools not just ivies, and in fact in many ways there is less anxiety at the ivy once they are past freshman fall and realize that they do not have to gun it out to be at the top to get into a good law or med school. [/quote]

That’s funny because the bottom third at a Harvard does not often do better than the top third at a non-Ivy.

The top third at any school will usually do well.

See Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on this topic for the data. He says it is most important to be the top third of the class at ANY college.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo

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Gladwell's general premise stands, for the majority of the top 200 or so colleges, but there is a certain level of eliteness where success is available much deeper into the class than top third.
The bigger the difference in eliteness/ranking, the more "gunning it out" to be at the very top (ie top 10%) of college matters. Ivy /T10 kids do not need to worry as much, they can just be average or above. They still work hard, but they do not need to be as competitive with peers because there is room for many. 
The ivy kids do not need to try to be top 10%. For JMU, VT the only kids getting into med school in the US are the top 10%, and that is often with gap years. William and Mary does much better than those two, but top third is very important.  For the ivies, kids in the top HALF get into T50 med schools and kids deep into the bottom half get into med school in the US somewhere. 
Law school is the same: T10 non-ivy sends anyone with an above average GPA(ie 3.8 there) to T14 law presuming they followed advice of advising and did the correct ECs/internships, which are readily available at the well resourced school. All the way deep into the bottom 1/4 of the class gets into a law school somewhere.

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