Reply to For those who attended non-Ivies, do you regret not trying harder to get into an Ivy?

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[quote=Anonymous]This question really applies only to the very privileged. It’s a wild question as worded.  It
might work better if prefaced by: “if you grew up in the top 1% of wealth…”

I applied to my state’s flagship university and one private university in my state that I had heard of because a friend’s older sister went there. I had no one giving me any broad, strategic advice about applying to colleges. My dad was the first in his family to go to college (at night school for a decade) and become middle class. My mom didn’t go to college.

So thinking about the Ivy’s was not on our radar at all. School counselor meeting was more like, “you want to go to college, and are applying to some, great.”  I was a good student but not outstanding (top 5% of my class, not valedictorian), and could not have afforded any private university without a scholarship or aid.

I appreciate my college education (at an LAC that is now about T110), benefitted from it, and realize that a more thorough consideration of options would have been better, but was unrealistic in my circumstances. I was not likely an Ivy League school candidate. I could have gotten in to more selective schools than I did if anyone had been pointing that out to me.  In my community, colleges with strong basketball or football teams seemed like the “best” schools, because they were what people had heard of.

As say all this to say, everyone on DCUM is not living your 1%-er life. And that’s ok. Do recognize that your question comes from a position of incredible privilege. And good for you to have had that. Just try reading the room sometimes.

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