Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
No you don't, since the Ivies practice need blind admissions. Do you know what that is?
Not quite, though they say that officially.
It costs 60k a year to attend an Ivy, and a disproportionate amount of students have parents who can easily afford that. I've met kids whose family attended Cornell and other Ivies multigenerationally.
Also they recruit in certain geographic areas (particularly at certain private schools) that have high percentages of wealthy.
Ivies will have lots of students from the Northeast, California, Texas, and the wealthiest parts of the South (Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas). Basically they emphasize recruiting from the wealthier states). And of course there will be a decent percentage of international students who are either wealthy or who have foreign government paying all their tuition for them (foreign students cannot get financial aid as undergraduates though they can get graduate fellowships).
I'm not saying poor students don't get in (for those of us who do you get excellent financial aid which was donated to the universities by wealthy alumnae and wealthy parents) but no one should be under the illusion that having money doesn't help you get into a top university. It's a major factor, directly. Indirectly wealthy people have the money for tutors, test preparation, the best schools, so money helps indirectly as well.
The indirect benefits of wealth definitely help with qualifying for admission in the first place. But in the neighborhood of 50% of undergrads at Ivies get some financial aid. You can have family income into the 6 figures and still get some aid. The biggest category of full freight students are actually international students as most of them qualify for little, if any, financial aid.
and btw, financial aid is negotiable. You can ask for more and there's a good chance you will get at least some of what you ask for. Once you are accepted, they want you to attend and will work with you to make that happen, because their "yield" is important to them (yield is the percentage of accepted applicants who attend that school).
Another thing, how many years ago did these CEOs attend college? Just because that was a ticket to a fast track x amount of years ago does not imply that is the case today.
The indirect benefits of wealth definitely help with qualifying for admission in the first place. But in the neighborhood of 50% of undergrads at Ivies get some financial aid. You can have family income into the 6 figures and still get some aid. The biggest category of full freight students are actually international students as most of them qualify for little, if any, financial aid.
and btw, financial aid is negotiable. You can ask for more and there's a good chance you will get at least some of what you ask for. Once you are accepted, they want you to attend and will work with you to make that happen, because their "yield" is important to them (yield is the percentage of accepted applicants who attend that school).
That's 50% of people paying full tuition and other expenses and at 60k a year, that's a substantial percentage of the population at these schools that's clearly wealthy enough to afford to pay outright with no financial aid.
No, I do not think it matters where you go to college but what you do when you are there and what you do after school. A Harvard degree in an unmotivated, trust-fund baby won't get that person a job, let alone a CEO position that has not been earned...but Daddy may pass that down.
Given that the Ivy's and similar actually educate a very, very small % of people in the world/country, somewhere these successful people are being educated.....looking at the leadership at my company, NONE of them are Ivy educated, most at state schools, and they are all successful, C-level people in a company built from the ground up....
Getting into Harvard already demonstrates your aptitude. Studying with good quality faculty and students only adds to your learning experience. To dismiss the fact that you're getting a better education at high quality institutions is absurd.
That doesn't mean that non-ivy education is horrible. But one must also consider that fact that hiring isn't perfect. A good school like Yale has a post-graduate employment rate in the 90% range while a low quality school like Penn State has a post-graduate rate in the 50% range. Not to mention that people from Yale have a better education.
For several years I worked (not as a professor) for a school that practiced need-blind, full-needs admission (although not an Ivy). I knew several members of the admissions department quite well.
At least in that one case, quite. The admission committee *never talked* to the financial committee. It was like a firewall, and upheld stringently.
Because it was full need, admission was viciously competitive, and they could pick and choose. The reason students tended to come from money was not that the admissions committee looked for money-they looked for achievement, GPA, SAT, high-quality essay, and a good interview. Rather, it was that those that met the admissions criteria tended to be from really good home lives, and have the family wealth to either live in excellent public school districts or attend quality private schools.
When your endowment is in the range full needs schools tend to be at, it's a self-perpetuating cycle: many applicants because of the combination of the full need policy and the quality academics (the amount each mattered depended on individual and family circumstances), so they admit only the best high school students, spend a lot of money on the education, they tend to be successful because of that education, and then tend to be big donors because of the wonderful life-forming experience they had.
As a state school guy, I was jealous. But frankly, I would never have made it in that environment at 18 despite having a decent enough record to probably have gotten in (at the lower end of the spectrum). The workload would have crushed me at that age, and I liked to drink a lot of my meals then. I matured *after* my college years.
For several years I worked (not as a professor) for a school that practiced need-blind, full-needs admission (although not an Ivy). I knew several members of the admissions department quite well.
At least in that one case, quite. The admission committee *never talked* to the financial committee. It was like a firewall, and upheld stringently.
Because it was full need, admission was viciously competitive, and they could pick and choose. The reason students tended to come from money was not that the admissions committee looked for money-they looked for achievement, GPA, SAT, high-quality essay, and a good interview. Rather, it was that those that met the admissions criteria tended to be from really good home lives, and have the family wealth to either live in excellent public school districts or attend quality private schools.
When your endowment is in the range full needs schools tend to be at, it's a self-perpetuating cycle: many applicants because of the combination of the full need policy and the quality academics (the amount each mattered depended on individual and family circumstances), so they admit only the best high school students, spend a lot of money on the education, they tend to be successful because of that education, and then tend to be big donors because of the wonderful life-forming experience they had.
As a state school guy, I was jealous. But frankly, I would never have made it in that environment at 18 despite having a decent enough record to probably have gotten in (at the lower end of the spectrum). The workload would have crushed me at that age, and I liked to drink a lot of my meals then. I matured *after* my college years.
The admissions committee does not need to talk to the financial committee (and for legal reasons there are firewalls in universities). With that said, if your parents donated 55 million dollars to the university and were alumnae, the admissions department will know who you are.
With that said, you're basically right the students with the top grades tended to have families that substantially invested in their children and for rather obvious reasons those people tend to be disproportionately wealthy.
Getting into Harvard already demonstrates your aptitude. Studying with good quality faculty and students only adds to your learning experience. To dismiss the fact that you're getting a better education at high quality institutions is absurd.
That doesn't mean that non-ivy education is horrible. But one must also consider that fact that hiring isn't perfect. A good school like Yale has a post-graduate employment rate in the 90% range while a low quality school like Penn State has a post-graduate rate in the 50% range. Not to mention that people from Yale have a better education.
It costs 60k a year to attend an Ivy, and a disproportionate amount of students have parents who can easily afford that. I've met kids whose family attended Cornell and other Ivies multigenerationally.
Also they recruit in certain geographic areas (particularly at certain private schools) that have high percentages of wealthy.
Ivies will have lots of students from the Northeast, California, Texas, and the wealthiest parts of the South (Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas). Basically they emphasize recruiting from the wealthier states). And of course there will be a decent percentage of international students who are either wealthy or who have foreign government paying all their tuition for them (foreign students cannot get financial aid as undergraduates though they can get graduate fellowships).
I'm not saying poor students don't get in (for those of us who do you get excellent financial aid which was donated to the universities by wealthy alumnae and wealthy parents) but no one should be under the illusion that having money doesn't help you get into a top university. It's a major factor, directly. Indirectly wealthy people have the money for tutors, test preparation, the best schools, so money helps indirectly as well.
Of course money buys advantages and opportunities. But admissions is still need-blind, so all else being equal, being full pay doesn't help. That is the claim I was addressing, and it's patently false.
I pulled it directly from their reportings. I believe that 93% of Yale job-seeking students have offers upon graduation and Penn State has 53% for the same criteria (I believe Penn State includes up to 3 months after graduation in their calculation).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
