“Who Needs Harvard“, by Gregg Easterbrook. A former Fellow at the Brookings Institution answers this question aptly: you don’t. I have blogged on this topic several times, and it always comes back to the student. Going to college is more important than where one goes to college.
Did you know that half of our national Senators went to “state” schools? Ohio State, Chico, Utah State, Oregon State and so on and so forth? Did you know that only 4 of the Fortune 500 CEOs went to “elites”? Did you know that Steven Spielberg was rejected by UCLA and USC film schools? (He went to UC Long Beach).
Easterbrook writes, “… getting into Princeton isn’t a life-or-death matter hit home years ago for Loren Pope, then the education editor of The New York Times. For his 1990 book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League, Pope scanned Who’s Who entries of the 1980s, compiling figures on undergraduate degrees. (This was at a time when Who’s Who was still the social directory of American distinction—before the marketing of Who’s Who in Southeastern Middle School Girls’ Tennis and innumerable other spinoffs.) Pope found that the schools that produced the most Who’s Who entrants were Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Caltech; that much conformed to expectations. But other colleges near the top in Who’s Who productivity included DePauw, Holy Cross, Wabash, Washington and Lee, and Wheaton of Illinois. Pope found that Bowdoin, Denison, Franklin & Marshall, Millsaps, and the University of the South were better at producing Who’s Who entrants than Georgetown or the University of Virginia, and that Beloit bested Duke.
These findings helped persuade Pope that the glamour schools were losing their status as the gatekeepers of accomplishment. Today Pope campaigns for a group of forty colleges that he considers nearly the equals of the elite, but more personal, more pleasant, less stress-inducing, and—in some cases, at least—less expensive. Institutions like Hope, Rhodes, and Ursinus do not inspire the same kind of admissions lust as the Ivies, but they are places where parents should feel very good about sending their kids. (A list of the well-regarded non-elite colleges Pope champions can be found at www.ctcl.com.)”
Don’t worry if you don’t get in to the gotta get in. I assure you, you will do just fine, and maybe even better! Go to a college that fits you, and you will thrive.
