[busyant]

> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof.

If I knew a teenager in this situation, I'd emphasize that there is a large "quasi-random" component to admission to these types of school.

What I mean is that the number of incredibly talented applicants _rejected_ by Princeton and Harvard is probably as large as the number of admissions.

I know someone who is _tenured_ in the physics department @ a HYPS school. He was an undergrad (and grad student) @ Harvard. He once told me that if he applied as an undergraduate today, he'd probably have a 50/50 shot at getting in.

[dopu]

Your comment illustrates another way in which these institutions maintain exclusivity -- they hire and admit people that are already in them. I did my undergraduate in a run-of-the-mill liberal arts college. I managed to get into a post-baccalaureate program at a HYPS-level institution, and I'm now doing my PhD at a HYPS. I find it extremely difficult to believe that I would've been evaluated the same way in grad school applications if I hadn't done the post-bac where I did.

[busyant]

> I find it extremely difficult to believe that I would've been evaluated the same way in grad school applications if I hadn't done the post-bac where I did.

I have a similar background: undergrad @ middle-of-the-road state school. PhD at HYPS school.

As you would expect, I was a teaching assistant for a couple of undergraduate courses. As such, I got to know many undergrads.

I would occasionally bump into them when they were about to graduate and I was frequently shocked when they told me stuff like, "Yeah. I'm going to Harvard Med" (or some other illustrious program) and I would think to myself, "You were a good student, but I knew undergrads at my state school who were just as good. And Harvard Med didn't even given them an _interview_."

I'm not saying the students were not talented enough to excel @ Harvard Med, but I imagine there is some level of "peace of mind" if these schools favor their own. As the saying goes: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM stock....

[csa]

> I would occasionally bump into them when they were about to graduate and I was frequently shocked when they told me stuff like, "Yeah. I'm going to Harvard Med" (or some other illustrious program) and I would think to myself, "You were a good student, but I knew undergrads at my state school who were just as good. And Harvard Med didn't even given them an _interview_."

1. I am not sure what you taught and how much access you had to their application/portfolio, but you are probably not seeing some significant part of the picture. “Being a good student” is table stakes for Harvard Med, not an endearing application quality.

2. The student in question almost certainly has some serious research under their belt — Harvard Med can be somewhat snobby about this. Can you say the same about the applicants from your undergrad school who didn’t get an interview?

3. The goal of admitting someone to Harvard Med isn’t having them excel at Harvard Med — it’s having them succeed as significant researchers in the medical field after they graduate from Harvard Med. Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this? Do you think that they aim to? FWIW, one weakness of a lot of applicants to places like Harvard Med is that they aim too low. If they just want to be a great general physician, Harvard Med is not the place for them.

Fwiw, I do think that there are some students at state schools (esp. good large ones like Texas and Michigan) who would would excel at an elite school doctoral program, MD program, etc. Many of them self-select out for a number of reason (e.g., geography, anti-elitism, path of least resistance, career goals not aligned with elite education, etc.), but some do go and succeed.

That said, the number who think they could succeed is much greater than the number who could and the number who actually do. There are often entire elements of their field that they don’t even comprehend.

[busyant]

> 3. The goal of admitting someone to Harvard Med isn’t having them excel at Harvard Med — it’s having them succeed as significant researchers in the medical field after they graduate from Harvard Med.

I'm not sure I would agree with this. I was a postdoc @ Harvard Med, so I knew a fair number of med students there as well as grad students. I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here.

> Do you think that the students from your undergrad could do this?

In short: yes.

> Do you think that they aim to?

This is a key question and here the answer would often be "no." One key differentiator that I saw between HYPS and my state school is that EVERYONE at the HYPS places was _driven_. They were not looking for occupations where they would 'take orders.' In contrast, many (not all!) of my friends at the state school were roughly as smart as the people I met at the Ivies, but they were not necessarily _driven_. For example, I knew plenty of remarkably intelligent nursing majors at my state school. No one I met at the Ivies would ever consider being a nurse. That being said, I knew several people at my state school who were quite talented and driven pre-meds and the elite schools barely sniffed at them.

Obviously, I didn't know everything about the Ivy undergrads that I taught, but I knew enough of them well enough to have a sense of how talented they were with respect to research (my classmates and I supervised many undergrads doing research).

There is an inherent difficulty in these types of discussions: we are both basing our opinions on small amounts of subjective data.

[csa]

> I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here.

Agreed. It’s not as clean as that, but I think that it’s directionally correct (at least for this particular thread).

I agree with all of your other points as well.

I would be really curious about why the driven and talented students at the state school didn’t even get a look. I imagine there’s a good reason. Probably something like lack of research, studying under a dud professor (this can sort of be a kiss of death in some fields), studying under a prof with Ivy envy (basically crabs pulling their own back down — strange, but it happens), etc.

Any ideas?