[adamsmith143]

Let's be real, Stanford could fill it's entire freshman class with kids who got perfect GPAs and perfect SAT scores. That's not the deciding factor. You mentioned doing well in State level competitions but the elite schools of the US, Ivy+ etc, are the best schools on the planet. It's not surprising that you didn't get in given that fact. Their freshman classes are full of State Champions, National Champions, Olympiad Winners, Intel Science Fair winners, Published Authors, kids that have given concerts at Carnegie Hall, etc. I think you may have misjudged the level of competition. It's not 1940 when a perfect SAT got you into any school you wanted.

>This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.

People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.

[jklm]

I halfheartedly agree.

Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.

> People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.

This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.

[adamsmith143]

>Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.

I tend to think that that outside of like the top tiers of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT/Caltech that the top 20 have student bodies that are basically interchangeable and it's a coin flip whether someone gets into UPenn but not Columbia or UChicago but not Vanderbilt.

>This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.

You can short circuit this by doing a graduate degree. MBA from HBS is at least as good if not better than an AB from the College. But like I said outside of a few industries those connections aren't as valuable as you may think. Is getting a job in a VC firm easier as a Harvard/Stanford Alum? Sure, but least in theory though getting startup funding from a VC as a Harvard vs Michigan alum should be roughly equivalent in difficulty(lest we break the illusion of meritocracy in the tech world).

[csa]

I concur with all points, and I envy your brevity.