So, why did you apply to [enter prestigious college name]?
When listening to an admissions officer for Dartmouth lament the fact that tens of thousands of applications arrived every year at her doorstep, I noticed her mention one aspect in particular about the applicant pool. Many applications would go to all eight Ivy League universities and a smattering of similarly prestigious universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Duke etc.
This phenomenon, dubbed an ‘unselection’ by a friend of mine, is where ambitious students select their colleges by ticking boxes down the length of the Top 10 list at US News and World Report. Their aim: to get into the very ‘best’ university possible, as though this is the ultimate goal of tertiary education. For them it is all about the label, the brand name, the mark that they can stamp on their resumes.
Whether or not colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, or the Church of England believed this to be the reason for applying to Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is irrelevant. Today, 27,000 applications sit on desks at Agassiz House in Cambridge, MA. Many high school seniors apply to Ivy League universities as if all eight are one and the same because their short-term aim is not about finding which place suits them best, or even in which place they will flourish. It is all about that brand name.
This is dangerous because those who do arrive in Stanford, CA or Durham, NC may find themselves totally unsuitable for the lifestyle, culture, and intellectual rigour at these very different universities. The differences between them are countless and encompass every aspect of life and education. Choosing in the way students have is like buying a BMW, Mercedes Benz, or Audi purely to own an expensive, flashy car; and thinking all three will render exactly the same experience.
It is ludicrous to chose to live in NYC or SF purely because they are American ocean-front cities; and expect the experience to be exactly the same because they share this one characteristic.
Similarly, believing that your time at Harvard will be exactly like your time at Princeton is foolish. Students live at these universities for four years. If this isn’t a very well researched calculation, it could turn sour within the first semester. Despite all of this, tens of thousands of seniors apply only one criterion when picking colleges: cachet.
