Who Needs Harvard?

An interesting cover story in the latest Time magazine about how many top high school students are choosing to go to smaller, lesser known schools rather than Harvard and its ilk.  I think this is great in general -- and the outreach top schools are doing in trying to be more socio-economically diverse is particularly to be applauded:

Now 62% more students are going to college than did in the '60s, when Fitzsimmons was a Harvard undergrad, and while many of them head off to state universities and community colleges, the top schools are determined to tear down barriers to entry for the brightest of them. Admissions officers from Harvard, Yale and Stanford weave their outreach tours through low-income ZIP codes and remote rural areas, starting new summer academies for promising candidates and waiving their tuition if they do make it in. Harvard's class of 2009 included 22% more students from families who earned under $60,000 than the class of 2008. Like many other colleges, Harvard also gives some preferences to well-connected applicants like legacies (the children of alumni), but Fitzsimmons says his school is making a statement with its broader outreach. "The word has gone out that if you are talented, the sky is the limit," Fitzsimmons says. "If we don't take advantage of that energy, America will languish."

--------------------------------------------------

Who Needs Harvard?
Competition for the Ivies is as fierce as ever, but kids who look beyond the famous schools may be the smartest applicants of all
By NANCY GIBBS, NATHAN THORNBURGH

Time Magazine cover story

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1226150,00.html

 

It's the summer before your senior year, and you're sweating. The college brochures are spread across the table, along with itineraries, SAT review books, downloaded copies of Web pages that let you chart the grades and scores of every kid from your high school who applied to a given college in the past five years and whether they got in or not. You're hunting for a school where the principal oboe player is graduating, or the soccer goalie, so it might be in the market for someone with your particular skills. You can be fifth-generation Princeton or the first in your family to apply to college: it's still the most important decision you've ever made, and the most confounding.

You're a parent watching your child, so proud, and so worried. Your neighbors' son was a nationally ranked swimmer, straight As, great boards, nice kid. Got rejected at his top three choices, wait-listed at two more. Who gets into Yale these days anyway? Maybe they should have sent him to Mali for the summer to dig wells, fight malaria, give him something to write about in his essay.

You're the college counselor at a public school in a hothouse ZIP code, and you wish you could grab the students, grab the parents by the shoulders and shake them. Twenty thousand dollars for a college consultant? They're paying for help getting into a school where the kid probably doesn't belong. Do they really think there are only 10 great colleges in the country? There are scores of them, hundreds even, honors colleges embedded inside public universities that offer an Ivy education at state-school prices; small liberal-arts colleges that exalt the undergraduate experience in a way that the big schools can't rival. And if they hope to go on to grad school? Getting good grades at a small school looks better than floundering at a famous one. Think they need to be able to tap into the old-boy network to get a job? Chances are, the kid is going to be doing a job that doesn't even exist now, so connections won't do much good. The rules have changed. The world has changed. You have a sign over your office door: COLLEGE IS A MATCH TO BE MADE, NOT A PRIZE TO BE WON.