Collegewise

A Harvard interviewer's advice to eighth graders

Andy Doctoroff interviews applicants for Harvard, and he's got a good piece in the Huffington Post today, "Dear Eighth Grader: So You Want to Apply to Harvard? Some Words of Advice..."

The central message is that good grades, high test scores, and impressive activities alone aren’t what impress him during an interview.  “Intellectual ambition, drive and zest for discovery” are, especially when they’re genuine, not just being forcefully presented in an effort to get into Harvard. 

And make sure you don’t miss this part near the end (and remember, this is a guy who went to Harvard).

Frankly, it's not really that important whether you go to Harvard. There are a lot of Harvard graduates who do not lead productive lives. And, of course, Harvard and other comparable schools have not cornered the market on success."

Where did students at Harvard Law School go to college?

Anybody who claims that attending a less prestigious college hurts your chances of getting into a prestigious graduate school should check out this list of the 261 undergraduate institutions represented by all students enrolled at Harvard Law School for the 2010-2011 school year. 

Yes, all the Ivy League schools are listed, along with Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, Rice, UC Berkeley, West Point, the Naval Academy and other schools that reject almost everyone who applies.  I don’t dispute that a lot of graduates from highly selective colleges go on to do great things.  It’s not surprising considering that you’ve got to be an exceptionally smart, motivated, hard-working kid to get into one of those schools in the first place. 

But the list also shows that exceptionally smart, motivated, hard-working kids can go to places like Adelphi, Arizona State, Beloit, Cal State Northridge, Dickenson, Eastern Kentucky, Florida State, Gonzaga, Hampton, Indiana, Knox, Louisiana State, Mary Washington, Northern Arizona, Oregon State, Pacific Lutheran, Queens College, Rutgers, San Jose State, TCU, University of Delaware, Western Washington University, and dozens of other not-so-name brand schools and still go on to Harvard Law School.   

It’s not where you go.  It’s what you do while you’re there. 

Why Harvard is like the Boston Marathon

Every marathon is exactly the same distance—26.2 miles.  And yet many hard core marathoners covet the Boston Marathon more than any other. It’s not because Boston’s is notably prettier, more fun, more challenging, or otherwise better than New York’s or LA’s or Chicago’s marathons (all of which draw runners from all over the world).  Boston’s secret is simple—they reject runners who aren’t fast enough.  

Hal Higdon, longtime Runner's World magazine contributor and the author of the best-selling "Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide," explains the Boston Marathon’s allure in the documentary “The Spirit of the Marathon.”

When I first started running Boston we had, I think, 150 runners in the race.  Gradually through the 1960s, the numbers of runners started to grow.  By the end of that decade, I think we were up to about 1,000.  And they sought a way to limit the field, and they put on standards that began with, I think, you had to have run a previous marathon in four hours.  That, they figured, would limit the field.  And then they started cutting it down to 3 ½ hours, 3 hours, and the more they raised the challenge, the more interested runners became in meeting that challenge.  So, without realizing it, they had made their race much more popular by making it more difficult to get into.”

That’s surprisingly similar to the allure of the most prestigious colleges.

Telling lots of people, "You're out" just makes more people want in.   It’s true for night clubs, dinner parties, colleges, and even marathons.  I know that not every college is the same.  I know that people who go to Harvard or Yale or Duke will tell you that they couldn’t imagine going to school anywhere else, just like runners who finish Boston will tell you nothing could match that experience.  But whether you run a “sub-3” marathon in Boston or Toledo doesn’t matter—you’re pretty damn fast.  And if you work hard, find subjects that interest you, make contributions to activities you enjoy, treat people right, and keep doing those things once you get to college, you’re going to be a pretty damn successful college graduate no matter where you went to school.  

I'll bet you haven't tried this way of getting into a famous school

If you want to improve your chances of getting into a prestigious college, here’s one effective way to do it—find five other colleges you have never heard of but would be just as happy to attend as you would be to go to your dream school.

Whether or not you actually end up applying to them, the process of looking for and finding colleges you’ve never heard of that are right for you makes you focus more on the colleges and less on their names.  You'll think more about what you’re looking for in a college, what you expect your experience to be like and what you hope to get out of your time there.  You'll become more discerning.  At presentations and on tours, you'll ask more insightful questions than, “What’s the average SAT score for students you admit.” 

And more importantly, you’ll start to realize that there are hundreds of great schools out there, that you could be happy at lots of them, and that the difference between the first ranked school and the 100th ranked school would be almost indistinguishable if you took their names away.  

You’re not going to impress Harvard by telling your interviewer that you’re applying because Harvard is so prestigious.  If you’re choosing colleges based on their prestige, it’s time to look deeper (and think more deeply).   Becoming a savvier college shopper will help you get into lots of schools including the famous ones. 

Plenty of important roles

I spent last week with 60 people in an invite-only business and marketing class.  The group included a product manager at Google, a former speechwriter for a congressman, a programmer who writes software for major banks, the owner of one of the largest commercial construction companies in Texas, two published authors, the founder of a charter school in California, and the owner of an executive coaching firm.  Lots of diverse experiences, but all were successful. 

And in the three days, I didn’t meet one who’d gone to an Ivy League school.  In fact, the most selective college I heard mentioned was Tufts—that’s where the class instructor went. 

It would be hard for someone with even the most incurable case of namebranditis to spend any time around these people and still believe that going to a prestigious college was a prerequisite for being successful.  There are plenty of important roles in the world to be filled.  It will be up to you, not the name of your college, to cast yourself in one of them.    

Top-tier this

Nobody will ever accuse David Heinemeier Hansson of being subtle.  He’s brash and often profane.  But like him or not, you can’t argue with his success.  He’s a partner in 37signals, a New York Times best-selling author, the creator of the web-application framework Ruby on Rails, and the 2005 winner of Google and O’Reilly’s “Best Hacker of the Year.” 

Here's his post from their company blog yesterday.

If I hear one more Silicon Valley type gush over a computer science graduate from CMU, MIT, or Stanford, I’m going to puke. Yes, yes, I’m sure these are mighty dandy nice schools, but you’re letting the stench of superiority and shallow whiff of superficial judgement pollute my airways.

The fantastic thing about programmers is that we don’t have to give a f*ck about where they were trained because we have something much better available: We can look at what they actually do! We don’t need the indirection of pedigree to guess at their skills, we can look at their code and know it.

Here’s a list of the top tier schools that helped shape the fine band of programmers we employ at 37signals: 

Lawrence University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Brock University
Washtenaw Community College
California Institute of Technology
Copenhagen Business School
Brigham Young University”

There’s truth to what he says no matter what career you may want after college.  Just going to college—famous or not—and getting a degree isn’t what’s going to get you a job.  Employers want to know, “What can you actually do?”  If you attend the right college for you, you’ll have four years of virtually unlimited opportunity to find an answer to that question.  See my June 2011 post for more on that if you're interested.  

Why the nice tuba player will be just fine

At 6:45 a.m yesterday as I was finishing my morning run at the local high school’s track, the marching band was just making their way to the field to practice their formations.  And the fact that the entire band was walking out together meant that they’d probably arrived even earlier to rehearse inside first.   It wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet, but there were the clarinetists, flutists, saxophonists, percussionists, and a lone tuba player who looked to be a freshman with a tuba almost as large as he was.  Just a bunch of high school kids happy to be there practicing with the marching band before school.

It’s hard not to be impressed when you see nice kids working hard at things they enjoy.   I feel the same way when I see the cross country team out running together during the summer or the kid working behind the counter at the local In-N-Out Burger after school.  Kids and parents should know that your work ethic, curiosity, how you treat other people, how you commit yourself to things that matter to you—those traits, not the name of the college you attend, are what will determine your future success and happiness. 

If you’re a nice kid who works hard, does your best, and plays a mean tuba in the marching band, you’re going to be just fine whether or not Georgetown says yes.

Bad ways to cut college costs

Want to avoid college debt? Don’t cut back on the time you spend at college. Instead, pick a school that does not cost so much. President Obama’s new nominee to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, co-authored in 1999 a paper, “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College,” showing that expensive big-name schools add little if any value to a college education. He and co-author Stacy Berg Dale demonstrated that the character traits that bring success — such as persistence and good humor — produce just as much income with a degree from Delaware State as one from Cornell."

Jay Mathews
Bad Ways to Cut College Costs

Going to an elite university does not guarantee success

From the article "10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges":

Going to an elite university does not guarantee success.  To prove this point, Hacker and Dreifus tracked the 900-odd students who graduated from Princeton in 1973 to see if the school was delivering on its promise 'to prepare students for positions of leadership,' whether in business, public service, or the arts, which Princeton administrators claim as their goal. 'We were very disappointed,' Hacker says. 'There were only a handful of recognized names in that class of 900. What that tells us is simply this: In America, if you put your talents to their best use, by the age of 35 or 36, you’ll be passing people from Princeton, no matter where you went to school.'"

Put your confidence in the right place

Most students who feel confident about their chances of admission to a highly selective college are putting their confidence in the wrong place.

32,022 kids applied to Stanford last fall.  2,340 got admitted—a 7.3% admit rate. 

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Duke—all of them have similarly discouraging stats.

So whenever a student tells us that he only wants to apply to “prestigious” colleges, it’s time to confront some brutal facts.  The math doesn’t lie—the odds of admission are not good.  And they don’t improve by simply applying to as many prestigious schools as possible.  Lottery logic doesn’t work here.   

But high achieving students have every right to be confident—you just need to place that confidence someplace else. 

If you’ve taken AP everything, gotten A’s, scored high on the SATs, been successful in your activities and somehow found a way to sleep, breathe and have fun during high school, Stanford doesn't get to decide whether or not you're going to be successful in life.  You should have supreme confidence in yourself, your work ethic, and your likelihood of being successful no matter where you go to college.  You should even have a little swagger.  The people who graduate from schools like Stanford and go on to do great things started down that path to success long before they picked their colleges.

The hardest working and most successful students know that they don’t need to go to prestigious colleges to be successful.  They know they’re going to learn, have fun and keep excelling wherever they go.

So be realistic about your chances of admission.  But be confident in yourself.  You're going places with or without an offer of admission from a prestigious college.