Likelihood of Success

Peter Dutton passed this article along to an alumni mailing list on I’m on. It’s by an alumni interviewer about the almost tragic — but not quite — difference between getting to Harvard then, and now:

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake.

At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

This is why I quit the alumni schools committee for my school: What’s the point? Virtually everyone who came to my office was absurdly qualified not just for admission but for tenure; I thought they should be interviewing me. All that happened was I fell in love with these absurd kids, wondered why exactly it was God had sent me to His alma mater, and then watched hardly any of them make it in.

The author of the article gets it, however. His four children did not apply to Harvard, just as my four will not apply to Princeton, though for somewhat different reasons. As he says,

But I’ve stopped feeling bad about the looming rejection. When my four were little, I used to hope a couple might go to Harvard. I pushed them, but by the end of middle school it was clear my twins, at least, were not made that way. They rebelled, and I had to learn to see who they were.I came to understand that my own focus on Harvard was a matter of not sophistication but narrowness. I grew up in an unworldly blue-collar environment. Getting perfect grades and attending an elite college was one of the few ways up I could see.

I could have written that myself, just about every word of it. Princeton was a complete hyperspace trip for me. It didn’t, however, deposit me in the stars, though it did do wonders for my frequent flyer miles. Frankly today I am skeptical entirely of the whole concept of four-year residential universities in general, and for some people — not necessarily the non-gifted — in particular.

A while ago I wrote a book called the Princeton Review Pre-Law Companion. The publisher hated it — they wanted me to write something like How to Get Into Harvard Law School, which I thought was idiotic; the question for most college students considering law school was whether law school made any sense at all, not where to go. (I actually said in the book that this was not true if you got into Yale, Harvard or Stanford’s law schools, which are simply markers for superachievement which almost anyone should accept regardless of the flavor of his ambition.)

My little book was popular with guidance counselors, but it went out of print fast. Someone else did write How to Get Into Harvard Law School, literally, and from what I can tell it’s still in print.