A wonderful essay, Haven. It is accurate ,and enlightening . Where does all this high- minded admissions gobbledygook leave the other 96% who are rejected by Yale? Well actually they are doing ok. They go to well- respected schools in the NESCAC, Patriot , or Centennial Leagues . They get their first jobs , and after the first week at work nobody cares where they went to school. Then when they apply to grad school their work experience and test scores carry more weight than their undergrad GPA, so that matters less and less. Then they join clubs, get married , build careers , and their undergraduate diploma is quickly eclipsed by what they do in real life. So the parents get to brag for a while at Greenwich and Short Hills parties , but two years later , it doesn’t mean a thing . The smart , driven , hungry kid who goes to Drexel , Lehigh or Bowdoin will be turbocharged in his/her career , and the little snotty Yale girl who was filmed screaming and cursing about her “safe space” will be a loser in life. So all in all, Yale is succeeding at a great con game, but in real life, all its diploma will do is get a kid his first interview, maybe.
If you are circling 90, chances are you might not think much of Yale’s current direction. On the other hand, the opinions of 90-somethings rank low on the list of undergraduate concerns especially when they say, “sex without constraint was welcomed on campus.”
Yale is a valuable brand at least in part because it is associated with wealth, power and membership in an elite cadré of graduates including five U.S. Presidents, 19 Supreme Court Justices, 13 living billionaires, 52 Nobel Prize winners and 230 Rhodes Scholars to say nothing of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
