You'll find that the schools people casually drop in with that phrase are by and large tier-1 schools. While most people who went to school to learn just use the latter phrase. The lesson is that when you go to Harvard of Princeton or wherever, you didn't go to College, you went to some place that transcends mere college, you went to someplace with an important name, and because of that name, you too are important.

Hell: here it is off of the USNews list using google

   "When I was at Princeton" - 16.3 million
   "...Harvard" - 5.93m
   Yale - 2.58m
   Columbia - 3.53m
   Stanford - 2.44m
   University of Chicago - 6
   MIT - 18.5m
   Duke - 1.37m
   University of Pennsylvania - 1.81m (without "the" - 2 results, "Upenn" 201,000, "Penn" - 13.3m)
   California Institute of Technology - 1 ("CIT" - 6, "Caltech" 887,000)
   Dartmouth - 691,000
   Johns Hopkins - 6.14m
   Northwestern - 6.64m
   

Here's the Tier-2

   Ashland - 860,000
   Barry - 843,000
   Benedictine - 95,300
   Bowie State - 2 (Just "Bowie" - 249k)
   Cardinal Stritch - 4
   Clark Atlanta - 6
   Cleveland State - 6
   East Carolina - 1.62m 
   East Tennessee State - 3 ("East Tennessee" - 3)
   Florida A&M - 3
   Florida Atlantic - 3
   Florida International - 3
   Georgia Southern - 877,000
   Georgia State - 1.65m
   Indiana State - 1.28m
   Indiana University of Pennsylvania - 2 (Indiana University - 5.07m)
   Jackson State - 466k
   Lamar University - 0 ("Lamar" - 441,000)
   

Depends on who you hang out with, I guess. In my own crowd I find the subject of where you went to college (or even if you went) basically never comes up. But then again, there's that old joke:

"How do you know when you're talking to a Harvard man? He'll tell you."

The purpose of a university for undergraduates is not to select people of character, budding entrepreneurs,sportsmen,people with rich parents or anything else-it is to teach an academic subject to those best able to succeed at it.

The way to select them is to let the academic staff who will be teaching them decide. They will do that by means of exams and interview. How hard is that?

B. You act as if there is some absolute benchmark for "best able to succeed at [some subject]"...There is not. Sometimes the best engineers can come from people who hadn't initially aspired to be engineers and thus lack whatever credentials they could've built in their high school time. Sometimes character can be the factor in success, sometimes not.

That was, that candidates should be admitted on the basis of academic merit and that the 'right sort' of weaker candidates should not be given special consideration.

It admits enough of the brightest to ensure that it keeps its academic status and then gives special treatment to certain 'desirable' students, who give prestige to the institution in one way or another.

This would, of course, never work if the 'desirables' had to compete academically. They are thus steered into easier courses.

Of course, if the institution does not offer such easy subjects, it cannot play this game.

This debate is often framed as "Harvard vs MIT", where Harvard has been very successful in being ever more prestigious and important with their explicit "the smartest and the richest" strategy, while MIT is great, but not "near monopoly on the halls of power" great. The arbitrariness and thinly veiled racism of the admissions process is vexing, but they are crazy successful.

All that to say, it's not as easy as it seems it should be.

More and more colleges are being ran like businesses and the idea of spending time and money developing and running assessment centers does not make sense financially. Right now, candidates can be screened by a computer for test scores, GPAs, and key words on resumes. Alumni volunteer to interview potential students. The only paid staff are those reading essays (if they aren't graded electronically) and those making the final acceptance decision.

Universities may band together to create these assessment centers to share cost and upkeep, but even then costs are going to rise because the university still has to keep the yes/no admissions gatekeepers on staff.

Large universities seem to be doing fine with alumni donations and I'm not sure this method suggests enough of an increase in donations to make it a worthwhile investment for universities.

They are interested in the bottom line, first and foremost, and in any case are being run by executives pulled from the same executive pool that other large corporations are drawing from.

The author needs to first carefully define the problem without reference to Steve Jobs or academia golden-age idealism, and then posit a roadmap away from the current business model.

Tier-2 private colleges are having a tough-ish time right now, it could be a way to differentiate and attract ambitious students- "after you've thrown your application into the goofy lottery system, why not apply here, where we take you seriously? As you can tell with this significantly less goofy admissions process!"

So, somewhat smart kids from Iowa will ask themselves: Why bother? I can't compete to get in, I can't compete when I am actually in there, and I can't compete when I get out. Forget this game, I'm taking my tiddly-winks and going home.

And that is where the tier-2 schools really shine. Vassar, Colorado School of Mines, the Claremonts, etc really can take those kids that aren't literally-cookie-cutter-perfect-snoflakes-drill-and-kill and make them really shine. Yeah, they won't be the CEO of Hundai or GE, but they will make a damn good Lt. Major, or a VP at 7-11, or a hell of a McDonald's franchise owner, or the best darn member of a school board that is always re-elected, or a real good child abuse prosecutor. You won't make billions, but you will make 3-4 million.

There really is a need here for B- students that deserve a good living. Getting rid of the darn SAT is a great way to attract them.

My source here is Jerome Karabel's book called, naturally, The Chosen.

Cornell, basically an engineering school at this point, has a big reputation for 'gorging out'. AKA jumping off one of the many bridges on campus. This negatively affects the admission rates (from what I hear and no, I have no citation for that) Campus life is a big driver for many schools these days. It's not all new gyms and tail-gating, it's also the rape and suicide stats.

2: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/504/h...

The intro here is a very good look into the lives of admissions officers. The students, the parents, and the schools themselves are all guilty of 'pushing' the idea of college.

Most of the techniques discussed in the article's assessments are aimed at reducing the number of Asian-Americans and nerdy introverts. The promoters always have a load of code words, but the college leadership and fundraisers know what they're doing.

Since the equal opportunity lawsuits were ended -- at request of elite college insiders -- by Bush 41 in the 1990s, the rates of Asian admissions in elite colleges went down and hit a ceiling at 15%. The University of California is looking constantly for ways to duplicate the success of ethnic cleansing at elite private schools.

Alternatively, one might observe that modern colleges are for the mediocre, noting that college had little to offer the cited personalities and would likely have at best delayed their path, or more likely, prevent them from achieving what they did by socializing them into conformity and obedience of authority and convention.

We may certainly choose to daydream that "If only Steve Jobs and George Lucas had completed more college than they did, maybe they could have done something even more amazing", as if college has this effect on people. (Lucas has two degrees, so it's unclear what the article's author is really meaning to say about him, apparently that the author thinks he should have gone beyond a Bachelors.)

He was apprenticed to a local bookbinder and bookseller at age 14 and became a voracious reader as a teenager. He later wrote that one of the books he read during that time changed his life—Improvement of the Mind, by Isaac Watts. He rigorously applied the personal development principles within and began studying science on his own from the book shop.

He started attending public lectures of a prominent chemist, taking copious notes on lectures and sharing them with others. He gave the chemist he'd been following a 300 page book based on the lecture notes and the chemist later hired him as a secretary! He had to endure a multitude of slights in the company of other scientists due to having humble beginnings while they were almost universally gentlemen, but it was his ticket in. Once he was working as a prominent scientist's secretary, he had access to the scientists' professional circles, if not social circles. He relentlessly continued his studies and got so good that people could no longer ignore him. Within a couple of decades, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford and he eventually became the most prominent physicist in the world.

There are probably similar stories of slightly less prominent physicists in this century, I just haven't heard of them yet.

It's a great story of tenacity, but it reads more like "determined underdog gets a foot in the door and proves his worth the hard way" than "gifted magnate skips apprenticeship, becomes master"

Thanks for sharing it though :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

Why?

Creativity is the "next thing" on XXI century, and creative types have hard times following rules, or working well in army-like societies; those people are our underdogs now; the system doesnt know what to do with them; and does not like them (until they create "star wars" or a flying car); so i would say its a joke and pretty much broken

    200  1200 Caltech
   1100  9200 MIT
   1300 13000 Yale
   1700 18900 Harvard
   1700 17000 Stanford
   4200 18000 UC Berkeley
   7500 14700 UT Austin

* http://collegeadmissions100.com/caltech-admission-stats/

I simply botched the second column. The second column should be relabeled "A Number Smaller Than The Number Of Applicants, Probably By A Factor of 1.2 to 4". :-)

It was calculated from the class size and the acceptance rate. I forgot that I needed to also take a look at the percentage of the admitted who enrolled, since many people are admitted to multiple schools so not all admitted to a given school enroll.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/94/opinions_college08_Ameri...

So it's not quite as hectic as the numbers initially imply.

I believe this is overstated in current versions of the test. I have seen how cultural bias is mitigated on these and other tests, a battery of stats are run on the raw item scoring and if a question is found to disproportionally punish a particular group captured in the demographics section, the question is thrown out of scoring even if the reason isn't clear on review.

Does the NYTimes not employ sub editors anymore?