This is an advice column about getting into an elite college. And, like every column about the anxiety of getting into an elite college, it must begin with a massive caveat: If you and your parents are worried about getting into an elite school, odds are that you are already elite.
The raw numbers are instructive. There are more than 4 million 18-year-olds in the United States. About 3.5 million of them will go to college. And just 100,000 to 150,000 of those—somewhere around 3 percent of the entire age group—go each year to selective schools that admit fewer than half of their applicants. College-admissions mania is a crisis for the 3 percent.
That said, the 3 percent mania is real. Hence the annual April blossoming of op-eds promising, with comforting certainty, that "it doesn't matter where you go to college." That is a really nice message. It's also wrong.
It matters where you go to college, plain and simple. Graduates of the most-select colleges often earn more than graduates of less-select public universities, who are employed at higher rates than those of community colleges, who get more calls from potential employers than graduates of online universities. A world where "44.8% of billionaires, 55.9% of [Forbes's most] powerful women, and 85.2% of [Forbes's most] powerful men" attended elite schools is not a place where college doesn't matter.
One of the most reproduced statistics from Frank Bruni's new book on this subject, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be, is that just 30 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs went to elite colleges like the Ivies. (I have not read his book, and am not commenting on its quality outside of this statistic.) This factoid is being widely interpreted to prove that elite schools are overrated predictors of business success. But that's the wrong way to think about it. If a tiny share of college attendees account for a third of business leaders, that means graduates of elite schools are at least 10 times more likely than their peers to be Fortune 500 CEOs.