In 2014, 2.6 million of high school senior students applied to the Ivy League, while only about eight percent of these applicants managed to get in. During the college application season, a large part of the top students and their parents stresses out targeting at one of these eight colleges. It is not exaggeration to say that many parents consider an admission from the Ivy League colleges a ticket to success careers; therefore, they push hard at their own children in order to make sure they have better jobs and higher salaries. After the application season ends, the “winners” who finally get their admission from a Ivy League college would be more than willing to pay high tuition for their …show more content…
Almost all parents care about how much money their children are going to make in the future. In the book success trap (Katz, S. & Liu, A. 2014 ), success in parents’ eyes is “surpassing parental achievement according to parental standard: making more money, winning more recognition, earning a more impressive title, or achieve greater fame”. If measuring future career success in terms of earning more money and having greater fame, there is clear relationship between the Ivy League and successful business. In Sarah Smith’s article “Harvard’s billionaires: Ivy League college leads the world with the richest alumni”, there is a very clear list showing the top ten colleges that has the richest alumnus. From the list we can see that Harvard is the first place, with 2964 multi-millionaires and a total wealth added up to $622 billion, and then comes the University of Pennsylvania, the Columbia University, Yale, Connell and Princeton. Six out of eight Ivy League colleges has the top 10 richest alumni in the world. However, how they manage to generate so many millionaires? The answer to this question is mainly two kinds: first, the Ivy League colleges accept only students who are more likely to success; second, the Ivy League colleges have great education resource that help students to success. The first reason is closely related to the Ivy …show more content…
The way that the Ivy League colleges select qualified applicants changes as time past and gradually becomes of choosing the students that are more likely to succeed. The Ivy League is looking for students that have good academic performance, successful social and extracurricular activities, which potentially shows the traits that a successful person has. From the Harvard official website, an article named “what we look for” shows what qualities Harvard is looking for and why. For example, good academic performance may indicate a student has good attention to details, the ability to focus; successful social and extracurricular activities shows leadership, group-working capability; accomplished athletic activities implies the ambition and the passion to compete and win, etc. Every important factor that the admission office of the Ivy League looking at is logically related to potential success; what the admission does is like predicting students future success with past statistics on certain composition of characteristics. Therefore, there is no cause and effect relationship between the Ivy League admission and career success. The reason that the Ivy League colleges has so many millionaire alumnus is just they did a good job on collecting elites, which is technically not a impossible task since they