by Daniel Shotkin
Last summer, I wrote an article about Affirmative Action, college admissions, and what it meant for me as a high school senior. At the time, I’d just begun the arduous process of applying to colleges, and I was frustrated. Getting into a ‘top’ college had been my dream for the past four years, but the admissions process I had to go through to achieve said dream seemed to be purposefully designed to be as opaque as possible. So, while many of my friends developed fixations on ‘dream schools,’ I adopted an ultra-cynical view on the whole ordeal—I’d play the admissions game, but I’d expect nothing more than a loss.
But that view has been slightly complicated by a recent development. Last week, I was accepted to Harvard.
As streams of digital confetti floated down my refreshed application portal, I felt like I’d won the lottery. No, it couldn’t be true. Harvard’s acceptance rate sits at a measly 3.6%, meaning to get in, I’d have to squeeze past 50,000 chess prodigies, olympiad winners, and violin virtuosos. Add the fact that my suburban New Jersey public school had only had one accepted student in the past ten years, and such a feat was impossible. But somehow, there I was, mouth agape, mom hollering, and acceptance letter in hand.
So what now? Was my pessimism an overreaction?
The irony of my situation isn’t lost on me. In discussions with friends, family, and teachers, I’d been the Ivy League’s biggest critic. But I’d also worked hard to craft an application that appealed to their admissions system. How do I reconcile these two truths? To answer that, we first need to understand why a certain Boston-area liberal arts college has such a hold on high-achieving high schoolers.
One could say it’s the idyllic red-brick campus, the small class sizes, or the celebrity faculty, but the short answer is prestige and money. Simply being associated with the word ‘Harvard’ has been enough to change how people think of me. Since my acceptance, people who’d never said a kind word to me are calling me a genius—even my 3rd-grade gym teacher put me on their Instagram story. It’s flattering, sure, but strange how the decision of an admissions officer in Boston can suddenly change how people see me. But the hype isn’t undeserved. Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the world—larger than the GDP of entire countries. That endowment is the reason that my Harvard education (tuition, dorm, train tickets, and all) will be completely free. I’m getting paid by Harvard to cover any extra expenses in my first year. The bottom line is that no other university in the world can afford to do that, and it’s life-changing.
So, getting into Harvard is a lot more than just a college acceptance—it’s a golden ticket. But who deserves that ticket? I used to think that a Harvard education was reserved exclusively for geniuses, polymaths, and prodigies. Browsing Wikipedia pages of historical figures, the word appeared too many times in the ‘Early Life’ section to be a coincidence. Obama, JFK, FDR, both Adams’s, Oppenheimer, Gates, Bernstein, Thoreau, Zuckerberg, the list could go on endlessly. It was proof that a spot at an elite institution was reserved for those destined for greatness. Only those who were incredibly smart and gifted from the get-go were destined to be accepted, and to change the world. But I know that I’m no genius, so my acceptance leaves me with a contradiction.
The truth is, the college admissions process has deluded me and thousands of others into thinking that only a select few are capable of changing the world. Admissions, we think, is a filter through which meritocratic institutions such as Harvard weed out the gifted from the mediocre, the 3% from the other 96%. But my experience has proved that wrong. If raw intelligence is the key factor, I should have been rejected in favor of my grade’s valedictorian, instead, he was waitlisted by six schools. This isn’t to say I wasn’t qualified, but it does show how unpredictable the process is. So my personal conclusion is simple: we’ve overstated the value of greatness.
We believe that only a select few have the potential to change the world. But as I approach the end of my high school life, I’ve been struck by the sheer amount of talent there is in everybody. In my grade alone, I could easily point to five potential senators, three Nobel laureates, and ten Lady Gagas. Some of my friends are incredible communicators, innovators, and performers, despite not having a shiny medal to show for it. There’s Alex, an unassuming tech nerd who achieved full fluency in German in three years without ever consulting a teacher. Then there’s Charlie, a wrestler who can get a crowd of rowdy teen boys to shut up and listen to whatever anecdote he’s recounting. Or Francesca, whose rendition of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes it All” in our school musical got an audience of three hundred to on their feet clapping.
Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, we’ve been conditioned to believe in Great Man Theory—that Napoleon was destined for greatness. But when you get to know people, you realize that most already have the qualities necessary to do great things. My friend Charlie could certainly conquer Europe, given the right resources.
The reality is that I got my golden ticket. I studied the system, worked hard, and spent months crafting an application that appealed to Ivy League sensibilities. I also got extremely lucky. But thousands of other students who are equally, if not more, talented than I am never get that opportunity. And this doesn’t just apply to college admissions. Many of my brightest friends are never going to use their talents beyond high school. Instead, most take the sensible route and go into fields they care little about. Rock stars go to community college, and quarterbacks work in accounting. And who can blame them? For the class of 2025, every dream has an infinitely large crowd of contenders at its door.
It’s right about now that an inspiring motivational speaker would conclude: the answer is to stick with your dreams. Keep believing! Never give up! If you just put in enough hours and believe really hard, you’ll get those millions. But this kind of thinking is deceptively naive and perpetuates our obsession with greatness. Instead of addressing the core problem, it tells us to invest even more into our delusion. But why equate selectivity with greatness in the first place?
To me, the answer lies in spreading the spotlight. If we resist the natural impulse to idolize a select few, we can start seeing the talent in all people. There’s no reason a bus driver can’t be a poet, a teacher can’t be an actor. It’s a naive thought, and it goes against my cynical Gen Z nature, but success depends as much on how others perceive us as it does on how hard we work. So, instead of celebrating selectivity, maybe the solution is to appreciate collective talent.
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