This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From YKTTW Working Title: Everyone Gets Into An Ivy League
Would it be part of the trope that characters seem to get into the Ivy League schools despite that there is no way they would be qualified? A girl at my school went to an interview for Harvard, and when she told them that she was fluent in Chinese at the age of 17, their response was pretty much "Well, duh. Everybody speaks Chinese. What kind of person isn't fluent in Chinese? Don't you have any actual accomplishments?" Yet, the ones who get into these schools on TV are pretty much average kids with A's. Pretty much, if you had any life outside of studying during your childhood or teenage years, you didn't go to Harvard. If your parents didn't invest hundreds of thousands in tutors and books and software and SAT classes, you didn't go to Harvard. So the life of anyone who could feasibly go to Harvard is probably far too uneventful for television.
- Sort of. This troper has two Ivy League degrees (Brown and Columbia), and knew folks at Harvard and Yale. The students there weren't all superhuman or supremely wealthy; while it was certainly common to find students from a big-name school (Andover, Stuyvesant, Blair) and prodigies weren't unheard of, most of the students really did just have decent grades and test scores. In fact, kids who have no life outside of studying are *less* likely to be accepted because of the perception that they will continue to do nothing but study and contribute nothing to campus life. (I suspect that the dismissal of Chinese-at-17 girl has more to do with the perception that it's one of those pursuits, and doesn't speak to what she'd bring to the school.)
