The Foreign Service Journal, June 2015

68 JUNE 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT FS students who are overseas, thank- fully, dodge some of the stateside admis- sions mania. In the United States, the situation has become so frenzied that, in some families, the pressure to go to a certain Ivy League or other prestigious school has been present before the child in question is even born. Bruni interviews a distraught parent whose 3-year-old did not get admitted to a high-end New York preschool because she didn’t think to prep him before the admissions event. It is into this overheated atmosphere that Bruni introduces an idea that is not new, but is still commonly disregarded: What if someone told you that you could go to one of many dozens, even hundreds of U.S. colleges, get a great education and end up after graduation following the same career path as Yale and Harvard grads? The author primarily wants to dis- courage the thinking among students that there is only one perfect college for them—the one in the Ivy League or at Ivy League level, or the one that their parents went to 30 years ago, or the one that U.S. News & World Report ranks in the top 10. The Benefits of Being Turned Down In fact, says Bruni, not only is it virtu- ally impossible to get into the top-tier schools, but those institutions don’t necessarily offer anything that can’t be found at other, less selective and often less expensive schools. He opens his narrative with several anecdotes about students who had their hearts set on Ivy Bruni primarily wants to discourage the thinking among students that there is only one perfect college for them.