Barry Schwartz Quotes

Before high school ended, I started applying to college. It really wasn't even a choice because of the brainwashing of my parents.

I don't think I could have thought of any place other than Stanford to leave Harvard for.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

Launching a kid into college is about more than having the money to pay for it. Parents invest so much of their time and identities in the process that it can feel like a part time job. For many parents, the college your child ends up attending becomes a parenting grade.

All the people who can't get into Michigan go to Michigan State.

My parents would have loved me to go to university - Oxbridge, particularly.

When I was applying to college, my mother told me I could apply to any school within the Boston subway map.

I got accepted at Yale but never went.

I'm really considering all the schools. It's not fair for me to only look at certain... programs just because they had players that are at my stature.

People would ask what college are you going to, and I'd say, 'San Diego State.' And they'd say, 'Why?'

Underestimating grades has serious consequences for a student's choice of university, and their future.

However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.

Message to all you crazed parents desperately hiring tutors and padding your kid's thin resume: Chillax. Attending an elite college is no guarantee of leadership, life success, or earnings potential.

A deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenaline rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer.

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world.

I wanted to go to a good college, and my mind was set on Wellesley.

When I was in high school, I didn't feel like I had to pile on the APs in order to look good to colleges. High-achieving classmates didn't use private tutors.

My mother never asked me whether I wanted to go to college, but told me I was going - to the University of Maryland on an academic scholarship.

Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

It's a hard process to navigate... to figure out where your kid ought to go to college.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

I'm sure that being an applicant from the American School in Vienna helped get me into all seven colleges I applied to.

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.

It's just become such a business, getting into college. I see that a lot in my friends, their parents were so on top of them about getting into an Ivy League school since they were so young, they were just drilled and drilled and drilled, to the point that they just don't know why they want to go.

When I was 18, I applied to go to BYU like my six brothers ahead of me - I have eight boys and one girl in my family.