Selective Admissions Quotes

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

Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.

I went to a really smart school where all the kids go to the Ivy Leagues.

I went to Duke, which is... a Top Five school. Not community college. But whatever.

Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren't a loser.

Colleges will try to get the good students. That's the way to go. When I chaired my department of Materials Engineering at the Technion in 1990, we started a program for which we set the bar very high. It was the highest at the Technion, above electrical engineering and medicine.

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

You cannot legislate a spirit of tolerance through an anti-discrimination bill any better than you could legislate sobriety through a constitutional amendment. If we are to maintain the quality of our student body-and this is a primary service to the nation--we must be completely free to select those we regard as best fitted for the privilege of a Yale education. … If we once put ourselves in the position of dependence upon government financial assistance, our freedom is lost.

Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of these special high schools, and my teachers didn't think it was possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied what I needed to know to pass the exam.

The new upper class devotes incredible amounts of effort to raising their kids but that also includes incredible amounts of effort in getting their kids into the right preschool in some elite communities which I think is going a little bit too far.

I didn't want to go to any school but Duke: the best of the best.

It is harder to get into Deloitte than into the University of Pennsylvania.

I couldn't have gotten into Harvard with a crowbar.

Second, when comparing private school and public school test scores, it's like apples and oranges. Public schools have to take everyone, but private schools can be selective. It's not accurate or fair to compare the job they do.

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

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

All of our colleges are free in Sweden, but this acting program is the second most expensive education for the government. It's difficult to get in. There are around 1,500 applicants, and 10-12 applicants are accepted each year. I was accepted, and I studied there for five years.

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.