...when he was relatively young and demonstrating he might have a shot of gaining admission to one if he kept it up.
He kept it up and had and outstanding high school career, being beat out for Valedictorian by his best friend and another student.
I saw to many very smart kids wrecked by going to an Ivy. Sadly this would include my son's best friend, who was accepted at all the big ones except Harvard.
That boy would have been a fine scientist or engineer. He had strong mathematical muscles when he was 8th grade. In fact he pushed my son and they blew through all the levels of AP calculus together.
After a year at the Ivy that boy changed his major to a humanity, a foreign language. He graduated but his job is respectable, but not appropriate to his intellectual power. I hope he's happy.
My son went, on a full scholarship minus room and board to a private university billed as a "hidden Ivy." As he approaches the end of graduate school I'm impressed with his scientific prowess.
The problem with Ivy undergraduate educations is that you have to be near the top, with little or no sweat, to get in. In high school, you're a star. Everybody pays attention. When you do get in you find yourself being among all the other high school stars; everybody was Valedictorian or nearly so. So for all but a very few, you're no longer the star. For many that's a psychological situation that is difficult to handle.
The boy, now a man, is not the only case I've seen. There have been several. I've seen total breakdowns.
Where my son went, he remained a star, had professors, good scientists, take him under their wings and mentor him, especially about the culture of science.
He has the most prominent advisor in his department, (again not an Ivy), a solid stipend, no need to TA, solid funding, and is working on projects that will make a difference, things he could take anywhere in the world after the now inevitable collapse of the United States.
I briefly was disappointed when he declined to fully engage with one of the Ivy's (MIT) interested in him for graduate school, but one of his professor mentors at his undergraduate school told him to not think about the institution so much as the advisor.
Good advice, I think.
Even free Harvard may not be a bargain.
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