College Admissions Quotes

Both my parents were educators, so interviews and college applications and shaking hands and looking people in the eye and feeling confident and knowing what you can bring to any project or audition - I've known about these things my entire life.

You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.

In the course of my life, for more than half a century, June 1989 was the major turning point. Up to that point, I was a member of the first class to enter university when college entrance examinations were reinstated following the Cultural Revolution (Class of '77).

I never went to college - I barely got out of high school.

I tried to go to college, I barely got out of high school.

I went to NYU for a year and a half, and I graduated from there and then years later went to Columbia for graduate school.

I never went to camp as a kid. I couldn't get into an Ivy League school. I wouldn't join a biker club.

American universities have never considered academic merit the sole criterion for admittance.

After graduation from high school, I attended the university entrance examination, and fortunately, I was accepted by the Department of Pharmacy and became a student at the Medical School of Peking University.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

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.

Well, I don't think that the SAT is a scam.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

Because I did well at the prep school, I got to have more options as some different universities gave me offers.

I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.

If I was going to go to college, I had to have a scholarship. By my sophomore year, it was evident golf was not going to be the path.

I applied to only one college - the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania - and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.

My senior year of high school, I probably wouldn't get so much out of it as if I went to college.

Maryland is one of the greatest schools that we have in this country.

I turned down a scholarship to Yale. The problem with college is that there's a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you'll never be successful.

Legacies, athletes, and favored racial minorities all receive preferential treatment from admissions committees to the exclusion of academically better-qualified students.

Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.

Finding out whether I had made the grades for my first choice university course or whether I needed to rethink my future was terrifying.

I want to see kids go to college more.

After secondary school, the big thing to do was apply for uni in England or Scotland and then just stay there.