Where did the Harvard rowing team go to high school?
As a bright-eyed college freshman, I was astonished and intimidated to learn that Sidwell, the DC prep school where the Obama daughters went, had sent ~10% of its graduating class to Wash U my year. I figured that anyone who’d gone to school with the President’s kids must be hyper-intelligent and competitive.
It took a month or two of classes for me to realize that the kids from the best prep schools tended to be much less academically impressive than the best students from my public high school in Cincinnati, several of whom had been rejected by Wash U.
It was rather eye-opening to realize that what felt to me like an elite college1 was in fact a safety school for the graduating classes at the fanciest high schools in America.
I was reminded of this revelation last week, when this tweet came across my desk:
