I’ve long known that getting into the big schools is the hardest part of the experience, but I’ve never looked at it this way:
It turns out that merely getting into Harvard is as good an indicator of future success as actually going. It turns out that being the sort of person that can invest the effort, conquer fear and/or raise the money to capture some of the elite trappings of visible success is what drives success, not the other way around.
Via: Seths Blog: Do elite trappings create success? Causation vs. correlation.