Where you go is not who you’ll be: na antidote to the college admissions mania

Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, starting with a conviction among too many young people that their futures will be determined and their worth established by which schools say yes and which say no. That belief is wrong. And in Where you go is not who you’ll be, Frank Bruni explains why, giving students and their parents a new perspective on this brutal, deeply flawed competition and a path out of the anxiety that it provokes. Bruni, a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors’ mansions or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys and the stories of hugely successful people who didn’t attend the most exclusive schools, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges, large public universities, tiny hideaways in the hinterlands, serve as ideal springboards.